The previous chapter sought to set the record straight on what I take to be misrepresentations of linguistic relativity over several decades from the 1950s. In this chapter we look at some ways in which key elements of the Boasian project survived and eventually grew again. The chapter has three parts: we look first at some other schools of thought that sought to account for sociocultural and linguistic diversity without falling into either universalist or essentialist patterns; we then look at ways in which the Boasian heritage came to be preserved through the height of cognitive hegemony; and finally we examine how this heritage has been revived dramatically, notably within cognitive science itself, especially since the late 1990s.

Once in a while during the period just considered, someone from outside would look at the controversy and wonder about the heaps of condemnation of linguistic relativity and particularly of Whorf. A case in point is the literary theorist George Steiner, who in 1975 called Whorf's work “the crowning statement” of the Leibniz–Humboldt “monadist” case, a theory