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Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis)

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There are about seven thousand languages heard around the world – they all have different sounds, vocabularies, and structures. As you know, language plays a significant role in our lives.

But one intriguing question is – can it actually affect how we think?

It is widely thought that reality and how one perceives the world is expressed in spoken words and are precisely the same as reality.

That is, perception and expression are understood to be synonymous, and it is assumed that speech is based on thoughts. This idea believes that what one says depends on how the world is encoded and decoded in the mind.

However, many believe the opposite.

In that, what one perceives is dependent on the spoken word. Basically, that thought depends on language, not the other way around.

What Is The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

Twentieth-century linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf are known for this very principle and its popularization. Their joint theory, known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or, more commonly, the Theory of Linguistic Relativity, holds great significance in all scopes of communication theories.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the grammatical and verbal structure of a person’s language influences how they perceive the world. It emphasizes that language either determines or influences one’s thoughts.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that people experience the world based on the structure of their language, and that linguistic categories shape and limit cognitive processes. It proposes that differences in language affect thought, perception, and behavior, so speakers of different languages think and act differently.

For example, different words mean various things in other languages. Not every word in all languages has an exact one-to-one translation in a foreign language.

Because of these small but crucial differences, using the wrong word within a particular language can have significant consequences.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is sometimes called “linguistic relativity” or the “principle of linguistic relativity.” So while they have slightly different names, they refer to the same basic proposal about the relationship between language and thought.

How Language Influences Culture

Culture is defined by the values, norms, and beliefs of a society. Our culture can be considered a lens through which we undergo the world and develop a shared meaning of what occurs around us.

The language that we create and use is in response to the cultural and societal needs that arose. In other words, there is an apparent relationship between how we talk and how we perceive the world.

One crucial question that many intellectuals have asked is how our society’s language influences its culture.

Linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his then-student Benjamin Whorf were interested in answering this question.

Together, they created the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that our thought processes predominantly determine how we look at the world.

Our language restricts our thought processes – our language shapes our reality. Simply, the language that we use shapes the way we think and how we see the world.

Since the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis theorizes that our language use shapes our perspective of the world, people who speak different languages have different views of the world.

In the 1920s, Benjamin Whorf was a Yale University graduate student studying with linguist Edward Sapir, who was considered the father of American linguistic anthropology.

Sapir was responsible for documenting and recording the cultures and languages of many Native American tribes disappearing at an alarming rate. He and his predecessors were well aware of the close relationship between language and culture.

Anthropologists like Sapir need to learn the language of the culture they are studying to understand the worldview of its speakers truly. Whorf believed that the opposite is also true, that language affects culture by influencing how its speakers think.

His hypothesis proposed that the words and structures of a language influence how its speaker behaves and feels about the world and, ultimately, the culture itself.

Simply put, Whorf believed that you see the world differently from another person who speaks another language due to the specific language you speak.

Human beings do not live in the matter-of-fact world alone, nor solitary in the world of social action as traditionally understood, but are very much at the pardon of the certain language which has become the medium of communication and expression for their society.

To a large extent, the real world is unconsciously built on habits in regard to the language of the group. We hear and see and otherwise experience broadly as we do because the language habits of our community predispose choices of interpretation.

Studies & Examples

The lexicon, or vocabulary, is the inventory of the articles a culture speaks about and has classified to understand the world around them and deal with it effectively.

For example, our modern life is dictated for many by the need to travel by some vehicle – cars, buses, trucks, SUVs, trains, etc. We, therefore, have thousands of words to talk about and mention, including types of models, vehicles, parts, or brands.

The most influential aspects of each culture are similarly reflected in the dictionary of its language. Among the societies living on the islands in the Pacific, fish have significant economic and cultural importance.

Therefore, this is reflected in the rich vocabulary that describes all aspects of the fish and the environments that islanders depend on for survival.

For example, there are over 1,000 fish species in Palau, and Palauan fishers knew, even long before biologists existed, details about the anatomy, behavior, growth patterns, and habitat of most of them – far more than modern biologists know today.

Whorf’s studies at Yale involved working with many Native American languages, including Hopi. He discovered that the Hopi language is quite different from English in many ways, especially regarding time.

Western cultures and languages view times as a flowing river that carries us continuously through the present, away from the past, and to the future.

Our grammar and system of verbs reflect this concept with particular tenses for past, present, and future.

We perceive this concept of time as universal in that all humans see it in the same way.

Although a speaker of Hopi has very different ideas, their language’s structure both reflects and shapes the way they think about time. Seemingly, the Hopi language has no present, past, or future tense; instead, they divide the world into manifested and unmanifest domains.

The manifested domain consists of the physical universe, including the present, the immediate past, and the future; the unmanifest domain consists of the remote past and the future and the world of dreams, thoughts, desires, and life forces.

Also, there are no words for minutes, minutes, or days of the week. Native Hopi speakers often had great difficulty adapting to life in the English-speaking world when it came to being on time for their job or other affairs.

It is due to the simple fact that this was not how they had been conditioned to behave concerning time in their Hopi world, which followed the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun.

Today, it is widely believed that some aspects of perception are affected by language.

One big problem with the original Sapir-Whorf hypothesis derives from the idea that if a person’s language has no word for a specific concept, then that person would not understand that concept.

Honestly, the idea that a mother tongue can restrict one’s understanding has been largely unaccepted. For example, in German, there is a term that means to take pleasure in another person’s unhappiness.

While there is no translatable equivalent in English, it just would not be accurate to say that English speakers have never experienced or would not be able to comprehend this emotion.

Just because there is no word for this in the English language does not mean English speakers are less equipped to feel or experience the meaning of the word.

Not to mention a “chicken and egg” problem with the theory.

Of course, languages are human creations, very much tools we invented and honed to suit our needs. Merely showing that speakers of diverse languages think differently does not tell us whether it is the language that shapes belief or the other way around.

Supporting Evidence

On the other hand, there is hard evidence that the language-associated habits we acquire play a role in how we view the world. And indeed, this is especially true for languages that attach genders to inanimate objects.

There was a study done that looked at how German and Spanish speakers view different things based on their given gender association in each respective language.

The results demonstrated that in describing things that are referred to as masculine in Spanish, speakers of the language marked them as having more male characteristics like “strong” and “long.” Similarly, these same items, which use feminine phrasings in German, were noted by German speakers as effeminate, like “beautiful” and “elegant.”

The findings imply that speakers of each language have developed preconceived notions of something being feminine or masculine, not due to the objects” characteristics or appearances but because of how they are categorized in their native language.

It is important to remember that the Theory of Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) also successfully achieves openness. The theory is shown as a window where we view the cognitive process, not as an absolute.

It is set forth to look at a phenomenon differently than one usually would. Furthermore, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is very simple and logically sound. Understandably, one’s atmosphere and culture will affect decoding.

Likewise, in studies done by the authors of the theory, many Native American tribes do not have a word for particular things because they do not exist in their lives. The logical simplism of this idea of relativism provides parsimony.

Truly, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis makes sense. It can be utilized in describing great numerous misunderstandings in everyday life. When a Pennsylvanian says “yuns,” it does not make any sense to a Californian, but when examined, it is just another word for “you all.”

The Linguistic Relativity Theory addresses this and suggests that it is all relative. This concept of relativity passes outside dialect boundaries and delves into the world of language – from different countries and, consequently, from mind to mind.

Is language reality honestly because of thought, or is it thought which occurs because of language? The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis very transparently presents a view of reality being expressed in language and thus forming in thought.

The principles rehashed in it show a reasonable and even simple idea of how one perceives the world, but the question is still arguable: thought then language or language then thought?

Modern Relevance

Regardless of its age, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the Linguistic Relativity Theory, has continued to force itself into linguistic conversations, even including pop culture.

The idea was just recently revisited in the movie “Arrival,” – a science fiction film that engagingly explores the ways in which an alien language can affect and alter human thinking.

And even if some of the most drastic claims of the theory have been debunked or argued against, the idea has continued its relevance, and that does say something about its importance.

Hypotheses, thoughts, and intellectual musings do not need to be totally accurate to remain in the public eye as long as they make us think and question the world – and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis does precisely that.

The theory does not only make us question linguistic theory and our own language but also our very existence and how our perceptions might shape what exists in this world.

There are generalities that we can expect every person to encounter in their day-to-day life – in relationships, love, work, sadness, and so on. But thinking about the more granular disparities experienced by those in diverse circumstances, linguistic or otherwise, helps us realize that there is more to the story than ours.

And beautifully, at the same time, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis reiterates the fact that we are more alike than we are different, regardless of the language we speak.

Isn’t it just amazing that linguistic diversity just reveals to us how ingenious and flexible the human mind is – human minds have invented not one cognitive universe but, indeed, seven thousand!

Kay, P., & Kempton, W. (1984). What is the Sapir‐Whorf hypothesis?. American anthropologist, 86(1), 65-79.

Whorf, B. L. (1952). Language, mind, and reality. ETC: A review of general semantics, 167-188.

Whorf, B. L. (1997). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. In Sociolinguistics (pp. 443-463). Palgrave, London.

Whorf, B. L. (2012). Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT press.

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• Published: 27 December 2023

Facts in counterfactuals-cognitive representations of Chinese counterfactuals

• Yufei Ren 1 , 3 ,
• Gang Cui 1 &
• Stella Christie 2 , 3  

Scientific Reports volume  13 , Article number:  23064 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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How do people represent counterfactuals? As languages differ in expressibility of counterfactuals—some languages employ explicit grammatical marking for counterfactuals while others do not—are some speakers’ representations of counterfactuals less explicit? Prior studies examining this question with Chinese speakers—a language devoid of explicit counterfactual markings—found mixed results. Here we re-examined the issue by using a more sensitive test: people’s sensitivity to detect anomalies in sentences. We asked Chinese speakers to rate the acceptability of sentences employing “ruguo (if)…jiu (then)” configuration—the typical but non-unique, non-explicit marking of counterfactuals. Critically, we varied the semantic adherence to real-world facts [factuality], with some sentences containing made-up conditions [-fact as in “If fish had legs, then…” ] versus real facts [+ fact: “If dogs had legs, then…” ]. If speakers represent counterfactuals clearly, they should give higher acceptability ratings to [− facts] than to [+ facts] sentences, because the ostensible point of counterfactuals is to express non-factual situations. That is, expressing a true fact under a syntactic counterfactual construction makes the sentence anomalous. Instead, we found that Chinese speakers gave the opposite ratings: factual “ if…then ” sentences were rated as more acceptable than non-factual ones. This suggests that Chinese speakers find the processing of counterfactuals to be more challenging than processing facts, and that their representation of counterfactuals may be less explicit. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of the link between linguistic markings and cognitive representations.

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Introduction

Counterfactual thinking, a cognitive process marked by reflections on “what might have been”, is pervasively used in everyday reasoning 1 , 2 . People engage in counterfactual thinking in order to imagine alternative realities or outcomes 3 , 4 , 5 , a fundamental reasoning for planning and prediction, as well as for expressing emotions like regret and relief 6 , 7 . Even young children use counterfactuals, for example when doing pretend play 8 . There is evidence that counterfactual reasoning is instrumental in fostering an understanding of causal relationships—what causes a particular event to happen 9 , 10 —as well as to aid acquisitions of theory of mind 11 , 12 , 13 , a critical skill that enables individuals to attribute mental states to others.

Interestingly, despite the pervasiveness of counterfactual reasoning, not all languages have explicit syntactic markings for counterfactuals. Some languages do mark counterfactuals using distinct morphological markers, such as subjunctive moods, past tenses, imperfective aspects, perfective aspects, or an integrated blend of tense and aspect 14 , 15 , 16 . For example, in English, the sentence ‘Had today was Sunday, I would have been at home’ explicitly marked a contrary-to-fact situation that today is not Sunday.

But some languages like Chinese do not have explicit counterfactual markings. Unlike the explicit morphological markers in Indo-European languages, the conveyance of counterfactual meanings in Chinese relies on a combination of contextual and lexical cues. These cues include elements such as temporal indicators, negation, the intonation marker ‘ le ’, and a diverse array of hypothetical conjunctions 17 , 18 , 19 . But because the counterfactual cues are neither explicit nor unique—the same cues can be used to convey other things, such as conditionals—there is an ongoing debate of whether and how Chinese speakers process and represent counterfactuals. For example, Bloom (1981) 20 posited that the absence of counterfactual linguistic markers in Mandarin leads to a deficit in counterfactual thinking among its speakers. However, subsequent research on Chinese counterfactuals 21 , 22 counters this view, suggesting that Mandarin speakers are, in fact, adept at comprehending counterfactuals. Similarly, Li and Thompson 23 , Eifring 24 , and Wu 25 argued that while Chinese may lack inflectional means to denote counterfactuality, lexical and contextual tools facilitate Chinese speakers’ understanding of counterfactuals. But yet another study by Yeh and Gentner 26 showed that while Chinese speakers can judge a counterfactual nature using world knowledge, such as “ If antibiotics were never invented…, ” they had difficulties to judge counterfactual assertions based on contextual knowledge.

Here we want to revisit the issue by investigating the relationship between linguistic marking and cognitive representations that it affords. Different from prior research focusing on Chinese speakers’ accuracy in comprehending counterfactual stories or statements, we instead ask whether linguistic expressions denoting counterfactuals are deemed acceptable by speakers. Using acceptability judgment, as opposed to comprehension accuracy, gives a more complete picture of speakers’ mental representation as a whole—what they consistently and habitually represent, as opposed to task-taking ability 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 . Indeed, people give unambiguous and consistent acceptability ratings for a vast majority of linguistic stimuli 31 , making acceptability judgment a valid tool to understand humans’ repertoire of linguistic and cognitive representations. Studies using acceptability judgment also reveal certain constructions, such as center embeddings, are often judged unacceptable albeit being grammatically sound 32 , while other instances of grammaticality illusions are deemed moderately acceptable notwithstanding their ungrammaticality and uninterpretability 33 . In sum, people’s judgment of acceptability can reflect their true mental representations.

To probe people’s mental representation of counterfactual sentences, we are particularly interested in seeing how people accept (or not)—abnormalities in sentence constructions—whether syntactic or semantic 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 . Syntactic anomalies usually stem from the absence of grammatical markers or the violation of syntactic rules like word order, while semantic anomalies often appear as contradictions or conflicts with accepted reality. For instance, the sentence, “ A widow is talking to her husband ” exhibits semantic anomaly given societal understanding of a “ widow” precludes the presence of a husband.

But in the context of counterfactual sentences, conflicts with accepted reality ought not be judged as semantic anomalies. This is because counterfactuals precisely express alternative realities—conflicts with reality should in fact be expressed in counterfactuals. The opposite—using counterfactuals to express real facts—would be odd; imagine saying to your own child “ If only you were my child, I would have named you to be my heir ”. Indeed, studies have found that while violation of facts are deemed semantically anomalous, within counterfactual settings, they are deemed acceptable 38 , 39 . For example, Nieuwland and Van Berkum 38 discovered that the N400 effect dissipated when an ostensibly impossible event (e.g., the peanut fell in love) was contextualized within a counterfactual setting. Our question is whether Chinese speakers share this intuition.

To create semantic anomalies in counterfactual sentences, we need to use the typical linguistic markings for counterfactuals in Chinese. While Mandarin lacks tense markers similar to the subjunctive mood for explicitly delineating counterfactuals, it often employs specific connectives, notably the “ruguo(if)…jiu(then)” structure 23 , 40 , 41 . These connectives adhere to a relatively fixed syntactic pairing, a concept introduced early in educational settings. The rationale is that if this typical “ruguo(if)…jiu(then)” syntactic framework easily evoke counterfactual representations, then we expect speakers to rate non-factual antecedent, such as the sentence “ If fish had legs, then… ” to be acceptable. Likewise, speakers should rate factual antecedent sentences, such as “ If dog had legs, then… ” to be less acceptable (anomalous). On the other hand, if the construction “ruguo(if)…jiu(then)” does not evoke explicit counterfactual processing, then speakers will not differentiate between these two types of sentences, or they may just default to facts in judging acceptability—true facts are judged acceptable, while non-true facts are not.

Counterfactuals broadly bifurcate into two primary categories based on the nature of their falsified subjects. The first category concerns falsified past events and is frequently used to convey sentiments of regret, rumination, or disguise. For instance, in the sentence, “ If I had studied harder, I would have passed the exam”, conveys a sense of regret over not having studied adequately. The second category pertains to falsifications of the physical world, where the premise contradicts established physical laws. An example sentence, “ If a lion could speak” 39 , contravenes the known fact that lions do not have the capacity for speech. In this study, we focused on the second type of counterfactuals to create semantic anomalies, as they can afford clearer violations of facts.

To compare speakers’ acceptability to anomalous vs. non anomalous sentences in counterfactual vs. non-counterfactual setting, we created 4 types of sentences using two parameters: syntactic pairing [+ /− syntax] and factuality [+ /− facts]. For the canonical syntactic pairing [+ syntax], we used the “ruguo (if)…jiu (then)” construction. This pairing is deeply entrenched in the Chinese language, forming an integral part of linguistic instruction from primary education onwards. The “jiu (then)” particle, when paired with “ruguo (if)” serves to emphasize the consequential nature of the hypothetical scenario introduced by “ruguo (if) ”—in other words, it is a construction that ought to elicit counterfactual reasoning. For the illicit syntactic pairing [− syntax] we used the “ruguo (if)…suoyi (so),” a configuration that diverges from conventional Chinese syntax. There is logical incongruity between “ruguo (if)” and “suoyi (so)” : while “ruguo (if)” lays the foundation for a hypothesis, be it conditional or counterfactual, the particle “ suoyi (so)” serves as a marker of causal reasoning which requires a factual premise rather than a hypothetical one 23 . True fact [+ facts] sentences contain true assertions about animals’ attributes [e.g., dogs have legs], while [− facts] sentences contain non-true attributes of animals (e.g., fish have legs). We chose animals’ attributes so there are no ambiguities of what constitute as true vs. non-true facts.

These two parameters created 4 types of test sentences (a 2 × 2 design): [+ syntax − facts]; [+ syntax + facts]; [− syntax + facts]; [− syntax + facts]. The most critical comparison is between [+ syntax − facts] vs. [+ syntax + facts] sentences. Type 1 sentences [+ syntax − facts] denote non-anomalous counterfactuals because they express non-true facts under a syntactic framework of hypotheticals. On the other hand, Type 2 [+ syntax + facts] sentences are semantically anomalous, as they expressed true facts using a syntactic pairing for hypotheticals. If “ruguo (if)…jiu (then)” construction evokes counterfactual reasoning, speakers should give higher acceptability ratings to [+ syntax − facts] sentences than to [+ syntax + facts] ones. On the other hand, if speakers mostly care about factuality (rather than to counterfactuality), they might give higher ratings to all true-fact sentences ([+ syntax + facts] and [− syntax + facts]) compared to the [-fact] sentences. As a secondary interest, we also wanted to investigate Chinese speakers’ grammatical representations, comparing the canonical syntactic pairing [+ syntax + /− facts] sentences with the illicit syntactic pairing sentences [− syntax + /− facts]. In total, there were 24 unique test sentences, 6 sentences per type (see Table 1 for the design and example sentences).

In addition to test sentences, we created filler sentences containing the same typical and illicit syntactic pairing used in test sentences ( “ruguo (if)…jiu (then)” and “ruguo (if)…suoyi (so)” ), but now with conditional statements. Examples of filler statements are “ Ruguo tianqi hao jiu keyi pa shan” (If the weather is good, then (we) can climb a mountain .); or “ Ruguo chengji hao suoyi neng shou biaoyang” (If grade is good, so can get a praise) . The filler sentences serve several purposes: (i) to create variability so participants are not forming any particular expectations about the nature of the experiment, (ii) to maintain attention and engagement during the study—the filler sentences use interesting, varied everyday situations (compared to the test sentences that contain animal attributes only), and (iii) to serve as comparison baseline to the test sentences. We expected participants to find the filler sentences acceptable, as they are conditional statements without violation of facts. This rating serves as a baseline of what constitutes as high acceptability ratings.

Participants

300 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese participated in this experiment. Participants were middle school educators from the Xinjiang province of China and they represented a broad spectrum of age demographics and academic training background. Teachers’ specialization includes Chinese, English, Mathematics, and an assortment of Sciences. We ran the study with middle school teachers as they were a convenient sample at the time of the study, but also because we expected that teachers—more than ordinary individuals—might have a more explicit command of Chinese grammars and hence, provides a more stringent test to our question.

The final data set of the study includes responses from 262 individuals. This sample size was determined after excluding participants who did not complete the task.

Participants were asked to rate sentences’ acceptability using a Likert scale ranging from 1 (not acceptable at all) to 7 (very acceptable). The instruction for the rating task emphasized that participants should give judgements based on their own understanding; there is no right or wrong answer.

Sentences were presented one-by-one in a counterbalanced sequence, ensuring that no two consecutive sentences belonged to the same category. Participants judged a total of 36 sentences (24 test sentences and 12 filler sentences). All participants did the task on their mobile phones within a designated time frame during an official forum convened by the Education Authority of Heshuo County, Xinjiang Province, China. The formal setting of the forum may have exerted an influence on the participants’ diligent engagement with the assigned task.

This study was conducted in strict adherence to ethical standards, with approval from the Education Authority of Heshuo County’s Institutional Review Board. Informed consent was obtained from all participants, ensuring their participation was voluntary and their data confidential. Participant information was anonymized to maintain privacy. The methods used were in compliance with the guidelines and regulations of the conference, and the experimental protocols received approval from Tsinghua University.

Utilizing G*Power 3.1, we calculated an a priori sample size of 36 for repeated measures within factors to achieve 0.95 statistical power. Consequently, our actual sample size of 262 participants is more than sufficient and statistically robust. To compare filler and experimental items initially, we employed a t -test to determine the baseline acceptability of conditional sentences. Following this, we performed a factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) on z-scores from participants’ acceptability ratings to evaluate the effects of [Factuality] and [Syntactic Pairing] on sentence acceptability. The analysis, along with the generation of corresponding data and graphical representations, was performed using Python v2023.20.0, specifically employing the matplotlib and statsmodels packages.

As the study encompassed four distinct sentence types: [+ syntax + facts], [+ syntax − facts], [− syntax + facts], and [− syntax − facts], we first checked whether these 4 types indeed form consistent categories. A reliability analysis yielded high Cronbach’s alpha values for all 4 types: 0.8514 ([+ syntax + facts]), 0.8469 ([+ syntax − facts]), 0.8346 ([− syntax + facts]), 0.8471 ([− syntax − facts]). Analysis of the two types of filler sentences also yielded high Crobach’s alpha: 0.8757 (conditional [+ syntax]) and 0.7457 (conditional [− syntax]). Overall, the results suggest that there is good to excellent internal consistency across all categories of sentences.

Boxplots showing means of acceptability ratings for 4 types of test sentences and 2 types of filler sentences are shown on Fig.  1 . For the comparison of filler and experimental items, we first compared our critical test sentence [+ syntax − facts] with the filler conditional [+ syntax]. A t -test revealed that speakers found counterfactual sentences [+ syntax − facts] (Mean = 3.506) to be less acceptable than conditional [+ syntax] sentences (mean = 5.159), with t (261) =  − 15.10, p  < 0.001). This finding indicates that while conditional sentences, serving as a baseline, are generally viewed as more acceptable, the experimental counterfactual sentences receive lower ratings. The large effect size, Cohen’s d  = − 0.9326, reinforces this conclusion. These results suggest that despite the theoretical flexibility of the “ruguo(if)…jiu(then)” construction to express both counterfactuals and conditionals, in practice, it is predominantly used and perceived as more suitable for conditional statements.

Box plot of acceptability ratings for 6 Groups (mean marked in black).

To examine the overall impacts of [Factuality] and [Syntactic Pairing] on the acceptability of sentences, we employed a factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the z-scores of participants’ acceptability ratings. Levene’s test verified homogeneity of variance across conditions ( p -value = 0.8301, > 0.05), satisfying the prerequisite for conducting ANOVA (see Table 2 ).

Factorial ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of [Factuality] on sentence acceptability, F (1,1028) = 142.13, p  < 0.0001, signifying that factual content was rated distinctly from non-factual content. The [Factuality] effect is seen through two comparison groups: [+ syntax − fact] vs. [+ syntax + fact], and [− syntax + facts] vs. [− syntax − facts]. The comparison between [+ syntax − fact] and [+ syntax + fact] is our critical comparison. Recall that our hypothesis is that speakers should give higher ratings to [+ syntax − fact] because the combination of non-true facts and “ruguo(if)…jiu(then)” construction satisfies all requirements for counterfactual statements. But instead, we found the opposite effect: Chinese speakers gave higher acceptability ratings to [+ syntax + facts] sentences (mean = 4.273) as opposed to [+ syntax − fact] sentences (mean = 3.506). The comparison between factual [− syntax + facts] (mean = 4.041) with the non-factual [− syntax − facts] (mean = 3.375) shows factuality matters even under illicit syntactic pairing. This result suggests that the “ruguo(if)…jiu(then)” construction, while typically thought to be the most common construction for expressing counterfactual thoughts, does not in fact easily evoke counterfactual processing. Instead, it seems that the most salient thing for speakers’ is truthiness of facts.

Our secondary interest is to probe speakers’ internal representations of grammar: how much of a violation is it to read new syntactic pairings, as in the “ruguo(if)…suoyi(so)” construction. We approached this by comparing two distinct sets of syntactic pairings: [+ syntax − facts] (mean = 3.506) versus [− syntax − facts] (mean = 3.375), and [+ syntax + facts] (mean = 4.273) versus [− syntax + facts] (mean = 4.041). Although the effect observed in these comparisons was less pronounced, it was statistically significant, as evidenced F (1,1028) = 8.99, p  = 0.0028. This result indicates that the syntactic arrangement within a sentence significantly impacts how participants perceive its acceptability. This finding underscores the importance of syntactic structure in the cognitive processing of language, suggesting that even subtle changes in syntactic pairing can influence the perceived grammaticality of a sentence.

However, contrary to our hypothesis, there is no significant interaction between [Factuality] and [Syntactic Pairing], F (1,1028) = 0.14, p  = 0.7091. That is, the influence of [Factuality] on acceptability ratings is not contingent upon the syntactic structure. These two variables seem to operate independently in shaping sentence acceptability, with [Factuality] making a more substantial contribution than [Syntactic Pairing]. Particularly pertinent to our question about representation of counterfactuals among Chinese speakers, the results suggest that the typical counterfactual syntactic construction does not, in fact, easily evoke counterfactual representations.

Last but not least, to give a full picture of the distribution of participants’ ratings for each type of sentences, we included Fig.  2 .

Histograms illustrating the frequency distribution of acceptability ratings across the six types of sentences.

This study probes the processing of counterfactual constructions in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on the prevalent though non-exclusive “ruguo(if)…jiu(then)” syntactic pattern. Different from prior studies that measure Chinese speakers’ accuracies in comprehending counterfactual stories or statements, we instead reverse the investigative angle, asking whether a typical Chinese counterfactual syntactic construction indeed evokes counterfactual processing. Traditionally, counterfactuals are expected to score higher in acceptability when they express conditions contrary to fact, given that the purpose of counterfactuals are precisely to speculate beyond the scope of reality. Contrary to this expectation, our findings reveal that Chinese speakers rate sentences consistent with [+ facts] as more acceptable than those positing fictitious scenarios, underscoring a tendency to favor fact even within a hypothetical context. Our investigation suggest that Chinese speakers navigate sentences offering alternative realities with discernible difficulties. While engaging with counterfactuals, Chinese speakers might rely heavily on real-world factual knowledge, even in the face of linguistically presented hypothetical information.

This inclination implies that for Chinese speakers, representing counterfactuals may involve less explicit cognitive constructs, possibly because Mandarin lacks specific grammatical devices for clearly demarcating counterfactual statements. This could render the cognitive processing of such sentences more onerous, aligning with previous studies 42 , 43 , 44 that found counterfactual plausibility to be enhanced by closeness to reality.

Does this mean that Chinese speakers are unable or less likely to think counterfactually? Most likely not, or at least this is not what the study design and results point to. For one, preference for true facts over non-facts does not necessarily imply that one cannot represent counterfactuals. Clearly, Chinese speakers think about alternative realities, whether in planning, expressing regrets, or determining causality of events. Rather, we think these results suggest that unlike for speakers of languages with explicit counterfactual markings, speakers of languages like Chinese do not have a default linguistic mean for expressing counterfactuals—several constructions can be used to denote counterfactuals. While linguistic analysis suggests that “ ruguo(if)…jiu(then)” is the typical construction for counterfactuals, our results suggest that the link between this grammatical construction and counterfactual representation in the mind is less direct. Such mapping between syntactic construction and semantic representation—from direct to less direct—may be one useful way of classifying counterfactuality in language and mind. For example, English speakers most likely directly maps the past perfective syntax ( “Had I started earlier I would have finished on time” ) to a contrary-to-facts semantic representation—that the sentence’s author did in fact start late, rather than early. This direct mapping can be intuitively checked using the test we devised here: it would be odd to express true fact using counterfactual syntax, as in saying to your own (true) child “ If only you were my child, I would have made you my heir. ” But for Chinese speakers, the mapping between syntactic construction and semantic representation is less direct. Our results show that speakers do not directly map “ ruguo(if)… jiu(then)” to semantic representation of counterfactuality.

Does direct vs. non-direct mapping between syntax and internal semantic representation impact everyday communication? One possibility is that regardless of direct or non-direct mapping, speakers of all languages are equally good in expressing counterfactuality. As reviewed before, while Chinese lack inflectional means to denote counterfactuals, there exist other lexical and contextual tools for doing so 23 , 24 , 25 . That is, Chinese speakers have options for how they can express counterfactuals.

The present study, while offering valuable insights, is not without limitations. Firstly, the scope of the study was confined to a single grammatical construction—the commonly used “ruguo…jiu” structure in Mandarin Chinese. This construction is adept at eliciting both counterfactual and conditional responses and is a prevalent feature in Chinese linguistic education from primary school onwards. However, the applicability of our findings to other counterfactual constructions remains unexplored. Future research could extend this work by investigating other counterfactual constructions, such as those employing the “jiaru” marker, which signifies a hypothetical premise. Such research could provide a more comprehensive understanding of the representation of counterfactuals in Mandarin.

Another notable limitation is the absence of a cross-cultural comparison employing an identical experimental paradigm. Prior studies in English, a language that explicitly marks counterfactuals, suggest that implausible scenarios within counterfactual settings are processed as acceptable during online comprehension 39 . Conducting a parallel judgment study in English or another language with explicit counterfactual marking could potentially reinforce and extend the findings of the current study. However, it is important to note that languages with explicit counterfactual marking typically do not facilitate factual antecedents in counterfactual constructions. This discrepancy prompted our focus on the Chinese language, which offers greater flexibility in this respect. The underlying cognitive and neurological mechanisms driving the observed preference for factual scenarios in Mandarin speakers, and their rejection of counter-to-fact ‘counterfactuals’, remain an open avenue for further research. Future studies employing methodologies such as eye-tracking or electroencephalography (EEG) could illuminate the intricate processes underpinning counterfactual reasoning and its neural correlates.

But returning to the potential impact of direct vs. non-direct mapping on everyday communications, while ease of expression of counterfactuals may not differ, speakers of languages with less-direct mapping may have less fluent understanding of others’ counterfactual expressions and/or intentions. This is because when speaker A chooses to use construction 1 to express counterfactuals, listener B may not map construction 1 directly to counterfactual representation, but instead to other semantic meaning, for example, conditionals. Testing this hypothesis is beyond the scope of the current study, but it would very interesting for future studies to investigate group, rather than individual sentence processing about counterfactuals. Since language is primarily a tool of social communication 45 , 46 , it makes sense to ask whether languages’ diverse ways of marking counterfactuals—some with direct mapping and some less direct—impact social-group communications involving counterfactuals.

This research delves into Chinese counterfactuals, specifically focusing on the “ ruguo…jiu” structure, offering a significant contribution to typological language studies and the broader domain of language processing. By analyzing the “ruguo…jiu” configuration within the realm of manipulated syntactic and semantic anomalies, it becomes evident that [+ facts] scenarios are preferred in terms of acceptability, irrespective of their syntactic alignment. This suggests speakers’ inherent inclination towards factual constructs, even within counterfactual contexts. Chinese speakers seem to have a cognitive bias toward factual veracity, suggesting that factual information is processed more seamlessly than counterfactual suppositions in Chinese sentence comprehension.

This orientation toward fact over hypothetical construction suggests that the mental parsing of counterfactuals in Chinese may necessitate a deliberate, more cognitively taxing process. But as discussed above, this extra effort may only apply in the case of understanding others’ counterfactuals assertions, not in individuals expressing counterfactuals. Overall this study contributes to the wider conversation in linguistic and psychological research by delineating how different facets of language—semantics and syntax—converge to shape sentence interpretation.

Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Supplement to Philosophy of Linguistics

Whorfianism.

Emergentists tend to follow Edward Sapir in taking an interest in interlinguistic and intralinguistic variation. Linguistic anthropologists have explicitly taken up the task of defending a famous claim associated with Sapir that connects linguistic variation to differences in thinking and cognition more generally. The claim is very often referred to as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (though this is a largely infelicitous label, as we shall see).

This topic is closely related to various forms of relativism—epistemological, ontological, conceptual, and moral—and its general outlines are discussed elsewhere in this encyclopedia; see the section on language in the Summer 2015 archived version of the entry on relativism (§3.1). Cultural versions of moral relativism suggest that, given how much cultures differ, what is moral for you might depend on the culture you were brought up in. A somewhat analogous view would suggest that, given how much language structures differ, what is thinkable for you might depend on the language you use. (This is actually a kind of conceptual relativism, but it is generally called linguistic relativism, and we will continue that practice.)

Even a brief skim of the vast literature on the topic is not remotely plausible in this article; and the primary literature is in any case more often polemical than enlightening. It certainly holds no general answer to what science has discovered about the influences of language on thought. Here we offer just a limited discussion of the alleged hypothesis and the rhetoric used in discussing it, the vapid and not so vapid forms it takes, and the prospects for actually devising testable scientific hypotheses about the influence of language on thought.

Whorf himself did not offer a hypothesis. He presented his “new principle of linguistic relativity” (Whorf 1956: 214) as a fact discovered by linguistic analysis:

When linguists became able to examine critically and scientifically a large number of languages of widely different patterns, their base of reference was expanded; they experienced an interruption of phenomena hitherto held universal, and a whole new order of significances came into their ken. It was found that the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory ; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees. (Whorf 1956: 212–214; emphasis in original)

Later, Whorf’s speculations about the “sensuously and operationally different” character of different snow types for “an Eskimo” (Whorf 1956: 216) developed into a familiar journalistic meme about the Inuit having dozens or scores or hundreds of words for snow; but few who repeat that urban legend recall Whorf’s emphasis on its being grammar, rather than lexicon, that cuts up and organizes nature for us.

In an article written in 1937, posthumously published in an academic journal (Whorf 1956: 87–101), Whorf clarifies what is most important about the effects of language on thought and world-view. He distinguishes ‘phenotypes’, which are overt grammatical categories typically indicated by morphemic markers, from what he called ‘cryptotypes’, which are covert grammatical categories, marked only implicitly by distributional patterns in a language that are not immediately apparent. In English, the past tense would be an example of a phenotype (it is marked by the - ed suffix in all regular verbs). Gender in personal names and common nouns would be an example of a cryptotype, not systematically marked by anything. In a cryptotype, “class membership of the word is not apparent until there is a question of using it or referring to it in one of these special types of sentence, and then we find that this word belongs to a class requiring some sort of distinctive treatment, which may even be the negative treatment of excluding that type of sentence” (p. 89).

Whorf’s point is the familiar one that linguistic structure is comprised, in part, of distributional patterns in language use that are not explicitly marked. What follows from this, according to Whorf, is not that the existing lexemes in a language (like its words for snow) comprise covert linguistic structure, but that patterns shared by word classes constitute linguistic structure. In ‘Language, mind, and reality’ (1942; published posthumously in Theosophist , a magazine published in India for the followers of the 19th-century spiritualist Helena Blavatsky) he wrote:

Because of the systematic, configurative nature of higher mind, the “patternment” aspect of language always overrides and controls the “lexation”…or name-giving aspect. Hence the meanings of specific words are less important than we fondly fancy. Sentences, not words, are the essence of speech, just as equations and functions, and not bare numbers, are the real meat of mathematics. We are all mistaken in our common belief that any word has an “exact meaning.” We have seen that the higher mind deals in symbols that have no fixed reference to anything, but are like blank checks, to be filled in as required, that stand for “any value” of a given variable, like …the x , y , z of algebra. (Whorf 1942: 258)

Whorf apparently thought that only personal and proper names have an exact meaning or reference (Whorf 1956: 259).

For Whorf, it was an unquestionable fact that language influences thought to some degree:

Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person’s thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language—shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language—in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. [footnote omitted] And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness. (Whorf 1956: 252)

He seems to regard it as necessarily true that language affects thought, given

• the fact that language must be used in order to think, and
• the facts about language structure that linguistic analysis discovers.

He also seems to presume that the only structure and logic that thought has is grammatical structure. These views are not the ones that after Whorf’s death came to be known as ‘the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ (a sobriquet due to Hoijer 1954). Nor are they what was called the ‘Whorf thesis’ by Brown and Lenneberg (1954) which was concerned with the relation of obligatory lexical distinctions and thought. Brown and Lenneberg (1954) investigated this question by looking at the relation of color terminology in a language and the classificatory abilities of the speakers of that language. The issue of the relation between obligatory lexical distinctions and thought is at the heart of what is now called ‘the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ or ‘the Whorf Hypothesis’ or ‘Whorfianism’.

1. Banal Whorfianism

No one is going to be impressed with a claim that some aspect of your language may affect how you think in some way or other; that is neither a philosophical thesis nor a psychological hypothesis. So it is appropriate to set aside entirely the kind of so-called hypotheses that Steven Pinker presents in The Stuff of Thought (2007: 126–128) as “five banal versions of the Whorfian hypothesis”:

• “Language affects thought because we get much of our knowledge through reading and conversation.”
• “A sentence can frame an event, affecting the way people construe it.”
• “The stock of words in a language reflects the kinds of things its speakers deal with in their lives and hence think about.”
• “[I]f one uses the word language in a loose way to refer to meanings,… then language is thought.”
• “When people think about an entity, among the many attributes they can think about is its name.”

These are just truisms, unrelated to any serious issue about linguistic relativism.

We should also set aside some methodological versions of linguistic relativism discussed in anthropology. It may be excellent advice to a budding anthropologist to be aware of linguistic diversity, and to be on the lookout for ways in which your language may affect your judgment of other cultures; but such advice does not constitute a hypothesis.

2. The so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The term “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” was coined by Harry Hoijer in his contribution (Hoijer 1954) to a conference on the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf in 1953. But anyone looking in Hoijer’s paper for a clear statement of the hypothesis will look in vain. Curiously, despite his stated intent “to review and clarify the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” (1954: 93), Hoijer did not even attempt to state it. The closest he came was this:

The central idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language functions, not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also, and more significantly, as a way of defining experience for its speakers.

The claim that “language functions…as a way of defining experience” appears to be offered as a kind of vague metaphysical insight rather than either a statement of linguistic relativism or a testable hypothesis.

And if Hoijer seriously meant that what qualitative experiences a speaker can have are constituted by that speaker’s language, then surely the claim is false. There is no reason to doubt that non-linguistic sentient creatures like cats can experience (for example) pain or heat or hunger, so having a language is not a necessary condition for having experiences. And it is surely not sufficient either: a robot with a sophisticated natural language processing capacity could be designed without the capacity for conscious experience.

In short, it is a mystery what Hoijer meant by his “central idea”.

Vague remarks of the same loosely metaphysical sort have continued to be a feature of the literature down to the present. The statements made in some recent papers, even in respected refereed journals, contain non-sequiturs echoing some of the remarks of Sapir, Whorf, and Hoijer. And they come from both sides of the debate.

3. Anti-Whorfian rhetoric

Lila Gleitman is an Essentialist on the other side of the contemporary debate: she is against linguistic relativism, and against the broadly Whorfian work of Stephen Levinson’s group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. In the context of criticizing a particular research design, Li and Gleitman (2002) quote Whorf’s claim that “language is the factor that limits free plasticity and rigidifies channels of development”. But in the claim cited, Whorf seems to be talking about the psychological topic that holds universally of human conceptual development, not claiming that linguistic relativism is true.

Li and Gleitman then claim (p. 266) that such (Whorfian) views “have diminished considerably in academic favor” in part because of “the universalist position of Chomskian linguistics, with its potential for explaining the striking similarity of language learning in children all over the world.” But there is no clear conflict or even a conceptual connection between Whorf’s views about language placing limits on developmental plasticity, and Chomsky’s thesis of an innate universal architecture for syntax. In short, there is no reason why Chomsky’s I-languages could not be innately constrained, but (once acquired) cognitively and developmentally constraining.

For example, the supposedly deep linguistic universal of ‘recursion’ (Hauser et al. 2002) is surely quite independent of whether the inventory of colour-name lexemes in your language influences the speed with which you can discriminate between color chips. And conversely, universal tendencies in color naming across languages (Kay and Regier 2006) do not show that color-naming differences among languages are without effect on categorical perception (Thierry et al. 2009).

4. Strong and weak Whorfianism

One of the first linguists to defend a general form of universalism against linguistic relativism, thus presupposing that they conflict, was Julia Penn (1972). She was also an early popularizer of the distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ formulations of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (and an opponent of the ‘strong’ version).

‘Weak’ versions of Whorfianism state that language influences or defeasibly shapes thought. ‘Strong’ versions state that language determines thought, or fixes it in some way. The weak versions are commonly dismissed as banal (because of course there must be some influence), and the stronger versions as implausible.

The weak versions are considered banal because they are not adequately formulated as testable hypotheses that could conflict with relevant evidence about language and thought.

Why would the strong versions be thought implausible? For a language to make us think in a particular way, it might seem that it must at least temporarily prevent us from thinking in other ways, and thus make some thoughts not only inexpressible but unthinkable. If this were true, then strong Whorfianism would conflict with the Katzian effability claim. There would be thoughts that a person couldn’t think because of the language(s) they speak.

Some are fascinated by the idea that there are inaccessible thoughts; and the notion that learning a new language gives access to entirely new thoughts and concepts seems to be a staple of popular writing about the virtues of learning languages. But many scientists and philosophers intuitively rebel against violations of effability: thinking about concepts that no one has yet named is part of their job description.

The resolution lies in seeing that the language could affect certain aspects of our cognitive functioning without making certain thoughts unthinkable for us .

For example, Greek has separate terms for what we call light blue and dark blue, and no word meaning what ‘blue’ means in English: Greek forces a choice on this distinction. Experiments have shown (Thierry et al. 2009) that native speakers of Greek react faster when categorizing light blue and dark blue color chips—apparently a genuine effect of language on thought. But that does not make English speakers blind to the distinction, or imply that Greek speakers cannot grasp the idea of a hue falling somewhere between green and violet in the spectrum.

There is no general or global ineffability problem. There is, though, a peculiar aspect of strong Whorfian claims, giving them a local analog of ineffability: the content of such a claim cannot be expressed in any language it is true of . This does not make the claims self-undermining (as with the standard objections to relativism); it doesn’t even mean that they are untestable. They are somewhat anomalous, but nothing follows concerning the speakers of the language in question (except that they cannot state the hypothesis using the basic vocabulary and grammar that they ordinarily use).

If there were a true hypothesis about the limits that basic English vocabulary and constructions puts on what English speakers can think, the hypothesis would turn out to be inexpressible in English, using basic vocabulary and the usual repertoire of constructions. That might mean it would be hard for us to discuss it in an article in English unless we used terminological innovations or syntactic workarounds. But that doesn’t imply anything about English speakers’ ability to grasp concepts, or to develop new ways of expressing them by coining new words or elaborated syntax.

5. Constructing and evaluating Whorfian hypotheses

A number of considerations are relevant to formulating, testing, and evaluating Whorfian hypotheses.

Genuine hypotheses about the effects of language on thought will always have a duality: there will be a linguistic part and a non-linguistic one. The linguistic part will involve a claim that some feature is present in one language but absent in another.

Whorf himself saw that it was only obligatory features of languages that established “mental patterns” or “habitual thought” (Whorf 1956: 139), since if it were optional then the speaker could optionally do it one way or do it the other way. And so this would not be a case of “constraining the conceptual structure”. So we will likewise restrict our attention to obligatory features here.

Examples of relevant obligatory features would include lexical distinctions like the light vs. dark blue forced choice in Greek, or the forced choice between “in (fitting tightly)” vs. “in (fitting loosely)” in Korean. They also include grammatical distinctions like the forced choice in Spanish 2nd-person pronouns between informal/intimate and formal/distant (informal tú vs. formal usted in the singular; informal vosotros vs. formal ustedes in the plural), or the forced choice in Tamil 1st-person plural pronouns between inclusive (“we = me and you and perhaps others”) and exclusive (“we = me and others not including you”).

The non-linguistic part of a Whorfian hypothesis will contrast the psychological effects that habitually using the two languages has on their speakers. For example, one might conjecture that the habitual use of Spanish induces its speakers to be sensitive to the formal and informal character of the speaker’s relationship with their interlocutor while habitually using English does not.

So testing Whorfian hypotheses requires testing two independent hypotheses with the appropriate kinds of data. In consequence, evaluating them requires the expertise of both linguistics and psychology, and is a multidisciplinary enterprise. Clearly, the linguistic hypothesis may hold up where the psychological hypothesis does not, or conversely.

In addition, if linguists discovered that some linguistic feature was optional in two different languages, then even if psychological experiments showed differences between the two populations of speakers, this would not show linguistic determination or influence. The cognitive differences might depend on (say) cultural differences.

A further important consideration concerns the strength of the inducement relationship that a Whorfian hypothesis posits between a speaker’s language and their non-linguistic capacities. The claim that your language shapes or influences your cognition is quite different from the claim that your language makes certain kinds of cognition impossible (or obligatory) for you. The strength of any Whorfian hypothesis will vary depending on the kind of relationship being claimed, and the ease of revisability of that relation.

A testable Whorfian hypothesis will have a schematic form something like this:

• Linguistic part : Feature F is obligatory in L 1 but optional in L 2 .
• Psychological part : Speaking a language with obligatory feature F bears relation R to the cognitive effect C .

The relation R might in principle be causation or determination, but it is important to see that it might merely be correlation, or slight favoring; and the non-linguistic cognitive effect C might be readily suppressible or revisable.

Dan Slobin (1996) presents a view that competes with Whorfian hypotheses as standardly understood. He hypothesizes that when the speakers are using their cognitive abilities in the service of a linguistic ability (speaking, writing, translating, etc.), the language they are planning to use to express their thought will have a temporary online effect on how they express their thought. The claim is that as long as language users are thinking in order to frame their speech or writing or translation in some language, the mandatory features of that language will influence the way they think.

On Slobin’s view, these effects quickly attenuate as soon as the activity of thinking for speaking ends. For example, if a speaker is thinking for writing in Spanish, then Slobin’s hypothesis would predict that given the obligatory formal/informal 2nd-person pronoun distinction they would pay greater attention to the formal/informal character of their social relationships with their audience than if they were writing in English. But this effect is not permanent. As soon as they stop thinking for speaking, the effect of Spanish on their thought ends.

Slobin’s non-Whorfian linguistic relativist hypothesis raises the importance of psychological research on bilinguals or people who currently use two or more languages with a native or near-native facility. This is because one clear way to test Slobin-like hypotheses relative to Whorfian hypotheses would be to find out whether language correlated non-linguistic cognitive differences between speakers hold for bilinguals only when are thinking for speaking in one language, but not when they are thinking for speaking in some other language. If the relevant cognitive differences appeared and disappeared depending on which language speakers were planning to express themselves in, it would go some way to vindicate Slobin-like hypotheses over more traditional Whorfian Hypotheses. Of course, one could alternately accept a broadening of Whorfian hypotheses to include Slobin-like evanescent effects. Either way, attention must be paid to the persistence and revisability of the linguistic effects.

Kousta et al. (2008) shows that “for bilinguals there is intraspeaker relativity in semantic representations and, therefore, [grammatical] gender does not have a conceptual, non-linguistic effect” (843). Grammatical gender is obligatory in the languages in which it occurs and has been claimed by Whorfians to have persistent and enduring non-linguistic effects on representations of objects (Boroditsky et al. 2003). However, Kousta et al. supports the claim that bilinguals’ semantic representations vary depending on which language they are using, and thus have transient effects. This suggests that although some semantic representations of objects may vary from language to language, their non-linguistic cognitive effects are transitory.

Some advocates of Whorfianism have held that if Whorfian hypotheses were true, then meaning would be globally and radically indeterminate. Thus, the truth of Whorfian hypotheses is equated with global linguistic relativism—a well known self-undermining form of relativism. But as we have seen, not all Whorfian hypotheses are global hypotheses: they are about what is induced by particular linguistic features. And the associated non-linguistic perceptual and cognitive differences can be quite small, perhaps insignificant. For example, Thierry et al. (2009) provides evidence that an obligatory lexical distinction between light and dark blue affects Greek speakers’ color perception in the left hemisphere only. And the question of the degree to which this affects sensuous experience is not addressed.

The fact that Whorfian hypotheses need not be global linguistic relativist hypotheses means that they do not conflict with the claim that there are language universals. Structuralists of the first half of the 20th century tended to disfavor the idea of universals: Martin Joos’s characterization of structuralist linguistics as claiming that “languages can differ without limit as to either extent or direction” (Joos 1966, 228) has been much quoted in this connection. If the claim that languages can vary without limit were conjoined with the claim that languages have significant and permanent effects on the concepts and worldview of their speakers, a truly profound global linguistic relativism would result. But neither conjunct should be accepted. Joos’s remark is regarded by nearly all linguists today as overstated (and merely a caricature of the structuralists), and Whorfian hypotheses do not have to take a global or deterministic form.

John Lucy, a conscientious and conservative researcher of Whorfian hypotheses, has remarked:

We still know little about the connections between particular language patterns and mental life—let alone how they operate or how significant they are…a mere handful of empirical studies address the linguistic relativity proposal directly and nearly all are conceptually flawed. (Lucy 1996, 37)

Although further empirical studies on Whorfian hypotheses have been completed since Lucy published his 1996 review article, it is hard to find any that have satisfied the criteria of:

• adequately utilizing both the relevant linguistic and psychological research,
• focusing on obligatory rather than optional linguistic features,
• stating hypotheses in a clear testable way, and
• ruling out relevant competing Slobin-like hypotheses.

There is much important work yet to be done on testing the range of Whorfian hypotheses and other forms of linguistic conceptual relativism, and on understanding the significance of any Whorfian hypotheses that turn out to be well supported.

Copyright © 2024 by Barbara C. Scholz Francis Jeffry Pelletier < francisp @ ualberta . ca > Geoffrey K. Pullum < pullum @ gmail . com > Ryan Nefdt < ryan . nefdt @ uct . ac . za >

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The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: How Language Influences How We Express Ourselves

Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

Thomas Barwick / Getty Images

What to Know About the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Real-world examples of linguistic relativity, linguistic relativity in psychology.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, refers to the idea that the language a person speaks can influence their worldview, thought, and even how they experience and understand the world.

While more extreme versions of the hypothesis have largely been discredited, a growing body of research has demonstrated that language can meaningfully shape how we understand the world around us and even ourselves.

Keep reading to learn more about linguistic relativity, including some real-world examples of how it shapes thoughts, emotions, and behavior.  

The hypothesis is named after anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. While the hypothesis is named after them both, the two never actually formally co-authored a coherent hypothesis together.

This Hypothesis Aims to Figure Out How Language and Culture Are Connected

Sapir was interested in charting the difference in language and cultural worldviews, including how language and culture influence each other. Whorf took this work on how language and culture shape each other a step further to explore how different languages might shape thought and behavior.

Since then, the concept has evolved into multiple variations, some more credible than others.

Linguistic Determinism Is an Extreme Version of the Hypothesis

Linguistic determinism, for example, is a more extreme version suggesting that a person’s perception and thought are limited to the language they speak. An early example of linguistic determinism comes from Whorf himself who argued that the Hopi people in Arizona don’t conjugate verbs into past, present, and future tenses as English speakers do and that their words for units of time (like “day” or “hour”) were verbs rather than nouns.

From this, he concluded that the Hopi don’t view time as a physical object that can be counted out in minutes and hours the way English speakers do. Instead, Whorf argued, the Hopi view time as a formless process.

This was then taken by others to mean that the Hopi don’t have any concept of time—an extreme view that has since been repeatedly disproven.

There is some evidence for a more nuanced version of linguistic relativity, which suggests that the structure and vocabulary of the language you speak can influence how you understand the world around you. To understand this better, it helps to look at real-world examples of the effects language can have on thought and behavior.

Different Languages Express Colors Differently

Color is one of the most common examples of linguistic relativity. Most known languages have somewhere between two and twelve color terms, and the way colors are categorized varies widely. In English, for example, there are distinct categories for blue and green .

Blue and Green

But in Korean, there is one word that encompasses both. This doesn’t mean Korean speakers can’t see blue, it just means blue is understood as a variant of green rather than a distinct color category all its own.

In Russian, meanwhile, the colors that English speakers would lump under the umbrella term of “blue” are further subdivided into two distinct color categories, “siniy” and “goluboy.” They roughly correspond to light blue and dark blue in English. But to Russian speakers, they are as distinct as orange and brown .

In one study comparing English and Russian speakers, participants were shown a color square and then asked to choose which of the two color squares below it was the closest in shade to the first square.

The test specifically focused on varying shades of blue ranging from “siniy” to “goluboy.” Russian speakers were not only faster at selecting the matching color square but were more accurate in their selections.

The Way Location Is Expressed Varies Across Languages

This same variation occurs in other areas of language. For example, in Guugu Ymithirr, a language spoken by Aboriginal Australians, spatial orientation is always described in absolute terms of cardinal directions. While an English speaker would say the laptop is “in front of” you, a Guugu Ymithirr speaker would say it was north, south, west, or east of you.

As a result, Aboriginal Australians have to be constantly attuned to cardinal directions because their language requires it (just as Russian speakers develop a more instinctive ability to discern between shades of what English speakers call blue because their language requires it).

So when you ask a Guugu Ymithirr speaker to tell you which way south is, they can point in the right direction without a moment’s hesitation. Meanwhile, most English speakers would struggle to accurately identify South without the help of a compass or taking a moment to recall grade school lessons about how to find it.

The concept of these cardinal directions exists in English, but English speakers aren’t required to think about or use them on a daily basis so it’s not as intuitive or ingrained in how they orient themselves in space.

Just as with other aspects of thought and perception, the vocabulary and grammatical structure we have for thinking about or talking about what we feel doesn’t create our feelings, but it does shape how we understand them and, to an extent, how we experience them.

Words Help Us Put a Name to Our Emotions

For example, the ability to detect displeasure from a person’s face is universal. But in a language that has the words “angry” and “sad,” you can further distinguish what kind of displeasure you observe in their facial expression. This doesn’t mean humans never experienced anger or sadness before words for them emerged. But they may have struggled to understand or explain the subtle differences between different dimensions of displeasure.

In one study of English speakers, toddlers were shown a picture of a person with an angry facial expression. Then, they were given a set of pictures of people displaying different expressions including happy, sad, surprised, scared, disgusted, or angry. Researchers asked them to put all the pictures that matched the first angry face picture into a box.

The two-year-olds in the experiment tended to place all faces except happy faces into the box. But four-year-olds were more selective, often leaving out sad or fearful faces as well as happy faces. This suggests that as our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

But some research suggests the influence is not limited to just developing a wider vocabulary for categorizing emotions. Language may “also help constitute emotion by cohering sensations into specific perceptions of ‘anger,’ ‘disgust,’ ‘fear,’ etc.,” said Dr. Harold Hong, a board-certified psychiatrist at New Waters Recovery in North Carolina.

As our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

Words for emotions, like words for colors, are an attempt to categorize a spectrum of sensations into a handful of distinct categories. And, like color, there’s no objective or hard rule on where the boundaries between emotions should be which can lead to variation across languages in how emotions are categorized.

Emotions Are Categorized Differently in Different Languages

Just as different languages categorize color a little differently, researchers have also found differences in how emotions are categorized. In German, for example, there’s an emotion called “gemütlichkeit.”

While it’s usually translated as “cozy” or “ friendly ” in English, there really isn’t a direct translation. It refers to a particular kind of peace and sense of belonging that a person feels when surrounded by the people they love or feel connected to in a place they feel comfortable and free to be who they are.

Harold Hong, MD, Psychiatrist

The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion.

You may have felt gemütlichkeit when staying up with your friends to joke and play games at a sleepover. You may feel it when you visit home for the holidays and spend your time eating, laughing, and reminiscing with your family in the house you grew up in.

In Japanese, the word “amae” is just as difficult to translate into English. Usually, it’s translated as "spoiled child" or "presumed indulgence," as in making a request and assuming it will be indulged. But both of those have strong negative connotations in English and amae is a positive emotion .

Instead of being spoiled or coddled, it’s referring to that particular kind of trust and assurance that comes with being nurtured by someone and knowing that you can ask for what you want without worrying whether the other person might feel resentful or burdened by your request.

You might have felt amae when your car broke down and you immediately called your mom to pick you up, without having to worry for even a second whether or not she would drop everything to help you.

Regardless of which languages you speak, though, you’re capable of feeling both of these emotions. “The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion,” Dr. Hong explained.

What This Means For You

“While having the words to describe emotions can help us better understand and regulate them, it is possible to experience and express those emotions without specific labels for them.” Without the words for these feelings, you can still feel them but you just might not be able to identify them as readily or clearly as someone who does have those words. 

Rhee S. Lexicalization patterns in color naming in Korean . In: Raffaelli I, Katunar D, Kerovec B, eds. Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics. Vol 78. John Benjamins Publishing Company; 2019:109-128. Doi:10.1075/sfsl.78.06rhe

Winawer J, Witthoft N, Frank MC, Wu L, Wade AR, Boroditsky L. Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination . Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2007;104(19):7780-7785.  10.1073/pnas.0701644104

Lindquist KA, MacCormack JK, Shablack H. The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism . Front Psychol. 2015;6. Doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00444

By Rachael Green Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

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Selected writings of edward sapir, language, thought, and reality: selected writings of benjamin lee whorf, citations & impact , impact metrics, citations of article over time, alternative metrics.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

A study on the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional with chinese and french participants.

• 1 Laboratory Cognition Humaine et Artificielle, Université Paris 8, Paris, France
• 2 Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse, France
• 3 Probability, Assessment, Reasoning and Inferences Studies (P-A-R-I-S) Association, Paris, France

According to the weak version of linguistic relativity, also called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the features of an individual’s native language influence his worldview and perception. We decided to test this hypothesis on the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional, expressed differently in Chinese and French. In Chinese, connectors for both conditionals exist and are used in everyday life, while there is only a connector for the sufficient conditional in French. A first hypothesis follows from linguistic relativity: for the necessary conditional, better logic performance is expected in Chinese participants rather than French participants. As a second hypothesis, for all participants, we expect performance on the sufficient conditional to be better than on the necessary conditional. Indeed, despite the isomorphism of the two conditionals, they differ in how information is processed for reasoning. We decided to study reasoning under uncertainty as it reflects reality more accurately. To do so, we analyzed the coherence of participants using de Finetti’s theory for deduction under uncertainty. The results of our study show no significant difference in performance between Chinese and French participants, neither on the sufficient conditional nor on the necessary conditional. Thus, our first hypothesis derived from the weak version of linguistic relativity is not confirmed. In contrast, our results confirm the second hypothesis in two out of three inference schemas.

Introduction

The sapir-whorf hypothesis.

For decades, linguistic relativity theory, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, has been omnipresent in studying the relationship between thought and language. Linguistic relativity theory, defended by Sapir (1921) and more radically by Whorf (1956) , proposes that language influences the way people perceive and think about the world. This hypothesis focuses on the differences in both vocabulary and grammar between languages. It suggests that people’s language vocabulary and grammatical structure strongly influence how they conceptualize the world. Whorf considers that human language has an additional role in shaping thought besides its function as a communication tool. Two versions of the principle of linguistic relativity can be distinguished: the weak version and the strong version ( Carnes, 1970 ; Brown, 1976 ). According to the strong version, the characteristics of our native language determine our worldview and way of perceiving; as for the weak version, the former influences the latter. The strong version refers to linguistic determinism. Whorf himself does not make such a distinction. As Yao (2002) has pointed out, Whorf sometimes favored the weak version, sometimes the strong one. Compared to the strong version, which is very radical and that most researchers do not adhere to, the weak version seems much more realistic.

Whorf (1956) claims that grammatically based systems that differ across languages exercise an unconscious control over reasoning; that is, the grammar of one’s native language might affect one’s reasoning. Precisely, one’s reasoning competence would be constrained by the presence or absence of grammatical structures in one’s mother tongue. Counterfactual reasoning is an important topic in this area of research. Bloom (1981 , 1984) proposed that Chinese speakers lacked a specific counterfactual construction without a distinct counterfactual marker (the subjunctive). For Bloom, this leads to a reduced ability to engage in counterfactual reasoning for Chinese speakers, compared to English speakers, who have a subjunctive structure. His results confirm the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In contrast, Au (1983 , 1984) and Liu (1985) did not find any particular difficulty of Chinese speakers with counterfactual reasoning compared to English speakers. Takano (1989) did not find any difference between Japanese speakers, who similarly lack a counterfactual marker, and English speakers. Their results invalidate the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. However, more recently, the result of Yeh and Gentner (2005) has partly validated the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In their experiment, when the participants had sufficient knowledge to interpret a counterfactually presented portion of a story, there was no difference between Chinese and English speakers. When they did not, the results showed an advantage for English speakers over Chinese speakers. As for the interference between thought and language, Hunt and Agnoli (1991) have argued that the locus of the interference between thought and language would not lie at the conceptual level but instead at the information processing level.

Sufficient Conditional and Necessary Conditional

In the same manner, as with counterfactual reasoning, we would like to test the validity of the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We compared Chinese and French speakers regarding the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional in our experiment. The sufficient conditional refers to the reasoning “if A, then C,” which means that, given the antecedent A, the consequent C occurs. As for the necessary conditional, it refers to “only if A, then C,” which implies that the antecedent A is necessary for the consequent C to happen. A’s presence is required to make C happen but might not be enough, unlike the sufficient conditional. The two conditionals are not expressed identically in Chinese and French. On the one hand, in Chinese, both connectors for the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional are present in daily life; on the other hand, only a connector for the sufficient conditional exists in French. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Chinese participants should perform better than French participants on the necessary conditional, given the presence of the corresponding connector in their mother tongue. Also, there should be no significant difference between Chinese and French participants concerning the sufficient conditional, given that the connector for the sufficient conditional is present and widely used in both languages. In addition, we state a second hypothesis that there should be better performance in the sufficient conditional than in the necessary conditional. In the necessary conditional “only if A, then C,” the antecedent A is necessary for the consequent C. This means that, without the presence of A, there is no C. So, “Only if A, C” is equivalent to “If not-A, then not-C” ( Johnson-Laird and Byrne, 1991 ; Gomes, 2009 ; Wang and Gao, 2010 ), which has the same structure as the sufficient conditional “If P, then Q” (P being not-A, Q being not-C). Thus, the two conditionals can be interpreted as isomorphic. Nevertheless, the information processing most likely differs between the two conditionals, as reasoning in the necessary conditional a priori implies the process of transformation to the sufficient conditional in our experiment, in addition to reasoning in the sufficient conditional. We make such a claim due to the nature of the necessary conditional, which does not guarantee any event; it does not lead to another result in general, which makes the reasoning more difficult.

In Chinese communication, the sufficient conditional with the connector “ rúgu ǒ A, nàme C” translates into “If A, then C” and the necessary conditional with the connector “ zh ǐ y ǒ u A, cáihuì C” translates into “Only if A, C.” Most studies on conditional reasoning have focused on the sufficient conditional “if A, then C.” There are few studies on the necessary conditional “A, only if C,” logically equivalent to the sufficient conditional “if A, then C” ( Evans, 1977 ; Evans and Beck, 1981 ; Grosset and Barrouillet, 2003 ). Those studies examined whether both conditionals were interpreted similarly by the participants. Despite logical equivalence, the results showed that those two forms seemed to be interpreted differently by the participants ( Evans, 1977 ; McCawley, 1981 ). “If A, then C” is not always interpreted as “A, only if C”: it is sometimes interpreted as “A, only if C,” and sometimes as “C, only if A.” Evans (1977) ; Evans and Newstead (1977) , and Evans and Beck (1981) considered that the “only if” syntax involves both a temporal and a necessity relation. Thompson and Mann (1995) consider that pragmatic contexts, such as in the interpretation of necessity and temporal relations, might play a more indirect role. From another perspective, the study of Wang and Gao (2010) consisted in comparing the performance of Chinese participants with the traditional inference schemas: Modus Ponens (MP), Modus Tollens (MT), Denying the Antecedent (DA), and Affirmation of the Consequent (AC), with the sufficient conditional “If A, then C” and the necessary conditional “Only if C, A” logically equivalent. By way of a reminder, MP denotes the reasoning from a premise “if A, then C,” knowing the event A occurs. MT implies reasoning from the same premise, considering the event C does not occur. Likewise, DA refers to a situation where A does not occur, and AC to a condition in which C occurs. Their study showed a significant effect of the representation of semantic relations on conditional inferences. For example, for MP, the rate of correct response (73.8%) with “If A, then C” was much higher than the rate (47.7%) with “Only if C, A,” despite the logical equivalence of both inferences. To interpret this result, the authors explained that, in the “If A, then C” form, the sufficiency of A for C is explicit, whereas in the necessary conditional “Only if C, A,” it is implicit. The participants performed better on conditional inferences corresponding to explicit semantic relations than those corresponding to implicit semantic relations. It should be noted that all the studies so far on the necessary conditional, including the studies cited above, investigated reasoning under certainty, which means reasoning from certain assumption. As for us, we decided to study the reasoning on the necessary conditional under uncertainty, implying the possibility that the assumptions might not certainly happen, as it reflects reality more accurately.

As one should note, the necessary conditional statement “Only if A, C” in Chinese is different from the statement “A, only if C.” Firstly, there is a difference of directionality: “Only if A, C” in Chinese starts from the antecedent, and consists in deducing the consequent, from the antecedent, whereas “A, only if C” starts from the consequent, and consists in inferring the antecedent. Numerous studies in the context of certainty have underlined a directionality effect, which means people perform better while making inferences that correspond to the direction of the conditional ( Evans, 1977 , 1993 ; Evans and Beck, 1981 ; Johnson-Laird and Byrne, 1991 ; Ormerod et al., 1993 ; Rips, 1994 ; Grosset and Barrouillet, 2003 ; Byrne and Johnson-Laird, 2009 ). Secondly, the necessary conditional “Only if A, C” in Chinese is used as such in daily life. Thus, we deem it natural and relevant to study the Chinese necessary conditional as it appears in Chinese: “Only if A, C,” instead of “Only if C, A.” The necessary conditional “Only if A, C” implies the sufficient conditional “If not-A, then not-C.” Our study on the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional offers us twice as many situations to study the reasoning as the classical study of the sole sufficient conditional.

Reasoning Under Uncertainty: A New Paradigm

In the study of inferences, we classically set the premise as certain, but this rarely occurs in everyday life. Hence, we decided to use a framework to consider uncertainty in human reasoning. We have opted for the new paradigm approach of reasoning ( Oaksford and Chater, 2007 , 2009 ; Over, 2009 ; Evans, 2012 ; Elqayam and Evans, 2013 ; Elqayam and Over, 2013 ; Evans and Over, 2013 ; Mandel, 2014 ), which highlights the importance of uncertainty in human deductive reasoning. In this approach, the reference model is no longer binary logic but the Bayesian model. More specifically, in our study, we adopt the subjective Bayesian theory of De Finetti (1964) , which has many theoretical, methodological, and prescriptive advantages ( Baratgin and Politzer, 2016 ; Over and Baratgin, 2016 ; Politzer and Baratgin, 2016 ; Baratgin et al., 2017 ; Oaksford and Chater, 2020 ; Politzer et al., 2020a , b ; Baratgin, 2021 ; Lassiter and Baratgin, 2021 ).

Theoretically, the Finettian approach is based on the Bayesian subjective concept of coherence, which states that the degrees of belief must respect the axioms of probability ( Baratgin, 2002 ; Baratgin and Politzer, 2006 ). The theory of De Finetti (1980) distinguishes two levels of experimental analysis, corresponding to two levels of knowledge of an event. The elementary level concerns the belief in the realization of some event C conditioned on the state of knowledge of some individual A (noted C|A ). C|A is a tri-event having three values of truth: true when A and C are true, false when A is true and C is false, and uncertain when A is uncertain or false. Recent studies ( Politzer et al., 2010 ; Baratgin et al., 2013 , 2014 , 2018 ; Nakamura et al., 2018 ) have shown that most participants interpret the conditional of natural language in the same way as indicated in the theory of De Finetti (1995) . The epistemic meta-level relates to the degrees of belief in the event. Many studies have shown the strong acceptance of participants to the principal property of this level, that the probability of the indicative conditional “if A, then C” is equal to the conditional probability P(C|A) ( Evans and Over, 2004 ; Oaksford and Chater, 2007 , 2009 ; Pfeifer and Kleiter, 2010 ; Politzer et al., 2010 ; Manktelow, 2012 ). More recently, there have been advances in the study of human coherence in deduction under uncertainty ( Pfeifer and Kleiter, 2011 ; Pfeifer, 2014 ; Singmann et al., 2014 ; Cruz et al., 2015 ; Evans et al., 2015 ; Politzer and Baratgin, 2016 ). De Finetti (1964 , 1974) provides an effective method to appraise the coherence of a probability evaluation, using coherence intervals determined by the probability of the premises ( Suppes, 1966 ; Hailperin, 1996 , 2010 ; Coletti and Scozzafava, 2002 ; Gilio and Over, 2012 ; Baratgin and Politzer, 2016 ; Politzer, 2016 ). If the coherence interval of the conclusion is [0, 1], the inference schema is called “probabilistically uninformative”; if the coherence interval of the conclusion is a restrained interval [l, u], it is called “probabilistically informative” ( Pfeifer and Kleiter, 2006 ). Pfeifer and Kleiter (2007) used this methodology to study inference schemas MP and DA. In their experiment on MP, the inference schema was probabilistic because they used statements such as “exactly 80% of the red cars on this parking lot are two-door cars, exactly 90% of the cars on this parking lot are two-door cars,” and the question “Imagine all the cars that are on this parking lot. How many of these cars are two-door cars?” 63% of the participants gave coherent intervals for MP, only 41% for DA. The results for MP are in line with the pioneering study by George (1997) (see also Singmann et al., 2014 ; Evans et al., 2015 , for similar results).

In the context of uncertainty, we decided to study three inference schemas, among which the two main classical ones: the probabilistic inference schema for MP, called PMP, covering from DA to MP; the probabilistic inference schema for AC, called PAC, covering from MT to AC. Besides PMP and PAC inference schemas, we also studied a third inference schema, IF-introduction: “A, C, therefore, if A then C” in probabilistic form, called PIF. Table 1 shows probabilistic inference schemas in the sufficient conditional “If A, then C” and the necessary conditional “Only if A, C.”

Table 1. Probabilistic inference schemas in the sufficient conditional “If A, then C” and the necessary conditional “Only if A, C”.

We thus have a kind of ‘‘trilogy,’’ in which the premises are taken in pairs out of a set of three sentences (A, C, and ‘‘if A, C’’). 1

In this study, we analyze the performances in terms of coherence, for Chinese and French participants, in these three inference schemas with two conditional forms: the sufficient conditional “If A, then C” and the necessary conditional “Only if A, C.” The coherence interval for the conclusions of MP and AC can be obtained by calculation ( Suppes, 1966 ; Hailperin, 1996 , 2010 ; Coletti and Scozzafava, 2002 ; Gilio, 2002 ; Wagner, 2004 ; Sobel, 2009 ) or by an analogical representation method ( Politzer, 2016 ). We present the coherence intervals for the three inference schemas in each, the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional.

In the sufficient conditional, the probabilistic inference schema for MP (PMP), which can be obtained from the probability of the conditional and the probability of the antecedent, is written:

When i = 1, a = 0 , we are in the particular situation that corresponds to classical DA, and when i = 1, a = 1 , we are in the particular situation of classical MP.

The probabilistic inference schema AC (PAC), obtained from the probability of the conditional and the probability of the consequent, is written:

when i = 1, c = 0 , we are in the particular situation that corresponds to classical MT, and when i = 1, c = 1 , we are in the particular situation of classical AC.

The probabilistic inference schema IF-introduction (PIF), which can be obtained from the probability of the antecedent and the probability of the consequent, is written:

We examined the case of the necessary conditional “Only if A, C.” “Only if A, C” corresponds to “If not-A, then not-C” in the sufficient conditional. The probability of the conditional “Only if A, C” is that of the sufficient conditional “If not-A, then not-C,” the probability of the antecedent is P (A), and the probability of consequence is P (C).

Thus, the inference schema MP in the necessary conditional « “ Only if A, C ,” A » corresponds to DA « “If not-A, then not-C,” A » in the sufficient conditional. The probabilistic inference schema for MP (PMP) in necessary conditional is the probabilistic inference schema for DA (PDA) in the sufficient conditional, which is written as follows:

when i = 1, a = 0 , we are in the particular situation of DA in the necessary conditional that corresponds to classical MP in the sufficient conditional. When i = 1, a = 1 , we are in the particular situation of MP in the necessary conditional that corresponds to classical DA in the sufficient conditional.

In the same way, the inference schema PAC in the necessary conditional corresponds to PMT in the sufficient conditional. Thus, the inference schema AC in the necessary conditional « “Only if A, C,” C » corresponds to MT « “If not-A, then not-C,” C » in the sufficient conditional. The probabilistic inference schema for AC (PAC) in necessary conditional is the probabilistic inference schema for MT (PMT) in the sufficient conditional, which is written as follows:

when i = 1, c = 0 , we are in the particular situation of MT in the necessary conditional that corresponds to classical AC in the sufficient conditional. When i = 1, c = 1 , we are in the particular situation of AC in the necessary conditional that corresponds to classical MT in the sufficient conditional.

Because the probability of the necessary conditional “only if A, C” corresponds to the probability of the sufficient conditional “If not-A, then not-C,” which is P [(1-c)/(1-a)], the probabilistic inference schema IF-introduction (PIF) in necessary conditional is written as follows:

On the one hand, our goal was to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by comparing the percentage of coherence of Chinese and French participants in both the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional. On the other hand, we expected a better performance in the sufficient conditional than in the necessary conditional. Despite isomorphism of the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional, the two conditionals might involve different information processing, resulting in better performances for the sufficient conditional. Indeed, it is likely that reasoning in the necessary conditional would imply a priori the transformation process to the sufficient conditional and reasoning in the sufficient conditional.

In this study, we took the methodology used in Politzer and Baratgin (2016) . The uncertainty of the premises as the choices of answers provided for the participants is formulated in a qualitative form, in contrast with a numerical form (a value between 0 and 1, or in the form of a percentage) as used in most previous studies on PMP and PAC ( Pfeifer and Kleiter, 2009 , 2010 , 2011 ; Pfeifer, 2014 ; Singmann et al., 2014 ; Cruz et al., 2015 ; Evans et al., 2015 ; Nickerson et al., 2019 ). This methodology is consistent with the subjective conception of de Finetti’s theory. Moreover, we believe that in everyday life, people do not reason by assigning a quantitative probability to an event or a conditional, but a qualitative probability such as high, medium, and low as de Finetti suggested himself ( De Finetti, 1964 ; Baratgin and Politzer, 2006 , 2007 ).

In our pilot experiment carried out on the sufficient conditional in France, the participants had to deal with two probabilistic inference schemas: PMP and PAC. The probability of the major premise as that of the minor premise varied from 0% to 100%, passing through low, medium, and high. We found out that when the two premises are uncertain, with verbal probability (probability of the first premise: high/medium/low, and probability of the minor premise: high/medium/low), most participants were confused, they had difficulty choosing their responses, the answers were primarily given randomly. Therefore, we decided not to combine two uncertain probabilities in our experiment. Indeed, we had the apprehension that the participants in the whole experiment would randomly select their answers instead of reasoning.

In our questionnaire, each item had two premises, a first premise and a second premise, for which we varied the levels of uncertainty: 100%, high, medium, low, 0%. When the first premise’s value was 100% or 0%, the second premise’s value was 100%, high, medium, low, or 0%. When the first premise’s value was high, medium, or low, the second premise’s value was 100% or 0%.

As in the experiments of Politzer and Baratgin (2016) , it was followed by a multiple-choice response format.

When the first premise and the second premise are both certain ( 0% or 100%) , the response options are:

- exactly 0% and above 0% , when the second premise is 0% ;

- exactly 100% and below 100% , when the second premise is 100%.

When one of the premises is high , medium , or low , there are three response options, depending on the degree of uncertainty of the uncertain premise:

- above [ the level of the uncertain premise ];

- just [ the level of the uncertain premise ];

- below [ the level of the uncertain premise ].

For example, if the first premise is 100% and the second premise is high, the response options are above high , just high , and below high . In this situation, there were seven possible responses from participants: above; just; below (only one primitive option at a time); above and just; below and just; above and below (two primitive options); and above, just , and below (all three primitive options). Table 2 summarizes the design of the items.

Table 2. Response format according to the level of uncertainty of the premises.

The point of this multiple-choice format is that it makes the ideas of De Finetti (1980) explicit by differentiating between certainty, where one is certain that an event is true or false, whether or not it is verified, and subjective uncertain judgments. Thus, 0% and 100% are used to indicate certainty with extreme objectivity to avoid confusion and qualitative probability to express uncertainty. Therefore, this response format we used is not an ordinary mixture of numerical and verbal responses.

Each participant had to deal with one of eight different questionnaires: 4 with the sufficient conditional and 4 with the necessary conditional. For each questionnaire, questions were presented in 2 counterbalanced orders. Every questionnaire included 12 questions. In each questionnaire, the participants had to treat the 3 probabilistic inference schemas: PMP, PAC, and PIF. The participants were asked to select all the options that seemed correct. Here is an example of a question for PMP in the sufficient conditional:

Knowing that the chances that “If Sophie is in the living room, then Mary is in the kitchen” are 100% ,

knowing that the chances are low that “Sophie is in the living room.”

In your opinion, the chances that “Mary is in the kitchen” are:

□ above low

□ just low

□ below low

The ordinal judgment “low” is considered as equivalent to the numerical probability 1/4 for us, “medium” is considered as similar as 1/2, and “high” is considered as 3/4. In this example, the first premise P(C/A) is 1 and the second premise P (A) is considered equivalent to 1/4. When we use the PMP formula mentioned in the previous part, a × i ≤ P ( C ) ≤ a × i + 1− a , we find the interval [1/4, 1]. Therefore, the coherent responses are “just low” and “above low.” We may also translate “low” into 0.20, “medium” into 0.50, and “high” into 0.80. We consider “low” as a probability of less than 50%, “medium” as a probability of 50%, and “high” as a probability of more than 50%.

It should be noted that in the questions, there was no causality between the antecedent and the consequent. Furthermore, to study only the logical aspect of reasoning, we paid attention to the choice of the first names, the gender, and the actions to prevent stereotypes from intervening. 2

Participants

The Chinese participants were 295 students in the first and second grades of “media management” at Zhejiang University of Media and Communications in China. They were all native speakers of Chinese. The age of the participants extended from 18 to 23, with a mean age of 19.3. The French participants were 242 students, mainly from Universities Paris 1, Paris 5, Paris 8, and the others being students or former students of other universities in Paris. They were all native speakers of French. The age of the participants extended from 18 to 27, with a mean age of 20.3. Education levels ranged from high school diplomas to master’s diplomas. The participants voluntarily took part in the experiment and gave their consent to participate in it. None of them were trained in logic. The participants were not screened for knowledge of other languages than the one classified as their mother tongue, and it was assumed each participant would only have one mother tongue. We used the criterion of the mother tongue because we wanted to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which focuses on an individual’s native language. The duration of the test was 15 min.

Comparison of Coherence Between the Chinese and the French Participants

If a participant’s response is within the coherence interval, it is considered coherent.

Sufficient Conditional

Figures 1 – 3 3 show the comparison of the percentage of coherence for the Chinese and the French participants in inference schemas PMP, PAC, and PIF in the sufficient conditional. The Z -test for comparing two proportions was used to compare the coherence for the Chinese and the French participants.

Figure 1. Percentage of coherent responses for the Chinese and the French participants in PMP in the sufficient conditional. *: p < 0.05. On the abscissa, the probabilities of the conditional and the probabilities of the antecedent below; on the ordinate: the percentage of coherent response for the Chinese and the French participants. Uninformative cases are those where the percentage of coherent responses is 1.0 for the French and the Chinese participants. MP: P (cond) = 1, P (a) = 1; DA: P (cond) = 1, P (a) = 0. The bars indicate the 95% confidence intervals for proportions.

We see on the abscissa all the combinations of the probabilities of the conditional and the probabilities of the antecedent, and on the ordinate, the percentage of coherent response for the Chinese and the French participants. For example, when the probability of the conditional is 1, and the probability of the antecedent is high, the percentage of coherent response is 87% for the French and 89% for the Chinese. There is no significant difference between the percentage of coherent responses for the Chinese and the French participants.

In PMP, it is to be noted that, in 6 out of 16 cases, the inference schema is called probabilistically uninformative as all responses are considered coherent, the coherence interval being [0, 1]. Figure 1 shows that in 10 informative cases, overall, there is no significant difference in coherence between the Chinese and the French participants. The only significant difference ( p < 0.05) concerns the case where the probability of conditional is low, and the probability of antecedent is 100%. In this case, the percentage of coherence is higher for the French participants than for the Chinese participants.

Figure 2 shows that in 13 informative cases in PAC, there are three significant differences ( p < 0.05) in the percentage of coherent responses between the Chinese and the French participants. For PIF, Figure 3 indicates only two significant differences ( p < 0.05) in the percentage of coherence between the Chinese and the French participants in 12 informative cases.

Figure 2. Percentage of coherent responses for the Chinese and the French participants in PAC in the sufficient conditional. *: p < 0.05. On the abscissa, the probabilities of the conditional and the probabilities of the consequent below; on the ordinate, the percentage of coherent response for the Chinese and the French participants. Uninformative cases are those where the percentage of coherent responses is 1.0 for the French and the Chinese participants. MT: P (cond) = 1, P (c) = 0; AC: P (cond) = 1, P (c) = 1. The bars indicate the 95% confidence intervals for proportions.

Figure 3. Percentage of coherent responses for the Chinese and the French participants in PIF in the sufficient conditional. *: p < 0.05. On the abscissa: the probabilities of the antecedent and the probabilities of the consequent below; on the ordinate: the percentage of coherent response for the Chinese and the French participants. Uninformative cases are those where the percentage of coherent responses is 1.0 for the French and the Chinese participants. The bars indicate the 95% confidence intervals for proportions.

In total, among the 35 informative cases in the three inference schemas, we observed only six significant differences in the percentage of coherence between the Chinese participants and the French participants, three in favor of the Chinese and three in favor of the French. Given that the connector of the sufficient conditional is present and the sufficient conditional is widely used in both languages, the result is in line with the expectation: there is, overall, no significant difference between the percentage of coherence for the Chinese participants and the French participants.

Necessary Conditional

Figures 4 – 6 show the comparison of the coherence percentage between the Chinese and the French participants in inference schemas PMP, PAC, and PIF in the necessary conditional. The Z -test was used to compare the percentage of coherence between the Chinese and the French participants.

Figure 4. Percentage of coherent responses for the Chinese and the French participants in PMP in the necessary conditional. *: p < 0.05. On the abscissa, the probabilities of the conditional and the probabilities of the antecedent below; on the ordinate, the percentage of coherent response for the Chinese and the French participants. Uninformative cases are those where the percentage of coherent responses is 1.0 for the French and the Chinese participants. MP: P (cond) = 1, P (a) = 1; DA: P (cond) = 1, P (a) = 0. The bars indicate the 95% confidence intervals for proportions.

Figure 4 shows that in 10 informative cases in PMP, there are 2 significant differences ( p < 0.05) in coherence between the Chinese and the French participants. As indicated in Figure 5 , in 14 informative cases in PAC, there are 3 significant differences ( p < 0.05) in the percentage of coherent response between the Chinese and the French participants. Figure 6 illustrates no significant difference of coherent response for PIF between the Chinese and the French participants in 12 informative cases.

Figure 5. Percentage of coherent responses for the Chinese and the French participants in PAC in the necessary conditional. *: p < 0.05. On the abscissa, the probabilities of the conditional and the probabilities of the consequent below; on the ordinate, the percentage of coherent response for the Chinese and the French participants. Uninformative cases are those where the percentage of coherent responses is 1.0 for the French and the Chinese participants. MT: P (cond) = 1, P (c) = 0; AC: P (cond) = 1, P (c) = 1. The bars indicate the 95% confidence intervals for proportions.

Figure 6. Percentage of coherent responses for the Chinese and the French participants in PIF in the necessary conditional. On the abscissa, the probabilities of the antecedent and the probabilities of the consequent below; on the ordinate, the percentage of coherent response for the Chinese and the French participants. Uninformative cases are those where the percentage of coherent responses is 1.0 for the French and the Chinese participants. The bars indicate the 95% confidence intervals for proportions.

In total, among 36 informative cases in the three inference schemas, we observed only five significant differences between Chinese and the French participants, all in favor of the French. This result disproves our hypothesis that there should be better performance for the Chinese compared to the French, so the presence of the connector of the necessary conditional in the Chinese language, as opposed to the French language, did not give the Chinese participants an advantage over the French participants.

Comparison of Coherence Between the Sufficient Conditional and the Necessary Conditional

To know if the participants are really coherent in a given situation, we need to examine whether the coherence percentage for the Chinese and the French participants is above the success rate by chance. Before that, we should determine the success rate by chance. For example, in the presence of uncertainty, the participants are asked to evaluate three propositions A , B , and C . They have seven possible responses, A ; B ; C ; A and B ; B and C ; A and C ; A, B , and C . Supposing that A , B are in the coherence interval, C is not in the coherence interval, then, we have three possible coherent responses: A ; B ; A and B . The success rate by chance to give a coherent response is 3/7. Supposing now that only A is in the coherence interval among the seven possible responses, the success rate by chance is then 1/7. When there is a combination of certainty in the statements: 0% and/or 100%, the participants are invited to evaluate two proposals: A and B . They have three possible responses: A ; B ; A and B . If only A is in the coherence interval, the success rate by chance is 1/3. Thus, for each question, we compare the coherence percentage of the participants with the success rate by chance.

In the informative cases, the X 2 test is used to compare the rate of coherence with the success rate by chance in each inference schema of the two conditionals. Table 3 shows the number of cases where the rate of coherence is above the chance of the total number of informative cases.

Table 3. Number of cases where the rate of coherence is above chance of the total number of informative cases.

It indicates that, in PMP, the coherence rate of the Chinese participants is higher than the success rate by chance in 9 of 10 informative cases in the sufficient conditional and in only 2 of 10 informative cases in the necessary conditional. Likewise, the coherence rate for the French participants is higher than the success rate by chance in all 10 informative cases in the sufficient conditional and in only 3 of 10 informative cases in the necessary conditional. According to Fischer’s exact test, the difference in performance between the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional is significant for both the Chinese and the French. There is better performance in the sufficient conditional than in the necessary conditional. Our results in the sufficient conditional in PMP, which includes classical DA and MP, are consistent with Evans et al. (2015) , who found that the scores of coherence were significantly above chance for MP and DA.

Table 3 shows that in PAC, the coherence rate for the Chinese participants is higher than the success rate by chance in 5 of 13 informative cases in the sufficient conditional and 4 of 14 informative cases in the necessary conditional. For the French participants, it happens in 6 of 13 informative cases in the sufficient conditional and 8 of 14 informative cases in the necessary conditional. According to Fischer’s exact test, there is no significant difference in performance between the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional, neither for the Chinese nor the French. Our results in the sufficient conditional in PAC, which includes classical MT and AC, are relatively consistent with Evans et al. (2015) , who found that the scores of coherence were below chance for MT and above chance for AC in one of two experimental situations. The poor performance of the Chinese and the French participants in PAC on the sufficient conditional could be explained by directionality, which plays an important role in conditional reasoning ( Oberauer and Wilhelm, 2000 ; Evans et al., 2005 ; Oberauer et al., 2005 ). The direction of PAC (knowing the probability of conditional “if A, then C,” and the probability of C, one should deduce the probability of A) does not correspond to the direction of the conditional. PAC is, therefore, more difficult than PMP (knowing the probability of conditional “if A, then C,” and the probability of A, one should infer the probability of C), which corresponds to the direction of the conditional.

In PIF, the coherence rate for the Chinese participants is higher than the success rate by chance in all 12 informative cases in the sufficient conditional and in only 5 of 12 informative cases in the necessary conditional. That happens for the French participants in all 12 cases in the sufficient conditional and only 2 of 12 informative cases in the necessary conditional. According to Fischer’s exact test, there is a significant difference in performance between the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional, both for the Chinese and the French. The high coherence rate in the sufficient conditional is consistent with the results of previous studies (i.e., Cruz et al., 2015 ).

We noted the number of coherent and not coherent responses in each situation in the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional. We indicated the cases where the rate of coherence is above chance (see Data Availability Statement). We found that the coherence rate is very low in some situations, even though it could be higher than the success rate by chance. In Table 4 , we have identified the number of cases where the coherence rate is below 50% of the total number of cases.

Table 4. Number of cases where the coherence rate is below 50% of the total number of informative cases.

Table 4 shows that the coherence rate below 50% is found chiefly with uncertain conditional, even though it is above chance in some cases. One explanation is that our task required making relative probability judgments, which are known to be more difficult than absolute probability judgments ( Stewart et al., 2005 ; Guest et al., 2016 ). This could have impaired the coherence rate of our participants in the conditions involving uncertainty.

General Discussion

According to the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, namely that language influences the way of thinking, we expected a similar performance for the Chinese and the French participants in the sufficient conditional, and better performance for the Chinese participants in the necessary conditional, since a connector for the necessary conditional exists only in Chinese. However, comparing the percentage of coherence between the Chinese and the French participants in inference schemas PMP, PAC, and PIF shows no significant difference in the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional. This result does not confirm our hypothesis.

Thus, the presence of the necessary conditional connector in the Chinese language does not give the Chinese participants an advantage in this type of reasoning compared to the French participants. The different languages implying a difference about the presence of the necessary conditional connector, more widely different grammatically based categorization, do not affect the reasoning since a difference does not follow them in reasoning performance. To explain this result, we consider that in the French language, although the connector of the necessary conditional does not exist as such, the reasoning of the necessary conditional exists by expressions less concise and formal than a connector, which seem to be as efficient as connectors yet. Our result supports the universalist hypothesis. According to the universals of grammar, there is an isomorphism in the lexical and grammatical core of the world’s languages, even if they all differ infinitely from one another, both in their structure and in their lexicon. Cross-cultural communication would be impossible if there were not, besides considerable variations, a kind of common core based on shared or equivalent words but also on shared or equivalent grammatical structures ( Wierzbicka, 1993 ). For Wierzbicka (1993 , p. 119), “It is clear that what is necessary both for a comparative study of languages and for a study of the functioning of language as a human faculty is an authentic universal perspective, and not a perspective specific to a particular language. Although every language has its own unique structure and equally unique lexicon (a lexicon that also incorporates a unique semantic structure), some areas can be considered mutually isomorphic. It is this (partial) isomorphism in grammar and lexicon that makes the notion of “linguistic universals” a legitimate notion.” Chomsky (1994) proposes a description based on phrase structure syntax and x-bar (headword) grammar. According to the theory of principles and parameters, the deep structure thus identified is part of universal grammar. The universalist hypothesis considers that logical reasoning is performed on abstract representations, which are common, universal, and products of semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic analysis, regardless of the realization of a function in the surface structure of a particular language. In fact, we agree with Politzer (1991) that connectors in one language will operate in all languages because they stem from general principles of human communication. However, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis could not be categorically refuted in the field of conditional reasoning. Indeed, although it has not been confirmed in most research ( Brown et al., 1980 ; Au, 1983 ; Zepp, 1983 ; Zepp et al., 1987 ; Politzer, 1991 ; Cara and Politzer, 1993 ), Yeh and Gentner (2005) partly validated its weak version. More generally, some experimental studies on color perception, spatial cognition, and spatial representation of events in time support the weak version of linguistic relativity theory (for recent reviews, see Pederson, 2007 ; Everett, 2013 ). Furthermore, concerning the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, one of the difficulties is to isolate the effects of language from the impact of culture. Indeed, the role of culture in thinking is undeniable ( Nisbett et al., 2001 ; Hiroshi et al., 2007 ; Hiroshi, 2016 ; Nakamura et al., 2018 ).

As claimed by our second hypothesis, there should be a better performance in the sufficient conditional than in the necessary conditional for both the Chinese and the French. We consider that despite isomorphism of the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional, the two conditionals might involve different processes, resulting in differences in reasoning performance in favor of the sufficient conditional. In fact, on the logical aspect, the necessary conditional “Only if A, C” is equivalent to the sufficient conditional “If not-A, then not-C”, thus, the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional could be considered as isomorphic. Nevertheless, our results show an important difference in favor of the sufficient conditional compared to the necessary conditional. Precisely, in the PMP and the PIF inference schemas, the Chinese and the French participants are coherent in the sufficient conditional, which is not the case of the necessary conditional. In the PAC inference schema, the number of situations where participants are coherent is quite close in the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional. This result confirms our hypothesis in the PMP and the PIF inference schemas that predicted better performance in favor of the sufficient condition.

We first examined PMP and PAC inference schemas in the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional. The probability of the sufficient conditional P (If A, then C) is P (C|A), but the probability of the necessary conditional P (Only if A, C) is not P (C|A). When the probability of the necessary conditional P (Only if A, C) is 100%, the inference is clear; participants can infer directly without going through the sufficient conditional. But when the probability of the necessary conditional P (Only if A, C) is not 100%, the participants very likely need to transform the necessary conditional into the sufficient conditional. Indeed, a necessary condition does not guarantee any event, and it does not lead to another result in general. If, in addition, we apply a probability to this conditional, it is very difficult to make PMP, PAC, or PIF inferences. For example, the probability of the necessary conditional “Only if A, C” is low, the probability of A is 0%, the participants must choose the probability of C: below low, just low, or above low. According to these elements, we think it is very likely that the participants would transform a priori the necessary conditional into a sufficient conditional before the reasoning process. The exceptional case is where the probability of the necessary conditional “Only if A, C” is 100%. In this condition, if the probability of A is 0%, one can infer that the probability of C is 0%; if the probability of C is 100%, one can deduce that the probability of A is 100%; one can also make other PMP and PAC inferences from the verbal probabilities of the second premise.

Normally, the interpretation of the necessary conditional “Only if A, C” is the sufficient conditional “If not-A, then not-C,” but it is not known if this is the actual interpretation of the participants. Indeed, the mental load to transform the necessary conditional “Only if A, C” to the sufficient conditional “If not-A, then not-C” is rather high because of the presence of negation in the sufficient conditional. The polarity effect (affirmative or negative), as the directionality effect, has been demonstrated in studies of conditional reasoning. For example, research by Grosset and Barrouillet (2003) showed that affirmative inferences took less time to endorse than denial inferences. Evans et al. (2015) found that coherent rates are better for affirmative inferences than negative inferences. The mental load is heavier with one negation; it might be even more with double negation. It is unlikely that the participants will do such a costly transformation. Instead, the most likely transformation of the necessary conditional “Only if A, C” would be the sufficient conditional “If C, then A.” In addition, some participants spontaneously told us that they made this interpretation. We analyzed the coherence of the participants with the transformation of “Only if A, C” to “If C, then A.” We noted the number of coherent and not coherent responses in each situation in the necessary conditional and indicated the cases where the rate of coherence is above chance (see Data Availability Statement). The result shows a better performance for the French participants and slightly better for the Chinese participants than the transformation of “Only if A, C” to “If not-A, then not-C.” The number of cases where the rate of coherence is above the chance of the total number of informative cases goes from 13/36 to 21/33 for the French participants and from 11/36 to 15/33 for the Chinese participants. With the transformation of “Only if A, C” to “If C, then A,” PMP in the necessary conditional P (Only if A, C), P (A) = > P (C) presents two additional difficulties compared to PMP in the sufficient conditional: the transformation of the necessary conditional into the sufficient conditional, and the directionality in the transformed PMP: P (If C, then A), P (A) = > P (C). This is what makes this inference schema particularly difficult. In PAC, in the sufficient conditional P (If A, then C), P (C) = > P (A), there is the difficulty of directionality in comparison with PMP in the sufficient conditional. On the other side, in PAC, in the necessary conditional P (Only if A, C), P (C) = > P (A) transformed into P (If C, then A), P (C) = > P (A), there is the difficulty of the transformation compared to PMP in the sufficient conditional. So, according to this analysis, among the 4 cases of PMP and PAC in both conditionals, the PMP in the sufficient conditional is the easiest; the PMP in the necessary conditional is the most difficult. The result provided in Table 3 confirms this. Indeed, the number of cases with coherence above chance in PMP in the sufficient conditional is very high: 10/10 for the French, and 9/10 for the Chinese; whereas the number of cases of coherence above chance in PMP in the necessary conditional is meager: 3/10 for the French, and 2/10 for the Chinese. The number of cases with coherence above chance in PAC is moderately low, in the sufficient conditional: 6/13 for the French, 5/13 for the Chinese; in the necessary conditional: 8/14 for the French, and 4/14 for the Chinese.

We then studied the PIF inference schema in the two conditionals. The number of cases with coherence above chance in PIF in the sufficient conditional is very high: 12/12 for the French and Chinese, whereas it is much lower in the necessary conditional: 2/12 for the French and 5/12 for the Chinese. On one side, the fact that PIF works in the sufficient conditional but not in the necessary conditional indicates that the different conditional connectors play an important role in this inference, therefore the predominant role of semantics, which supports the position of the inferential conditional. On the other side, the good performance of the participants in PIF in the sufficient conditional confirms the position of the probability conditional, showing the important effect of the general pragmatic. Nevertheless, one might ask why the participants can perform PIF in the sufficient conditional but not in the necessary conditional. In fact, PIF having no semantic connection, it can work in the sufficient conditional, which is simple, direct, and much closer to conjunction than the necessary conditional. Moreover, in the sufficient conditional, it is easy to obtain P (C|A) = P (C), which explains excellent performance from the participants. In contrast, the necessary conditional is more complex and very likely needs to be transformed beforehand into the sufficient conditional. As argued previously, the most likely transformation of the necessary conditional “Only if A, C” would be “If C, then A.” Thus, P (Only if A, C) would be transformed to P (if C, then A), so into P (A|C). In addition, there is also the question of order. With the probabilities being given in the order P (A) and P (C), it is more natural to consider the first statement as an antecedent, the second as a consequent. Then, it is easier to go to P (C|A) than to P (A|C), making PIF in the necessary conditional more difficult than in the sufficient conditional. In short, from P (A), P (C), without semantic connection between them, the participants with their experiences, intuitions, and general pragmatic can go to the probability of the sufficient conditional, but hardly go to the probability of the necessary conditional. Indeed, the path of the PIF in the sufficient conditional is P (A), P (C) = > P (C|A). Compared to this path, in the necessary conditional, to make the inference P (A), P (C) = > P (Only if A, C), two additional steps would be required: change of order between P (A) and P (C), and transformation of P (Only if A, C) to P (If C, then A), which allows reaching P (C), P (A) = > P (A|C). This comparison of PIF between the two conditionals helps us understand the difficulty of PIF in the necessary conditional.

Therefore, from the analysis of three inference schemas in the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional, we can say that the two conditionals can be considered isomorphic. Still, their information processing is different: very likely, further transformation steps, the problem of directionality, and the problem of order have made inferences schemas PMP and PIF more difficult in the necessary conditional.

Finally, we addressed the limits of our work. 4 To avoid random responses, we decided not to combine two uncertain premises, while keeping a large spectrum of the level of uncertainty in the remaining premise. It is essential to combine two uncertain premises in the design of the experiment. Indeed, it might be interesting to include this situation to study the coherent rates in all situations. In this study, we chose to represent “objective” certainty ( De Finetti, 1980 ) by numerical values 0% and 100%. To represent uncertainty, we used verbal labels. This choice allowed us to take into consideration the first epistemic level described by De Finetti with the idea that, in the first instance, the intuition of the probability of occurrence of an event is qualitative and can be positioned on an ordinal scale but also likely to be compared with another event ( Baratgin and Politzer, 2016 ). The second level corresponds to quantitative evaluation ( De Finetti, 1964 ). This choice, however, can be discussed. We assumed that degrees of qualitative belief are naturally verbalizable in language by many expressions and that these expressions are a natural and appropriate format for communicating probability. We take the fact that they are imprecise as a reflection of how they can be mentally represented. However, using a mix of numerical (for certainty) and verbal (for uncertainty) scales can pose some challenges ( Jenkins et al., 2018 ). Several studies have shown differences in the interpretation of verbal probabilities when reported in quantitative values. For example, people tend to interpret certain verbal statements in an extreme way ( Teigen et al., 2013 ) or to interpret expressions referring to a serious event as indicating a higher probability than those referring to a more neutral event ( Harris and Corner, 2011 ). These variations even appear to be greater with Chinese than Western participants ( Harris et al., 2013 ). However, in this study, the participants were asked to respond without converting their probability judgment numerically. This suggests that the participants remained at the verbal level, without moving to the meta (quantitative) level. The correspondence of the quantitative values 0% and 100% with “certainly false” and “certainly true” should be quite immediate and should not lead to any problems. Nevertheless, there is another way to represent the imprecision of qualitative degrees of belief using probability intervals (as opposed to point premise probabilities). Indeed, there are extensions of coherence formulas to interval premise probabilities (for a review, see Kleiter, 2018 ). It would, therefore, be interesting to replicate our experiment using this probability interval format to represent the uncertainty of the premises. In addition, we decided to study the coherent rate globally in this paper. Individual differences were not investigated as the participants did not have to deal with the same questions. It would be relevant to study such differences in our future project.

In summary, the framework of the new paradigm, more precisely the Finettian approach, allowed us to take into account uncertainty in human reasoning. Also, the use of qualitative probability allowed us to be closer to reality than numerical probability in the research of conditional reasoning. We found that, in some situations, the coherence rate is very low, it is possible that relative probability judgments are more difficult to process than absolute judgment. Although we are convinced of the validity of our method, it would be interesting to propose a numerical probability in a future study for comparison. The new paradigm model is interesting but could not explain the incoherent responses of the participants that are numerous and not negligible. So, we suggest that the different pragmatic aspects in information processing should be better taken into consideration to describe and evaluate human rationality. In addition, through this study on the comparison between the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional, we think that apart from the models of the new paradigm, other forms of logic should also be studied not to neglect the semantic aspect.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets analyzed for this study can be found in the Open Science Framework repository at the following address: https://osf.io/zawyj/ .

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by M. Maudinet Marc, Docteur en anthropologie, Ancien Directeur pédagogique du Master Gestion et Politiques du Handicap Sciences Po de Paris, Consultant indépendant expert auprès du Conseil de L’Europe, Président du Conseil Scientifique de la FISAF. M. Gutnik Fabrice, Enseignant-chercheur associé, Chercheur associé CURAPP, Université Jules Verne Amiens. Consultant en ressources humaines. Mme Aitao Tang, Ingénieur en informatique, diplômée de l’université de Paris VI, SOPRA STERIA. M. Daniel Morfouace, Professeur de philosophie, université Lille. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

JS and JB contributed to conceptual elaboration, design of the study, and draft of the manuscript. JS and DT contributed to data collection. JS contributed to data analysis. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Financial support for this work was provided by a grant from the ANR Chorus 2011 (BTAFDOC project). We thank the P-A-R-I-S Association and CHArt laboratory, which participated in financing the article’s publication in open access.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Guy Politzer for his valuable advice on the design of the experiment and helpful comments on the previous draft of the manuscript. We would like to thank Jean-Louis Stilgenbauer for his help in statistical analysis.

• ^ Thus, the variant schema of PIF called “centering” or the “conjunctive sufficiency” schema: “A and C, therefore if A then C” will be not studied (for studies of this schema, see, for example, Cruz et al., 2015 , 2016 ; Politzer and Baratgin, 2016 ; Vidal and Baratgin, 2017 ; Skovgaard-Olsen et al., 2019 ).
• ^ There are stereotypes about gender and first names ( Coulmont and Simon, 2019 ). For example, a stereotype might be that housework is more women’s business. Thus, participants might make the shortcut during their reasoning: men are in the living room, while women are in the kitchen. To avoid this, we indicate that “Sophie is in the living room; Mary is in the kitchen.” We took the same precautions for the first names. Some studies show that the choice of the first name can be an indicator of social origin ( Charonnat, 2017 ).
• ^ There is no difference between straight and dashed confidence intervals in the figures. The two types of lines have been used alternately to facilitate reading.
• ^ We thank the reviewer NC for pointing out these important points and also on the idea of using probability intervals for the premises.

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Keywords : Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, universalist hypothesis, cross-cultural comparison, sufficient conditional, necessary conditional, deduction under uncertainty, de Finetti’s coherence

Citation: Shao J, Tikiri Banda D and Baratgin J (2022) A Study on the Sufficient Conditional and the Necessary Conditional With Chinese and French Participants. Front. Psychol. 13:787588. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.787588

Received: 30 September 2021; Accepted: 10 January 2022; Published: 24 February 2022.

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Copyright © 2022 Shao, Tikiri Banda and Baratgin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Jing Shao, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Chinese and English counterfactuals: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis revisited

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• DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(83)90038-0

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