language, not belief

I have wanted, in the foregoing discussion, to distinguish between the beliefs people hold and the language in which those beliefs are expressed and which makes them possible. And I have tried to undermine the seductive idea that the grammar of our language is itself the expression of a set of beliefs or theories about how the world is, which might principle be justified or refuted by an examination of how the world actually is. This temptation is hard enough to resist in the case of our own language; so much the harder when we are dealing with a language the forms of which are alien, and even perhaps repugnant, to us.

• Winch, P., 1987, "Language, belief and relativism," Trying to Make Sense, Basil Blackwell, 206-7.