After service with the United States Army Air Forces (1942–1946), he remained in Europe to earn his first university degree, a licence in political science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in 1948.

He then accepted a position as a junior research anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did fieldwork in 1951 on the Luiseño language, collaborating with Alfred L. Kroeber on The Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño (University of California Press, 1960).

The Reality-Construction-view on the other hand says that each language embodies a different conceptual construction of reality, which is a stronger claim than the Mapping-view's.

[5] His unconventional terminology has been suggested as one reason why his theoretical work has received comparatively little attention in the scientific community.

[8] His theory is substantially influenced by the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on linguistic relativity, Etienne Bonnet de Condillac and Wilhelm von Humboldt.