There is a curious anxiety that has haunted linguistics for nearly a century — a shapeless dread that if language does anything more than label pre-existing chunks of the world, then we are all somehow prisoners of our grammar. It is the fear that if linguistic construal matters, then linguistic determinism must be lurking in the shadows, ready to enslave the mind.
This fear has produced a remarkable amount of intellectual noise. Entire careers have been built on reassuring readers that grammar does not, under any circumstances, affect thought — that humans are universally equipped with a kind of Platonic cognitive Esperanto that remains blissfully unruffled by the semiotic turbulence of actual languages.
But when we examine this fear closely, something peculiar comes into view:
the panic about determinism is itself… deterministic.
The Fear as Theory
Let us be charitable and call it a theory.
The determinism-panic school begins with a simple premise: if linguistic construal patterns experience, then it must also control it. Patterning, they assume, cannot exist without tyranny.
It’s a bit like assuming that if a map has contours, it must be forcing you to walk only along the contour lines.
This conflation produces a defensive reflex so strong that entire arguments end up shaped by it. They look something like this:
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Language shapes experience.
→ “Oh god, that means language determines experience!”
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No, no, cannot allow that.
→ “Therefore: language does nothing but label.”
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But languages demonstrably cut experience differently.
→ “Yes, but those differences don’t actually mean anything! They’re just… harmless variations in surface form!”
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But grammars encode different construals of processes, agency, space, perspective…
→ “Stop! Thought is universal! Nothing is patterned! Patterning is dangerous!”
And just like that, we are back where we started — trapped in a universalist metaphysics that insists that cognition must be identical everywhere, lest difference itself become oppressive.
The fear has become the worldview.
Determinism by Negation
The irony, of course, is exquisite.
In order to prevent linguistic determinism, these arguments install a deeper, more rigid determinism: the belief that human cognition is universally the same, regardless of semiotic history, cultural practices, or the patterned possibilities of a particular language.
This is determinism wearing a cheerful mask.
The panic about language determining thought results in the conviction that nothing shapes anything. Construal, on this view, is merely decorative — an aesthetic flourish pasted onto an otherwise uniform cognitive substrate.
But once you see language as a system of potential, not a causal mechanism — once you adopt the relational stance where meaning is reality as construed — the entire fear collapses into incoherence.
Patterning ≠ constraint.
Construe ≠ coerce.
Possibility ≠ prescription.
Systems are not engines; they are landscapes of potential.
Instantiations are not consequences; they are perspectival cuts.
Determinism simply does not enter.
The Relational Escape Hatch
In a relational ontology, everything turns:
Languages differ because they take different cuts through the potential of experience. They differ because they pattern what counts as a figure, what counts as a field, what counts as unfolding, stative, bounded, unbounded, intrinsic, relational, perspectival.
These are not restrictions on thought.
They are invitations to different worlds.
To fear this is to fear that possibility itself is dangerous.
A Tragicomedy Resolved
And so the determinism panic reveals itself as a kind of intellectual slapstick: scholars running from a shadow of their own making, loudly defending universal cognition while tripping over the empirical facts of grammar.
The tragedy is that the fear has distracted the field for decades.
The comedy is that it was never necessary.
Because once we stop treating grammar as a cage and start treating it as a repertoire of potential — once we stop imagining cognition as a universal monolith and recognise it as distributed, historical, semiotically inflected practice — we can finally study languages as ontologies without dread.
And then the real work begins.
