"It needs but half an eye to see in these latter days that science, the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture, has reached, without having intended to, a frontier. Either it must bury its dead, close its ranks, and go forward into a landscape of increasing strangeness, replete with things shocking to a culture-trammeled understanding, or it must become, in Claude Houghton's expressive phrase, the plagiarist of its own past. The frontier was foreseen in principle very long ago, and given a name that has descended to our day clouded with myth. That name is Babel. For science's long and heroic effort to be strictly factual has at last brought it into entanglement with the unsuspected facts of the linguistic order. These facts the older classical science had never admitted, confronted, or understood as facts. Instead they had entered its house by the back door and had been taken for the substance of Reason itself."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesLinguists from the United StatesAnthropologists from the United StatesLogicians from the United StatesPeople from Boston
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 264.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Benjamin Lee Whorf
Benjamin Lee Whorf (April 24, 1897 β July 26, 1941) was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer. Whorf is widely known as an advocate for the idea that because of linguistic differences in grammar and usage, speakers of different languages conceptualize and experience the world differently.
10 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Benjamin Lee Whorf β
Related Quotes
"The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, inβ¦"
"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the worβ¦"
"Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages. The verb tunatya contains in its idea β¦"
"We are thus able to distinguish thinking as the function which is to a large extent linguistic."
"Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality and, without correctives, holds resolutβ¦"
"Speech is the best show a man puts on."
"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language."
"Thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. Tβ¦"
"Whorf became increasingly concerned about the supposed conflict between science and religion... He wrote a 130,000-woβ¦"
"Scientific education is catholic; it embraces the whole field of human learning. No student can master all knowledge β¦"