What is Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a concept in personal epistemology: The words you habitually use reveal and reinforce the schemas you operate from.

Example: A company calls its employees 'resources.' That single word encodes a schema: people are fungible inputs to a production function, allocated and deallocated like memory in a program. Now the same company calls them 'team members.' Different word, different schema: people are collaborators with agency, belonging to a shared mission. Neither label is neutral. Each one installs a way of seeing that shapes every policy, meeting, and performance review that follows.

This concept is part of Phase 11 (Schema Foundations) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema foundations.