Kudryavtseva N. Linguistic Relativity of Philosophical Terms and Their Equivalents in Translation

The thesis is devoted to the study of language and thought interrelation viewed in the aspect of linguistic relativity approach. The idea of the influence of language on thought, also known as Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, came to light in the first half of the twentieth century and experienced a revival within the modern cognitive paradigm, after almost four decades of neglect under generative linguistics. Now, as a large-scale and multifaceted project, linguistic relativity has received theoretical as well as empirical proof from the fields of linguistics, anthropology, psychology and neuroscience, and has been widely researched in the intra- and cross-linguistic dimensions. This study is focused on the relation of philosophical worldview to language, i.e. on the question of there being a metaphysical point of view embodied in a particular semantic system. Posed in philosophical works by E. Cassirer, L. Weisgerber, B. Russell and L. Wittgenstein, this question was also studied by B. Whorf who stated that even such fundamental notions as space and time can be perceived differently by speakers of different languages, and that these linguistically mediated perceptions make up the background for the most basic abstract ideas and views characterizing Western philosophy and science. B. Whorf also suggested that, since worldviews sometimes turn out to be so radically distinct, the language-specific concepts he imputed as being present in the speakers’ minds are lost in translation. On B. Whorf’s view, then, a translation being thus different from its original, would no longer be a translation, but a “transfiguration”.