In the period from roughly 1940 to 1965, linguistics and anthropology in North America and much of the world were dominated by Whorfian radical linguistic relativity. The challenge from Chomskian innateness was on the horizon, but not yet the dominant force it was to become. The main tenets of the linguistic relativity doctrine were, and in many quarters remain, that (1) the categories that each language imposes on the world are the categories in which its speakers are constrained to experience the world and (2) the linguistic – hence cognitive and perceptual – categories of each language are arbitrary, conventional stipulations. In what is probably his most frequently cited passage, Whorf wrote:

In this and many other passages, Whorf appeared to endorse both tenets: (1) linguistic categories structure experience and (2) linguistic categories are arbitrary social conventions – although in other places he more or less explicitly disavowed (2).