Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right

Abstract

The Whorf hypothesis holds that we view the world filtered through the semantic categories of our native language. Over the years, consensus has oscillated between embrace and dismissal of this hypothesis. Here, we review recent findings on the naming and perception of color, and argue that in this semantic domain the Whorf hypothesis is half right, in two different ways: (1) language influences color perception primarily in half the visual field, and (2) color naming across languages is shaped by both universal and language-specific forces. To the extent that these findings generalize to other semantic domains they suggest a possible resolution of the debate over the Whorf hypothesis.