Pinker in "The Language Instinct" persuasively (at least for me) argues that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least as far as human languages are concerned, is _false_.
He argues it well for fundamental things, but I think it falls short because he doesn't touch on abstract notions, like 'personal freedom', 'federalism', or 'separation of church and state'. There's a line that can be re-drawn between what is "language" and are "ideas", and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds depending on where you draw that line.
A lot of our thought is based on frameworks of metaphors, the vast majority of which are learned, not discovered on our own.
Pinker seems to be on the other end of the academic spectrum from the SWH. For those who don't know linguistics, Chomsky was the driving force in modern linguistics. Last week I stumbled across this video, the first 15 minutes or so of such are a pretty good, easy to grasp intro to his ideas on universal grammar and the language faculty:
