I have quite a few problems with this hypothesis. It isn’t that the hypothesis is flawed – quite the contrary, actually: this hypothesis is so obvious that it really doesn’t deserve to be named after two people who, incidentally, were not the first to discover or write about it. Another problem I have is that it’s needlessly specific. It can be summarized in three words as “language influences thought”, when a much more general hypothesis (the one I arrived at as a child and later incorporated into my psychological postulates) is “expression influences thought”. Finally, the hypothesis is needlessly unidirectional: to argue that expression is not a product of thought, formal system that it is, is ludicrous. Therefore, an even stronger statement is “expression and thought influence each other”.

I needed to be born 50 years ago, when the obvious things weren’t all discovered yet. But then, perhaps I would have died in childbirth had that happened.