Discussions of linguistic relativity revolve around the specific parts of a speaker's worldview that their language affects or determines, and the functional mechanism for this. James Underhill's aim in Humboldt, worldview and language is to clarify the central term worldview. Chs. 1 through 3 show how unclear terminology creates inconsistent theories and unproductive debates. Chs. 4 through 6 offer a short discussion of the positions of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Whorf, and Chs. 10 through 12 and 14 sketch a Humboldtian linguistic research program. The clearer terminology introduced in Ch. 15, the short chapters, and references to other recent work on Humboldt make the book a good starting point for discussion, and thus a potentially valuable teaching resource.
Underhill's contribution to the debate comes in Ch. 15, the longest of the book's sixteen chapters. First, he restates what he has shown in Chs. 1 through 3: different meanings for the terms world, language, and thought can give rise to very different ideas of linguistic relativity. Then, Underhill offers his own five-layer terminology to replace worldview: world-perceiving, world-conceiving, cultural mindset, personal mindset, and perspective. The first two are introduced in Ch. 13: world-perceiving comprises the systems and rules of perception, world-conceiving those of representation and categorization. These are shared by all members of a language community. They form what Humboldt called Weltansicht, the aspects of cognition that can be influenced by language. Chs. 3 and 7 explain Humboldt's distinction between this Weltansicht and Weltanschauung, an individual's or group's ideology or concept of the world. Weltanschauung encompasses the remaining three of Underhill's terms: cultural mindset refers to the stable political and social positions shared by a group. An individual's personal mindset is their idiosyncratic version of their group's cultural mindset. Finally, perspective encompasses the individual's way of perceiving, categorizing, and social positioning, as well as their personal opinions and beliefs, all of which are fluid (a point made in Chs. 8 and 9).
These five layers thus encompass everything from a language community's shared aspects of cognition to an individual's opinions. Underhill crucially sees them as hierarchical and illustrates this with five concentric circles (134): an individual's perspective includes their entire personal mindset, which in turn includes the cultural mindset of their group. This cultural mindset is founded on how the community categorizes their experiences, which in turn includes the way these experiences are perceived in the first place.
The book would benefit from spelling out the obvious connections between these terms and other seminal work, like Lev Vygotsky's idea of thought as internalized speech, Jerry Fodor's language of thought hypothesis, or the use of cardinal rather than egocentric directions in Guugu Yimithirr or Kuuk Thaayorre. In the classroom, these can easily be given as supplementary reading. Humboldt, worldview and language provides an introduction to the discussion of linguistic relativity. Underhill is right to highlight the importance of distinguishing between worldview-meaning-Weltansicht and worldview-meaning-Weltanschauung throughout the book, and his five-layer terminology makes yet further important distinctions within these two terms.
