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linguistic and other cuhural expressions. This discovery spurred the investigation of
cognition, i.e. the tacit rules and premises governing human thought and behaviour, the
mechanism underlying worldview.
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Cognition involves a web of linguistic. cultural and mental phenomena. Every child
learns through the early stage of its socialization a set of cultural as well as linguistic
conventions which structure its perception, thinking and behaviour according to the
standards of its social group. This correspondence between linguistic and cognitive
patterning has established that a language is not only content but org,fnization, a device for
categorizing experience:
Every language is a vast pancrn-systcm different from others, in which are
culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality nOI
only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of
relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house
of his consciousness. I
Cultures arc analogous to verbal languages in their nature and functioning. A culture is
a meaningful syslem organized according to an implicit frame of reference that its members
have learned. Cuhures codify reality in specific ways.2 Every culture has, what Edward
Hall calls "a silent language" an idiosyncratic set of assumptions and conventions which
prescribes its handling of time, sp:lIial relationships, and attitudes in life. 3 So, even the
perception of space and time which underlies man's physical and mental universe is a
cultural elaboration. 4 This cognitive set of ideas is based on an underlying pattern of
agreed-on cultural definitions or "categories," which enables people 10 coordinate (heir
behaviour and make sense of their shared experience.
A society reproduces these codes, categories and cultural premises on all levels of
expression; hence, from its concrete forms--mental, verbal and material+-it is possible 10
read back to the collective mind which selected and shaped them. s As this cognitive
patterning shapes any human creation, any cultural expression gives a c4le to Ihe total view
of its culture:
10enj.lmin Lee Whorf, "Langu'lge, Mind, and Reality," Language, Thoughl. and l?ea/iIY. eu.
John B. Carroll (Cambridge: MIT, 1956) 252.
2Dorothy Lee, "Codification of RcalilY: Lincal and Nonlincal," Dundcs, Every 329-43.
3Edward Hall, The Silent Language (Ncw York: Douhlcu