Does Language Shape What We Think?

Joshua Hartshorne:

My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: “We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have.” This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds — called “Whorfianism” after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf — is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable.
Eskimos, as is commonly reported, have myriads of words for snow, affecting how they perceive frozen percipitation. A popular book on English notes that, unlike English, “French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition … and knowledge that results from understanding.” Politicians try to win the rhetorical battle (“pro-life” vs. “anti-abortion”; “estate tax” vs. “death tax”) in order to gain the political advantage.