It is inescapable that relativism in all its forms is enjoying a resurgence in popularity and some respectability in the areas of Cognitive Psychology and Linguistics. My experience of teaching students over twenty years suggests it always remained popular, but that for a time it was possible to innoculate against it with a couple of first year Intro to Linguistics lectures. Now that it has returned in more highly evolved and multi-resistant strains, the serious challenge for Universalists is to try to combat it, or at least to contain it within areas where it might do some good (see below).

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And yet, there is something to Linguistic Relativism. At least, there appears to be something to the idea that the structure of the language we speak predisposes us to construe events and situations in particular ways (certainly, when we need to talk about these events). This is, of course, the central idea of the "Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis" proposed by Dan Slobin, whose hypothesis that provides a nice general explanation for some experimental results that have emerged from experiments I carried out with Yayoi Tajima (Keio University). In co-authored work arising out of Tajima's 2008 MA thesis, we revisited some influential papers on cultural relativism by Richard Nisbett and his colleagues (Masuda & Nisbett 2001, Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan 2001), which purports to show that Asians and Westerners 'think' differently in virtue of deep-seated cultural differences.

 

Our research compared Chinese, Japanese and English participants in a series of visual recall tasks: the results show that Chinese and English participants' data pattern together, and in opposition to those of Japanese participants. We attribute this split in the 'Asian' response to grammatical, rather than cultural, factors: Our results thus challenge the idea of any straightforward dichotomy in perception between Asians and Westerners, and highlight the role played by grammatical/information structure in "Thinking for Speaking Slobin 2003)." Preliminary results of this research were presented at the Conference on the Mind-Context Divide (University of Iowa, April 2009); a version of the paper appears in the Proceedings. Subsequently, we carried out a follow-up to that experiment, which once again confirms the split in the Asian Response. The latter results are published in a Cognitive Linguistics article (available on request, directly or via Researchgate).