Comment by dragonwriter
7 years ago
> Asimov's dismissal of 'newspeak' as mostly just abbreviation completely overlooks the power of propaganda and fake news, or the Whorfian concept that underlies it.
But the strong Sapir-Whorf position of linguistic determinism in which the concept of newspeak is firmly grounded has generally been rejected and was never well supported; propaganda more generally is a different issue than newspeak specifically.
It's also entirely possible that even if Asimov had been introduced to the hypothesis at the time that he may have sided with Sapir and Whorf themselves who felt the Strong position was untenable for more than a thought experiment (ie, that it was a proper Null Hypothesis designed to be disproven, to prove more useful things such as some of the corollaries to the Weak version of the Hypothesis). Asimov would have probably loved that about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, given the implication that he and (John W.) Campbell built the Three Laws as a Null Hypothesis to disprove. [1] Makes you wonder if Campbell had taken a fancy to Sapir-Whorf as much as he did Psionics or Robotics what sorts of sci-fi might have mined that concept; an Asimov Sapir-Whorf novel might have been fascinating.
[1] I personally am on the side that the novels do manage to disprove the Three Laws several times, particularly in that the Zeroth Law is a huge consequent failure in the Laws (resulting directly in the failure of the Empire and a lot of the weirdness of the Foundation era), but it's a fascinating debate on both sides, and an interesting question of which side Asimov himself was on at various points in his career.
Agreed, and I don't regard the strong version as correct, either. What I mean here is that Orwell's concept of newspeak is Whorfian in nature, going beyond propaganda, and Asimov does not seem to appreciate either aspect of newspeak.