Editing Linguistic relativity (section)

=== Brown and Lenneberg ===
In 1953, [[Eric Lenneberg]] criticized Whorf's examples from an [[Objectivity and subjectivity|objectivist]] philosophy of language, claiming that languages are principally meant to represent events in the real world, and that even though languages express these ideas in various ways, the meanings of such expressions and therefore the thoughts of the speaker are equivalent. He argued that Whorf's English descriptions of a Hopi speaker's idea of time were in fact translations of the Hopi concept into English, therefore disproving linguistic relativity. However Whorf was concerned with how the habitual ''use'' of language influences habitual behavior, rather than translatability. Whorf's point was that while English speakers may be able to ''understand'' how a Hopi speaker thinks, they do not ''think'' in that way.{{sfn|Lakoff|1987|p=}}

Lenneberg's main criticism of Whorf's works was that he never showed the necessary association between a linguistic phenomenon and a mental phenomenon. With Brown, Lenneberg proposed that proving such an association required directly matching linguistic phenomena with behavior. They assessed linguistic relativity experimentally and published their findings in 1954. Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated a formal hypothesis, Brown and Lenneberg formulated their own. Their two tenets were (i) "the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic communities" and (ii) "language causes a particular cognitive structure".{{sfn|Brown|Lenneberg|1954|p=455,457}} Brown later developed them into the so-called "weak" and "strong" formulation:

<blockquote>
* Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the language.
* The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview he will acquire as he learns the language.{{sfn|Brown|1976|p=128}}
</blockquote>

Brown's formulations became known widely and were retrospectively attributed to Whorf and Sapir although the second formulation, verging on linguistic determinism, was never advanced by either of them.