The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis explored in the award winning 1966 novel Babel-17 states that human thought is strongly influenced by what?
Babel-17 Babel-17 Babel-17 is a 1966 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany in which the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (that language influences thought and perception) plays an important part. It was joint winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1967 (with "Flowers for Algernon") and was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1967. Delany hoped to have "Babel-17" originally published as a single volume with the novella "Empire Star", but this did not happen until a 2001 reprint. During an interstellar war one side develops a language, "Babel-17", that can be used as a
Benjamin Lee Whorf have seen similarities between Whorf's work and the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who read Whorf and whose approach to textual meaning was similarly holistic and relativistic. Whorf's ideas have also been interpreted as a radical critique of positivist science. Whorf is best known as the main proponent of what he called the principle of linguistic relativity, but which is often known as "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", named for him and Edward Sapir. Whorf never stated the principle in the form of a hypothesis, and the idea that linguistic categories influence perception and cognition was shared by many other scholars