Whorf and His Aftermath Revisited
Whorf and His Aftermath Revisited

Summary/Abstract: Vlhorf claims that any thought process takes place within the boundaries of a language, that each language fleshes out a worldview and that the world views structured by languages or, at least, the language families 'differ greatly. Whorf shrouds his view on world views in a metaphysical mystery which makes up the gist of his epistemic paradigm of cultural relativism. The paper sets out to discuss some of the tenets and conclusions of Whorfs views, unveiling their traces into the contemporary linguistics and philosophy and expounds Whorf's staunch relativistic creed, reviews the arguments against his position and appraises the arguments for a soft version relativistic version of the theory. We call aftermath the array of positions taken up by those who prove and disprove linguistic relativism alike. The author of the paper sets forth his own soft version of linguistic relativism called perspectivism, which permeates the entire linguistic field and is tightly linked up with cognition and cognitive paradigm approaches.

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