With regard to the books, while I haven't read The Selfish Gene, I have read GEB, and while it's a superb introduction to the philosophy and formal logic, that's not really what I mean about modes of thought.
Example: Scottish Gaelic has two words for red. dearg is the kind of red you get in paint or dye. ruadh is the kind of red you get in hair or deer. They're not considered anything like similar in Gaelic, even though they're usually translated into English as the same word. So, if you think about colours in Gaelic you're going to reason about them in a very different way than if you are in English.
To expand on my reasoning with Finnish is: in English, we have two (well, five, but only two are of interest here) pronouns, which are gendered: he and she. This means that it's much easier to talk about two people in a single sentence if they're of different sexes. "He opened the door using her key." If the person who owns the key is also male, we can't use this construction unambiguously, so we need to rephrase.
Finnish only has a single pronoun, hän. So Finnish can't use the construction above. In order to say that, they'll always have to explicitly choose some other means to disambiguate the people. "The locksmith opened the door using the customer's key." "The large person opened the door using the small person's key."
Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish.
The same reasoning applies to any place where a symbol or construct in one sentence doesn't map 1:1 onto the same symbol or construct in another, which is all of them. Learning and internalising a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit.
Ahh, I see the source of the confusion. Finnish is a Nordic language, but not a Scandinavian language.
If someone wants to appreciate differences in color perception, is it better to learn Scottish Gaelic or read Berlin and Kay's "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" or similar works since 1969? See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_i... for the differences in blue and green across many different languages.
This is why I argue that if the goal is to "think and reason differently" then learning a new language should not be high on the list. Instead, learning a new language has a side effect of thinking and reasoning differently, but so do many other topics. I believe there are easier ways achieve that goal than learning a new language.
Your 'key' example is resolved in Swedish with a special term for his/her own X. Compare "Han öppnade dörren med sin nyckel" (He opened the door with his own key) with "Han öppnade dörren med hans nyckel" (He opened the door with some other male's key.)
GEB is also all about recursion. I remember in my own learning how tough it was to understand recursion and induction. I consider that a mode of thought.
There's also the essay in GEB about the difficulties of language translation, such as the street name in Crime and Punishment. He goes into several pages about the different aspects of that translation. I consider that an aspect of the same mode of thought you are talking about. Further, in "Metamagical Themas" he covers aspects of gender neutrality in Chinese. Reading his essays seems much easier than learning Finnish.
I'm not arguing against your conclusion, which is that "Learning _and internalising_ a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit" but against the implication that learning a new way to think is one of the reasons to learn a new language. I think that's poor advice given other methods to learn new ways of thinking.
Further, languages are not equal. The Swedish mode of thought is very similar to English, so you might end up after a couple of years of study with only a few small insights that could have been more easily learned by reading a linguistics textbook.
>Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish. //
I don't think your conclusion follows. We elicit a sentence that externally shortcuts the designation of who does what by using pronouns where it seems still clear. But that doesn't mean we reason any differently internally about the subjects and objects. With a sentence like:
"The mother gave the sommelier a wave."
Being spoken as:
"She gave him a wave."
It seems quite reasonable to imagine that we perceive in our mind's eye the subject and object in the same way but extract the pertinent information as appropriate. A simpler sentence could be the result of a more complex process.
But then we come across this sort of issue within English too because we come across ambiguous situations "they gave me the other's key". Or perhaps ...
A: "She gave me her key"
B: "Who?"
A: "The girl gave me her key."
B: "Why did the girl have a key?"
A: "No I mean the girl gave me the mother's key."
The reasoning about the people was clearly about a girl and a mother in the first sentence but the expression of that reason wasn't elicited until the final one - I don't think the mental model has changed anywhere is such an exchange. Thus I don't see why there needs be a different internal model being used in your [david-given's] example.
In your red example if someone tells me "he has red hair" red refers to a different thing to "his door is red" - red _hair_ is what we call ginger hair usually. It's not that Gael's think of red differently IMO it's just a limitation of English expression. The expression doesn't reflect the internal model well.
With regard to the books, while I haven't read The Selfish Gene, I have read GEB, and while it's a superb introduction to the philosophy and formal logic, that's not really what I mean about modes of thought.
Example: Scottish Gaelic has two words for red. dearg is the kind of red you get in paint or dye. ruadh is the kind of red you get in hair or deer. They're not considered anything like similar in Gaelic, even though they're usually translated into English as the same word. So, if you think about colours in Gaelic you're going to reason about them in a very different way than if you are in English.
To expand on my reasoning with Finnish is: in English, we have two (well, five, but only two are of interest here) pronouns, which are gendered: he and she. This means that it's much easier to talk about two people in a single sentence if they're of different sexes. "He opened the door using her key." If the person who owns the key is also male, we can't use this construction unambiguously, so we need to rephrase.
Finnish only has a single pronoun, hän. So Finnish can't use the construction above. In order to say that, they'll always have to explicitly choose some other means to disambiguate the people. "The locksmith opened the door using the customer's key." "The large person opened the door using the small person's key."
Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish.
The same reasoning applies to any place where a symbol or construct in one sentence doesn't map 1:1 onto the same symbol or construct in another, which is all of them. Learning and internalising a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit.