Language and Perception: “The Egg and the Sperm”
March 12, 2009 by ithinkthereforeib
We will be discussing the article “The Egg and the Sperm” tomorrow, but here are a few pre-class reflection questions:
1) What are the stereotypical male/female traits? Identify and write them down.
2) Do the textbooks examined in the study reflect any of these stereotypical traits?
3) Does your biology textbook (whether from IB Biology or from lower grades) reflect any of these stereotypical traits?
4) What does this parallel suggest about language? What does it suggest about Biology, and, possibly, the other Natural Sciences?
5) In what ways does this reflection of stereotypes have implications (according to the article)?
6) How do the arguments presented in the article support the idea that ‘language shapes our perception’? What kind of implications might this have?
7) In what ways is this kind of discussion significant (regardless of how you personally feel about it)?
How does this discussion fit into the realm of “politically correct language”?
9) What do you personally think about all this? What might your opinion be influenced by?
You may want to read about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in relation to this article.
Some other, related articles:
Language as Context
Scientists show that language shapes perception
Bonus reflection question: How do you feel about this latter article (on colour perception)? Do you feel the same way about this article as on the “Egg and Sperm” one? Why or why not?
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Lizzy, I know the article is useful because you can see how science is “subjective”. However, I have to argue that it is just WAAAAYYY too old. Everything, at least from what we have seen in TOK, has a subjective “root”. Yet, I think science (at leas the way I have been exposed to it) has lost most of that root. I also thought that the article made a COUPLE of reasonable points, but at times it seemed too far fetched. While reading some of the examples I could not stop rolling my eyes… seriously.
Yes, the article is old, but that doesn’t mean it is invalid. Is bias (gender or otherwise) in language no longer an issue now? Have does stereotypes (linguistically and practically) been eradicated?
One way to determine this is to pull out your biology textbooks (IB or pre-IB) and start analysing the language used there.
We’ll discuss this in class (-:
By the way – although in some subject areas knowledge changes constantly and rapidly, it others it doesn’t. Discourse analysis is a huge field in linguistics and hasn’t yet reached to the point where there is nothing more current to analyse…
(Discourse = any spoken or written text/communication. Discourse analysis investigates such texts. I already took most of my translation studies materials home, but I did hold on to one book that I’ll bring for you to see.)