THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYone, two or three batteries, but for any numbers greater than this their
performance grew progressively more inaccurate. Gordon concluded
with some gusto that this was a “rare and perhaps unique case for strong
linguistic determinism”.
However, in his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into
Human Nature, Steven Pinker pours cold water on this interpretation of the
Pirahã findings, arguing that Gordon has cause and effect the wrong way
around. In Pinker’s view, the tribespeople’s lack of numerical words and
poor numerical performance are both consequences of the fact that their
way of life doesn’t require them to think about or communicate in precise
numerical terms larger than three. The same logic can be applied to the
Eskimo myth. Eskimos spend more time thinking about snow than the rest
of us because they’re surrounded by the stuff. And thinking about snow so
much means they’ve had more cause to invent new ways of talking about it.
Besides these logical objections there’s also ample empirical evidence
that refutes linguistic determinism. For example, the French neuro-
scientist Stanislas Dehaene studied another Amazonian tribe called
the Mundurukú who have no words for spatial relations. Despite this,
Dehaene demonstrated that members of the tribe were able to solve
geometric problems and learn how to use a map. Also, in an inversion of
the Pirahã research, Dehaene showed that the Mundurukú were poor at
numerical tasks involving quantities of three and greater, even though
they have words for numbers up to five. As Pinker puts it: “The prereq-
uisite for exact number concepts beyond ‘two’ is a counting algorithm,
not a language with number words.”
Although language doesn’t determine what we can and can’t think about,
it’s worth pointing out that there is ample evidence that the conventions
of different languages can affect our habits of thought. For example,
speakers of languages which require them to attribute genders to objects
have been shown to think about those objects as if they really do have
the qualities of the gender attributed to them. Native Spanish speakers,
for example, think of bridges (male in their language) as having more
masculine qualities, whereas the Germans (for whom bridges are female)
think of bridges as being more feminine. Perhaps the most striking
example of language conventions influencing mental habits comes from
the Australian aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr. Speakers of this
tongue refer to all spatial relations in terms of the cardinal directions
(East, West and so on) and never egocentrically, as in left, right, behind,
in front. This convention obliges them to pay constant attention to envi-
ronmental cues so that they know the geographical coordinates in any