We don't think in terms of language. Language is simply a translation layer for the underlying neurological phenomenon. It feels like we think in language because we tend to understand concepts after they've been turned into words.
I can turn this off and just compare the word referents to each other. In fact, I have to in order to get any serious thinking done. Translating to and from words just introduces friction.
The tradeoff to doing this is that the end product insight is not at all relatable to other humans, it's some deep deep link into my subconscious that's extremely abstract.
Sometimes I'll conjure up, in my head, an imaginary conversation partner, and converse with them. Then I will use words, because the point is to use the other person as a clarifying foil. I'll hew to the rules of human logic, and make points that they can follow. In my own head, I don't have to use the same logic everyone else does. To me, human logic presents as a strict subset of rules of my logic, but still "logic-complete" in that I can represent most of my findings in semantic form given enough time to find the right 'compilation'.
I believe that language is in the process of deeply integrating into the brain and still isn't really done yet. People have tricks that they use in order to increase the compression rate of words. Narrative for instance. But we still have trouble reaching for words when we need them. I think the language part moves in parallel to the rest of the brain, silently translating thoughts and presenting them to the executive function. (what you think of as you) Thoughts are multi-dimensional, whereas words have many fewer.
In the future, we'll become more strongly aware of the limitations semantics places on articulation. People tend to get too hung up on what words mean, and discussions will often digress to the moors of semantic posturing.
Just as a counterpoint: I (think I) absolutely do think in a specific language. I don't know if I do so all of the time -- there could be times when I don't and don't realize it -- but most of my conscious thought does definitely take the form of words, and sometimes even a well-formed internal dialog.
I speak a second language fluently, and after spending several weeks immersed in that second language I'll sometimes notice that my internal speech switches to it as well, especially when I'm thinking about concepts that I've verbalized/discussed in that language.
We need language really to exchange thoughts in one head to another head, in a slightly richer manner than an ape can.
To "think" we don't really need language (the oral kind the non- deaf think they are thinking in).
Sign language among the born deaf, if allowed to develop without a need to learn spoken languages of the non-deaf, would be clear evidence that thought underlies oral language. And words (that stuff produced for your ear) need not be the only way to think.
I feel the same way. I always think in language and can't conceive of thinking productively another way. Sure, I can imagine a shape, but that's not something that I'd consider really thinking.
Additionally, for me to really understand some concept, I often have to concretely put it into language so I end up talking to myself. I got a cat so I feel like less of a crazy person - I talk to him and not myself.
Can you think mathematically? Do you know how to code? I would call that thinking and at least for me, that's not verbal. I can explain what I'm thinking but by default I just think without a need to have a voice in my head.
This. Internal dialogue can be mistook to be the only form of thought, but thought itself can be abstract beyond words. Of course the distinction, and the discussion here, might all just be a matter of semantics.
> I (think I) absolutely do think in a specific language. I don't know if I do so all of the time -- there could be times when I don't and don't realize it -- but most of my conscious thought does definitely take the form of words, and sometimes even a well-formed internal dialog.
You are mistaken. Your internal monologue is a side effect of your thoughts; it is not your thoughts themselves.
Perhaps you are actually thinking in concepts, and in order to help organise and 'sequentialise' those thoughts, you translate them to words in your head at the same time. Therefore, you 'hear' the words, but don't notice the concepts.
while it has pretty much all my life been for me the same as you describe, i still remember that before and during the first 1 or 2 years of elementary i wasn't thinking in language. And reading - i was reading whole paragraphs as an image instead of sequential word-by-word "reading aloud inside my head" as i've been doing since then. I guess it is about left hemisphere taking control. It is like classical CPU in the left and very powerful GPU in the right.
> We don't think in terms of language. Language is simply a translation layer for the underlying neurological phenomenon. It feels like we think in language because we tend to understand concepts after they've been turned into words.
It always surprises me how many people assume the opposite. Since I don't speak or use my native language during the day, sometimes people will come and ask me whether I "think" in my native language, or in my adopted language. And they're always baffled when I say "neither", because that's not how I think people think.
(Sometimes I, too, may construct internal dialogues in either language, but I never form thoughts themselves as sentences. In fact, more often than not I forget the word that expresses a particular idea, or feeling, or something. That doesn't mean I won't still be able to think about it)
Language is a huge part of people's cultural perspective, and it causes all sorts of stupid things to happen. People will say things like "animals don't have morality", when in fact they only fail to have a human morality that humans can communicate. They'll say "animal X doesn't have emotions" - based on what? The fact that they can't communicate with you and demonstrate a human-like response?
Then there's the whole board of culture antagonism built upon the premise of people who can't speak your language being 'lesser people' in some manner.
I think that thinking can happen in different modes depending on what is useful for the domain you're contemplating. When I am programming I often "see" programs as geometric or organic interlocking structures. I find that I don't really understand a program until I can visualize its structure. On the other hand sometimes I use language and dialog to think out a problem. I remember a specific incident where I was laying in bed on a hot day and I thought "I'm laying here constantly sweating" and then I thought "sweating sounds like a Chinese name" and that's when I realized I had been thinking in Chinese where sweating is pronounced "chu han". You could argue that language-style thought is "translated" from deeper concepts, but I think that goes without saying because there must be some layer of thought that is pre-representation.
But speaking helps to linearize those thoughts and makes them more distinct.
I often just talk to people about my thoughts because it helps meto structure them with the help of language. Sometimes I even get to the point where I have a thought that doesn't map to a word.
I guess one can think in language although it's not the main way we do it but it is the most observable and you can write it down easily unlike the non verbal but more important parts.
> In the future, we'll become more strongly aware of the
> limitations semantics places on articulation. People tend
> to get too hung up on what words mean, and discussions
> will often digress to the moors of semantic posturing.
I'm curious why you think this will be so in the future? Mo matter how much we learn about cognition, the basic process of how people think hasn't changed as far back as we've paid attention. Awareness of the process of thought isn't something that most people ever give attention to beyond idle internal philosophical debates.
Related to this: Anyone else ever focus on their language-based thoughts while thinking them and notice how every mentally verbalized thought seems to have almost a pre-echo of that thought that seems like words but isn't?
Alternatively, my brain is playing a trick on me and I'm filling this sense of echo in after the fact of the language-thought. I've never been able to be discern the sequence with absolute certainty, so figured it was worth putting out there to see if I'm alone in it.
> Anyone else ever focus on their language-based thoughts while thinking them and notice how every mentally verbalized thought seems to have almost a pre-echo of that thought that seems like words but isn't?
Yes. I noticed this when I was first getting into programming and concluded that the verbal part wasn't strictly necessary and should be avoided when possible. Seems to be an issue similar to verbalizing while reading or not (i.e. 'subvocalization'. I always did verbalize initially, but now I can fairly often get into a mode where it feels like the book is reading itself and I understand the words, but there is no enunciation).
I have two main, perhaps conflicting hypotheses on language and thinking now:
1) It's used to solidify trains of thought, similarly to writing down ideas—makes them more stable and easier to return to. Sometimes it's useful to echo your thoughts verbally in order to get this solidification, but it's not necessary.
2) Everything that appears in consciousness is a representation of something deeper going on in the brain. Certain subconscious processes are represented as what we call language in the brain, but the language itself isn't 'active' in any sense.
> Anyone else ever focus on their language-based thoughts while thinking them and notice how every mentally verbalized thought seems to have almost a pre-echo of that thought that seems like words but isn't?
Feels like goal-directed behavior, where the function to maximize is "how best can I internally broadcast this exceptionally salient combination of memories and emotions?"
Semantics is a difficult problem. Wittgenstein once stated "Semantic atoms exist, and I will find them". 20 years later he had to admit defeat and said "Tell me, what's the essence of a chair?". Not long after that, he abandoned rationality completely.
Language basically seems to have two main evolutionary purposes: The first one is the obvious one that we use it to share a common concept space with one another. The second one I am not so sure about, but it seems that language also greatly enhances our thinking. We can exploit the phonological short-term memory in shape of the inner monologue essentially as a scratchpad to efficiently keep track of recent thoughts, and grammars are a great way of combining concepts, so that we can just plug different concepts into the same grammatical structure and obtain new thoughts that might still be grounded in reality due to intuition about the way concepts are typically combined. Moreover, we seem to be able to better verify the soundness of our thinking using language. Oftentimes a thought becomes much clearer when encoded in language. Perhaps grammatical structures are very efficiently linked to causal experiences such that we can very swiftly debug language-coded meanings. The efficient code might also reduce the cognitive load such that we process longer chains of reasoning at a time.
I think language is essentially hacking our memory model which developed around emotional associations with the world. We have sensory input which we translate into associations like danger or pleasure and need to store those in a way that relates in useful ways to the complexities of the way the world works so that we can function as animals. Something like a shriek which might signal danger in one situation might signal happiness in another.
For most people, words start out as sounds, which we are primed by biology to remember and react to. We then form relations around these sounds and their associated symbols or textures for the blind (which sensory input is primary doesn't really matter) and reinforce our associations with emotions and other words to form complex relationships. When we have formed enough of these conections, we can start to establish complex logical arguments around their arrangement and connections. Logical problems become clear in the same way that we are able to react to dangers or opportunities in the real world through the application of memory associations.
So when we string a series of words together, we aren't just bringing up the direct meaning of the sentence. We're bringing into working memory all the various levels of association which those words bring. We're always thinking in these multiple dimensions, whether or not we're directly aware of it. Words are just ways to direct the flow of these associations based on our memories and experiences. When I'm thinking about a sentence, I tend to try to focus more on the periphary thoughts and emotions which they bring to mind rather than focusing on the base meaning.
Our memory is not a model, it is the actual memory we refer to when we talk about memory models. :) Moreover I don't think emotions play a critical role here in the sense that I could imagine a neural architecture without any emotions that still has language.
The idea you've mentioned last is basically what I mean by the scratchpad: We can kind of start associating and explore peripheral thoughts based on a sentence and fairly reliably return the the exact thought from a while ago since our phonological memory is so good.
What I mean by memory model is the way our brain handles access to information and structures the flow of thought. Thought can exist without emotion, and likely does in many living things, but I think the way we structure language is specifically related to our capacity for emotion and the way we attach abstract emotional states to sensory stimulation. I would consider emotion the precursor to symbolic thought in the specific way we do it.
>I believe that language is in the process of deeply integrating into the brain and still isn't really done yet. People have tricks that they use in order to increase the compression rate of words. Narrative for instance. But we still have trouble reaching for words when we need them. I think the language part moves in parallel to the rest of the brain, silently translating thoughts and presenting them to the executive function. (what you think of as you) Thoughts are multi-dimensional, whereas words have many fewer.
Yeah I don't know about all this though. Maybe the brain is very messy and we can't really understand something consciously until we can write/speak it in words, and that words connect disparate thoughts into something meaningful. Maybe this is what you were getting at with 'multi dimensional', but I would think language creates structure, not reduce structure.
For things directly related to the body and rote repetition, the brain might do things we can't consciously express while still being good at it, but that's not really knowledge, that's more automatic neural response. To have knowledge you should have to encode it into some language I think.
On a more broad level, I wonder what symbols like the alphabet and words really 'are', I would tend to think they have no more priority than other stimuli from the environment, but that rather in themselves as an environment for the brain, they have a lot of innate capability for representation and that the brain has learned to manipulate that environment with great skill, but that as far as internal thought goes it's just another environment like navigating a forest or sleeping in a hidden place under the trees to hide from predators. "it's all aesthetic as stimuli" so to speak
> To have knowledge you should have to encode it into some language I think.
What we seem to do is to build concept 'maps' of relating information. The conscious mind has ready access to these maps and uses them to experience the world. I think because most people just aren't terribly intellectual, individual elements in these maps and the very structure of the maps reflect other people around them, what we call culture.
But when we think, we remix and match the map against itself, building up connections between concepts. The more you do this, the less it resembles other peoples'.
A person's definition of a word can change over time. The same basic concept can be represented in crazy-different ways in different people. What I think of when I hear 'Microsoft', is bound to be way different than what someone else thinks.
Or your own self-reflection may not be the best guide to what really is happening with your thoughts. Or there might not even be a specific thing happening beyond one's self reflection.
I often have trouble expressing my thoughts concisely for complex concepts. I know the concepts and have a model in my mind of the 'thing' I want to explain. When thinking through, i'll abstract out many things, simply referring to them as 'this' or 'that' in my mind as i try form the sequential narrative to explain them. If a spend too much time trying to think what 'this' and 'that' are, i forget where i am up to in the sequential narrative, needing to start again. I find writing it down helps, but i'll sometimes forget what i'm trying to write half way through it.
> Thoughts are multi-dimensional, whereas words have many fewer.
Another way i like to explain that, is that thoughts are concurrent, while words are sequential. I can think of multiple things at the same time, but i can only speak one word at a time.
There's a quote which i'm not sure where its from, but it something to the effect of:
> Words are power. When you can put a word to a concept, you have power over it.
The correct single word can instantly convey multiple concepts more quickly than many other multiple words can. This enables much better compression and easier conversion of multiple concepts faster and more easily, assuming the recipient of the word is familiar with it. Using multiple words requires the recipient to sequentially construct concepts, leading to the greater possibility of confusion.
I previously never cared much about using the correct words all the time, as it required a lot of effort to remember them (at least on my part). However, i'm beginning to think that the advantages of doing so would be worth the effort.
To really understand this point, I highly recommend playing the board game Concept. It is both really simple and fun, and a deeply thought-provoking intellectual excercise.
Your first two sentences seem to imply that thought is a neurological phenomenon, but in the following paragraphs you describe several examples of thinking without ever mentioning neurons or any other (one would think) necessary components of neurological phenomena. That's pretty interesting.
I would define a hierarchy of reflex < habit < intuition < 'thinking'. Though they all reflect some neurological activity, the only explicitly verbal level is 'thinking', and the others can be conducted unconsciously.
There may be more usefully discriminable levels of abstraction than those. Where to draw the line between thought and unthought? It seems an uninteresting question to me. Should I draw a line between the United States of America and the people thereof? They are distinct, but the latter is a part of the former, and without their aggregate the former would not exist.
Usually I equate thought and consciousness, but perhaps there is a useful distinction there?
In mammals sentience precedes consciousness precedes sapience. In machines the necessity of the linkage is not clear. We can imagine sapience without consciousness, at least, but consciousness without sentience seems more questionable.
> I am not sure that I think in words, and I never seem to hear any inner voices. This caused a bit of an embarrassment once at a meeting about the evolution of conscience, when fellow scholars kept referring to an inner voice that tells us what is right and wrong. I am sorry, I said, but I never hear such voices.
Speaking overbroadly, with way too many generalizations, simplifications, and the like...
You stand a stronger chance of hearing such voices if you actively seek out and speak to those voices. The directive given to young children to actively seek out and talk to their conscience (a la Pinnochio) is a cultural one which, over time, can shape a portion of your mind to give you this sort of feedback. Further training of this portion of your mind might be provided through a channel such as certain traditions of prayer or meditation found in western Christianity, seeking to program this part of the brain to guide you to be as ethical as possible; some Protestant denominations in particular focus extensively on building a "personal relationship with God" through conversational prayer. Specifics may vary widely within individual cultures, and even over an individual's lifetime, but America in general has seen a strong influence from Protestantism over the years, and it may be affecting the way people in America organize their thoughts with inner dialogue.
I wonder if those working in the science of conscience are subject to some sort of cognitive self-selection bias...
He just might be one of the roughly 1 in 70 people that lack inner monologue. I remember reading about another person a month back that had a hard time reading books because we use visual metaphors in books and can do thing like imagine a beach in our minds eye. But not everyone can apparently. Can't find the link will keep digging through my history.
> I remember reading about another person a month back that had a hard time reading books because we use visual metaphors in books and can do thing like imagine a beach in our minds eye. But not everyone can apparently. Can't find the link will keep digging through my history.
That's interesting, can you point me to a source about the 1 to 70 ratio?
I once had a weird conversation with a friend about thinking in a foreign language: he said he didn't understand what that would mean, as he didn't usually think in our own language anyway.
I am not a neuroscientist, but believe the following to be mainly noncontroversial:
When you speak to another person, there is a neural activation pattern distributed over space and time which encodes, somehow, a sentiment to be expressed. There is also a multistage neural structure (L) that converts that pattern into another, more sequential pattern that drives motor neurons to articulate a series of phonemes.
Sometimes an activation pattern will drive this sort of conversion to yield a serial, phonetic activation pattern, but activity elsewhere in the brain that interferes with the final stage of structure L to prevent the actual articulation from happening. You could call this "covert speech".
You probably perform covert speech at least occasionally. If you stub your toe, you may have the sense that you have just sworn/cursed, even if there was no utterance. (This might be because the processing in earlier stages of L leads to a brain state encoding an expectation of hearing the utterance, but this is getting a bit speculative.) I'll call this sort experience "hearing your own covert speech".
It may be the case that certain types of cognition, like multistep logical deduction, are performed by use of L. This is a small minority of human mental activity, but it is probably the mental activity that we are most aware of performing.
If people go through the day being totally unaware of most of their cognitive activity, but "hear" their own covert logical reasoning whenever they do it, I can see how they would form the impression that they "think in English".
For me, it's not much different than reading silently, where I convert text into mental auditory speech and the corresponding concepts are simultaneously activated.
Once having studied, for example, rational arithmetic, or predicate logic, it is difficult NOT to think in those languages. Yet we are perfectly capable of performing rational or predicative inference if we have no knowledge of those languages, if less precisely. Presumptively this is due to the abstraction of rules from experience facilitating a branching sequence model for abstractions and hypotheses represented during inarticulate thought - abstractions being holographic summary statistics of concepts derived more directly from the sensory manifold.
>Oddly enough, this particular desire must have passed me by, because I have never felt it. I am not waiting to hear what my animals have to say about themselves
Confirmation bias?
>This might be true for simple attitudes free from moralisations (‘What is your favourite music?’), but it seems almost pointless to ask people about their love life, eating habits, or treatment of others (‘Are you pleasant to work with?’). It is far too easy to invent post-hoc reasons for one’s behaviour, to be silent about one’s sexual habits, to downplay excessive eating or drinking, or to present oneself as more admirable than one really is. No one is going to admit to murderous thoughts, stinginess or being a jerk.
I'm not sure where this person lives, but they don't seem to have much social experience. People lie yes. But they also tell the truth all the bloody time too, even for what would seemingly be their most private thoughts.
Heck, sometimes you need to really try hard to stop them from endlessly filling you in into what they believe is the truth -- including about their flaws.
>In one study, female college students reported more sex partners when they were hooked up to a fake lie-detector machine, demonstrating that they had been lying when interviewed without the lie-detector.
Well, duh. An interview situation, and with a lie-detector attached to your hand to boot, where you're being asked to reveal private data to a random stranger/official, is nothing like confiding to another human being.
>There is a notable irony here. In an earlier age, the absence of language was used as an argument against the existence of thought in other species. Today I find myself upholding the position that the manifest reality of thinking by nonlinguistic creatures argues against the importance of language.
The real irony is not seeing that the "hand gestures" and other signals the author seems to appreciate, also constitute a language (as they have all the essential attributes of one -- actual verbalizations in sound or writing are secondary expressions of having a language).
The metaphor I like is that "language is a tool for thought". It's a technology that dramatically expands human cognitive potential, to the extent that they could be confused.
There's a great Radiolab episode about the experiences of some Deaf adults who acquired (sign) language as adults (the 1st story) and an adult who temporarily lost language ability as an adult due to brain trauma (the 2nd): http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/
>We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
>I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.
'Among Pirahã's many peculiarities is an almost complete lack of numeracy, an extremely rare linguistic trait of which there are only a few documented cases. The language contains no words at all for discrete numbers and only three that approximate some notion of quantity—hói, a "small size or amount," hoí, a "somewhat larger size or amount," and baágiso, which can mean either to "cause to come together" or "a bunch."'
...
'We can only count so fast, after all, but the Pirahã appear not to be counting at all—because, well, how could they? Instead, they're employing what Everett calls an "analog estimation strategy," which works well for a few items but breaks down beyond that.'
In the exact same way that mathematical notation expands cognition of math. By giving us a way to agree on and define ideas in a way that allows us to discuss, think about, and develop further, related ideas. As we grow, we construct a massive scaffold of ideas built on other ideas.
Some of the accounts of Pirahã subjects are really interesting: IIRC when shown two groups of (for example) 4 and 7 objects and asked to describe the difference between them, some people didn't care to answer or said they were the same. Others were puzzled; they could tell there was a difference, but couldn't articulate what it was. And you need to be able to articulate/describe that difference before you can go on to trigonometry.
Naming things makes them easier to distinguish, see the Wharfian Hypothesis [1] (which has been validated experimentally).
For example, if you don't have different words for blue and green (which is the case for some languages), then it's harder (slower) to distinguish distinct color samples that are blue and green than if you had words for the different colors.
If you're an Inuit, and you have words for different kinds of snow, it's going to be easier to disambiguate them, as you have a mental anchor (the name) for each concept.
In programming terms, I think there's a meaningful analogy with heap vs. dictionary lookups, with words allowing more efficient retrieval of unrelated concepts.
Linguistic relativity is quite controversial and nowhere near as clear cut as you are making it out to be - there are studies that don't support the claims around color naming, for example. When I last spoke to someone who studied linguistics (but wasn't a researcher), he said the consensus was there was only a weak effect.
The mathematician Jacques Hadamard carried out an interesting study on this subject and presented his findings in a small book called, "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field". Here are a couple of excerpts from it that I found compelling (he's talking about a sort of 'schematic' thinking with something like relationship diagrams, and much of his motivation is the contention that thinking is only done linguistically):
"Indeed, every mathematical research compels me to build such a schema, which is always and must be of a vague character, so as not to be deceptive. I shall give a less elementary example from my first researches (my thesis). I had to consider a sum of an infinite number of terms, intending to valuate its order of magnitude. In that case, there is a group of terms which chances to be predominant, all others having a negligible influence. Now, when I think of that question, I see not the formula itself, but the place it would take if written: a kind of ribbon, which is thicker or darker at the place corresponding to the possibly important terms; or (at other moments), I see something like a formula, but by no means a legible one, as I should see it (being strongly long-sighted) if I had no eye-glasses on, which letters seeming rather more apparent (though still not legible) at the place which is supposed to be the important one."
"About the mathematicians born or resident in America, whom I asked, phenomena are mostly analogous to those which I have noticed in my own case. Practically all of them -- contrary to what occasional inquiries had suggested to Galton as to the man on the street -- avoid not only the use of mental words, but also, just as I do, the mental use of algebraic or any other precise signs; also as in my case, they use vague images."
> My experience with thinking in abstract domains matches this perfectly—and I bet it can be trained/taught.
Well, when I first started reading mathematics books I found them extremely difficult to read, and had to labour over each statement that was made to try and get the structure of the thing they were defining -- nowadays a lot of the trouble has subsided, because I'm more able to visualise it. An example of this are the set-theoretic ideas of sets, union, intersection, etc.
Nowadays something a bit like a Venn diagram appears in my head, that I can manipulate at will. One thing to note is that I used to put a lot of focus on the names of variables, whereas now I think more about what it represents in general.
I would add that something similar happened with programming.
Honestly, define language first because the word it thrown around and used sloppily with no one taking the time to reflect on it. (I shouldn't be surprised, of course, by the willingness of HN posters to pontificate on subjects they have not studied or comprehended in any meaningful way. The Emory professor is just embarrassing to read.)
This topic has been studied for a very long time and a rudimentary understanding of concept, signifier, denotation, etc, would cut the bullshit drastically. Donald Davidson, Karl Buehler and Karl Popper are contemporary contributors to the subject. Frege. Aristotle. Tarski. I can keep going.
The article is something of a Rorschach blot - mention language and consciousness and a hundred ill-defined pet theories are going to come of peoples mouth, or out of their fingertips onto the comment section.
Not that these pet theories are necessarily bad. Usually they're variations on existing frameworks but with lots of things left uninvestigated because each theory is developed just enough to satisfy the individual.
He mostly rejects that we literally think in words: ‘The obvious (and I should have thought sufficient) refutation of the claim that natural languages are the medium of thought is that there are non-verbal organisms that think.’ (This is him quoting Jerry Fodor.)
I don't think this is particularly controversial among contemporary linguists. It's important to him because if we did think in natural languages, and if further we were the only linguistic animal (which he first posits and than backtracks), then it would follow that animals do not think, which, given only such a binary option, seems absurd.
There is a rich field of linguistics that studies the relationship between language and cognition: Language can shape the way we think in obvious and non-obvious ways even if it does not determine the limits of our cognition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Yes, exactly this. It does feel like something of a straw man argument that the author is disproving (though perhaps it's one that he encounters often).
I think the obvious and un-controversial position is slightly more complicated; language is not required for thought, but like most (every?) other activity in the brain, it affects thought.
Cognition doesn't require language, but it can use language.
The brain is a parallel processing engine, and can recruit several modules at once for cognition, spatial modules, visual ones etc...[1]
It's a good thing we don't think in words, because as good as they are for transmitting information to others, and for recording it, it is a serial format, and the part of our brain that processes it has a limited capacity.[2]
If you've ever had the solution to a problem come to you before you can express it in words, you know that words aren't required for cognition, even awareness isn't.[3]
I'm not a fan of Ayn Rand, but I have read some insightful statements from her over the years. The one that has stuck with me the most is the idea that if you don't have a conscious, clearly defined philosophy, then your actions are still dictated by SOME philosophy. You just don't know what it is because you've never articulated it or thought critically about it. It is almost certainly a mishmash of biases and contradictions. By articulating your own philosophy (i.e., just putting it into words), you gain the ability to critically reason about it, better understand your own feelings and actions, and hopefully fix the ways in which that unarticulated philosophy was broken.
I'm sure there are lots of other people who are a lot smarter than I am and don't need to articulate things in order to reason about them, but I am not one of those people.
I tend to think that we think in actions and consequences. It just so happens that speech is an action which has a very tight loop for direct consequences which other parts of the brain can make use of (sound waves). When you're angry you imagine punching someone, or if you're happy you imagine jumping around ecstatically, etc. The tight coupling between sound an movement means that the agent in the brain for most people just uses the auditory representation since it is more salient (grabs the attention better) than the motor movements of the mouth/tongue/vocal cords. When learning a new language and trying to figure out how to produce a new phoneme if all you think about is the sound that comes out rather than what you are actually doing with your speech motor system you will have a much harder time learning. Consider a deaf person whispering or a 'truly' deaf person (who can't hear low frequencies via bone conduction) speaking. They can do it, but they must be thinking in terms of the movement of their mouth and vocal cords, not in terms of the 'sound' they make.
Speaking just for myself, language is thought and thought is language. I've talked to other people about their inner monologues (or lack of one) and everyone has different experiences (or different perceptions of similar experiences, a la the blind men and the elephant).
Unless I have articulated a thought in my head in terms of language, I don't feel like I have thought of anything at all. My nonverbal "thoughts" are just a mishmash of emotions, memories, images, sensory input, reflexive reactions to things, and pseudorandom associations that pop up occasionally.
If other people can think in depth about abstract concepts through some means other than imagining words to describe those concepts, I'm either very very jealous, or they don't mean the same thing I do by words like "thought" and "thinking".
In the same way that we use language to serialize ideas from one person to another, my own mind uses language to communicate with my own lower-level cognitive processes. Those low-level processes are the real sources of thought, but without language to interpret what bubbles up from that level, and without language to steer thinking at that level, I would lose the ability to debug my own brain (root out biases, play devil's advocate against myself, examine my own mental state, make good life choices, understand other people's points of view, etc.).
I don't know if this applies to anyone but me, but without using language as a tool for reasoning, I feel like I would 100% be a product of my environment, and not someone who is capable of imagining different paths that my life could take and then going down one of the non-default paths (which is good, because otherwise I'm pretty sure I would've been dead or in jail by age 30 :).
Speaking just for myself, language is thought and thought is language.
I used to be like that, but then I learned a second language, and learned to think in the second language. Soon, I realized their was a place in my mind where thoughts were formed, before being verbalized (although the verbalization happened so fast and automatically before that I didn't notice it). Then I learned to trust that non-verbalized part of my brain, and I could think faster by not using words.
Another way to see the same effect while not going to the effort is while playing a game like chess; you can think "she moves here, then I move there, the she moves there...." going with words through all the variations. But if you just look at the variations without putting them into words, you can go faster.
I'm not sure he is wrong. Here's a quote with his position. Seems fairly reasonable:
QUESTION: It might help if you could define how you use the term “cognition” as opposed to the term “language.”
CHOMSKY: Well, I wouldn’t use the term “cognition” as opposed to the term “language.” Rather, cognition is an overall term that includes every system of belief, knowledge, understanding, interpretation, perception, and so on. Language is just one of many systems that interact to form our whole complex of cognitive structures.
You mean the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong. Which people like me (originally trained as a linguist) have been saying for years.
Who does defend the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? I've never seen anybody defending it, while I've seen lots of people arguing against it; the first name that comes to mind is Steven Pinker.
The Strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seems obviously deficient because you can certainly think about things your language has no words (concepts and feelings, etc).
It's the Weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that is much more interesting and still at debate. Certainly things that are easier to describe in a language would seem easier to reason with. Our brains leverage language as a tool to map concepts and the concepts we can name are easier to grasp and utilize than the ones we cannot.
The Weak hypothesis does seem like it would be affected by brain elasticity. Keeping concepts close to hand in your language would presumably keep them easier to conceptualize as your brain plasticizes.
Chomsky believes the human capacity for language to be one of many "mental organs" specialized to different tasks. This article is pretty confused, and Chomsky would probably say the root cause of the author's confusion is the ill defined terms "language" and "thought".
I think there's it can't be denied that there is a strong link between cognition and language, since from introspection I feel that my thoughts are in language, and language certainly permits tremendous richness of expression of thought. Chomsky discusses these views here - I don't think this article repudiates them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH8SicnqSC4
I will agree with the author that, despite being not possessing language, animals are more intelligent and sensitive than frequently given credit.
> But who says that what people say about themselves reveals actual emotions and motivations?
> This might be true for simple attitudes free from moralisations (‘What is your favourite music?’)
My answer to that question changes depending on who asks me, where, and when.
As for a link between language and cognition, it completely depends on the definition. Like the arguments of religion they are both pointless and masturbatory unless the participants are willing to agree on concrete definitions beforehand.
Cognition is murky because it involves understanding, and understanding is a most variable and undefined term.
From an AI standpoint, that's probably right. This was an unpopular position in AI a few decades ago. As progress continues on vision, robotics, automatic driving, and dealing with the real world without language, it's become more of a mainstream position.
All the mammals have relatively similar DNA, and the DNA differences between humans and the great apes are minor. This suggests that getting to chimpanzee-level AI is 90-95% of the way to human-level AI. Yet that doesn't require language.
As everyone's ability to express self is different, there is certainly a difference how linguistical one's forming thought in own head.
My theory is, more you engaged in inter-person communication, from moment to habit, more you may have thought in the form of language, and more the thoughts are limited by the nature language. Deep thoughts especially those sparked creativity are certainly much beyond language, and difficult to express. Complex concept takes time to communicate is a proof of this.
I prescribe to the idea that all thought and language is metaphorical. Language and thought do exist separately but also combine in useful ways for all of us. This is why you can think of something but not find the word for it.
But just look at the metaphorical structure of language. Concepts are nothing but our ability to map our modalities in a way that become useful for our biological goals.
George Lakoff has some great books on metaphors. Metaphors we live by is a great book.
(I again find myself on the other side of most comments) I think it is obvious that we think in a language, or more specifically the vocabulary. Try to imagine thinking without language (yes, you can do it), e.g. think about an apple. When I tried it, I was picturing the apple and imagined the smell and taste. That was a lot of details. On the other hand, when I think about with the word "apple", the shape and color, smell and taste does not come on so strongly yet I still have the feel that I got the (idea of) apple. So in my opinion, language vocabulary is an abstraction over a collection of ideas that allows us to focus our thought without recollecting (flood our limited short term memory slots) all the details. There is this saying that our short term memory only have 7 plus or minus 2 slots and this short term memory is like our ram that enables our thinking. Vocabulary allows us to abstract complex ideas to fit into a single memory slot, thus it is essential for us to be able to have complex (when we have multiple components of ideas interweaving) thoughts.
Now, I do not distinguish one language from another. Different languages may accidentally possess different power of abstraction in particular area due to the culture behind the language, but in general, I believe the abstraction power is similar -- if not, we can always invent new vocabulary and we do. So whether you are thinking in English or Spanish or jumping back and forth or mixing in between, but the abstracting aspect remain the same. For those bi-linguists try think "apple" in one language and "eat" in another language and try think anything that involves eating apple. For me at least, I do not have trouble use either language for either apple or eat, but once I start my thought, I do not swap it -- that is, if I started thinking apple in English, I remains thinking apple in English. It is the function of words as abstracting that is key to our thought (not language as typically a language teacher would define).
Then there is grammar in addition to vocabulary. I don't think grammar is part of our thought. They are more like cues. We don't think about grammar, but grammar automatically comes as we use the vocabulary. The grammar do not really occupy any memory slots (except when you are learning the language).
It is not that we have to think in a language -- we can think in pictures and imagine playing a movie, but thinking via a language allows us to think in a more abstract way and I believe it is essential for us to develop and grab complex thoughts.
I think that we have to give up the idea that we can understand anything about thought and more generally cognitive processes by looking at how it "feels" thinking (or doing math, vision, etc).
The more we observe how we work, the more we learn that we really have no idea how we work. The ancient idea that we can understand reason by reasoning have to be abandoned: it is, after all, an idealistic belief; if we accept that our cognitive processes are physical phenomena, we also have to accept that reasoning without observation is powerless.
I can turn this off and just compare the word referents to each other. In fact, I have to in order to get any serious thinking done. Translating to and from words just introduces friction.
The tradeoff to doing this is that the end product insight is not at all relatable to other humans, it's some deep deep link into my subconscious that's extremely abstract.
Sometimes I'll conjure up, in my head, an imaginary conversation partner, and converse with them. Then I will use words, because the point is to use the other person as a clarifying foil. I'll hew to the rules of human logic, and make points that they can follow. In my own head, I don't have to use the same logic everyone else does. To me, human logic presents as a strict subset of rules of my logic, but still "logic-complete" in that I can represent most of my findings in semantic form given enough time to find the right 'compilation'.
I believe that language is in the process of deeply integrating into the brain and still isn't really done yet. People have tricks that they use in order to increase the compression rate of words. Narrative for instance. But we still have trouble reaching for words when we need them. I think the language part moves in parallel to the rest of the brain, silently translating thoughts and presenting them to the executive function. (what you think of as you) Thoughts are multi-dimensional, whereas words have many fewer.
In the future, we'll become more strongly aware of the limitations semantics places on articulation. People tend to get too hung up on what words mean, and discussions will often digress to the moors of semantic posturing.