The Language Impact - Evolution -- System -- Discourse - Alwin Frank Fill
6. The ‘Linguistic Seduction’ of Thought (Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Mauthner, Kainz): The Harmful Impact of Language
The Language Impact - Evolution -- System -- Discourse - Alwin Frank Fill
Alwin Frank Fill [+]
University of Graz
Alwin Frank Fill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Graz, Austria. His previous books include Ökolinguistik: Eine Einführung (Gunter Narr, 1993), Das Prinzip Spannung (Gunter Narr, 2003 (2nd ed. 2007)) and (co-edited together with Peter Muhlhäusler) The Ecolinguistics Reader (Continuum, 2001).
Description
In some of Whorf’s initial examples the topic of language misleading thought and thus resulting in the wrong action is addressed (see Chapter 5.4 above: the workman and the ‘empty’ gasoline drums). Ever since Antiquity, one group of scholars has approached the topic of the impact of language on thought from the negative side with the emphasis on the ‘misleading’ or in some other way harmful influence of language on our thinking and acting. The ‘Sprachverführung des Denkens’ [linguistic seduction of thought], as it was termed by Friedrich Kainz, has been a recurring theme in philosophy ever since the time of the Ancient Greek philosophers.