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Is language essential for rational thinking?

SolitaryWalker

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What I'm saying is that we cannot ultimately separate rational thought from language-- even though we're capable of thinking wordlessly, we're still thinking wordlessly in a mind constrained (and, in other ways, set free) by language. There's still the one-degree-of-separation between the ineffable and our thought processes, and it's because of our language. It is still ineffable, but the rigor that language imposes on the brain prevents us from fully experiencing the ineffable.

Do you remember how emotions seemed so much more raw before you had the linguistic skills to symbolize them? Now that you can say "I feel angry," anger has less potency.

You're right about that, rational though can not be seperated from language, though rational though is first given rise to by intuitive hunches, feelings, or ideas that are not yet rational thoughts. So indeed rational thought does end up getting symbolized into something, a language of a sort, even if its not a conventional one.

Yet again we have to be broad with the definition of language, as it can be anything that can be symbolized and it does not have to be something that is compatible with objective linguistics.

But again, only the conventional definition of rational thought requires language. Intuitive hunches in themselves can be rational in a way that they follow a meaningful pattern, yet recognition of this pattern requires language.

Hence meaningful ideas are possible without language, though identification of those ideas does need symbolism.
 

Ivy

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You're right about that, rational though can not be seperated from language, though rational though is first given rise to by intuitive hunches, feelings, or ideas that are not yet rational thoughts. So indeed rational thought does end up getting symbolized into something, a language of a sort, even if its not a conventional one.

Yet again we have to be broad with the definition of language, as it can be anything that can be symbolized and it does not have to be something that is compatible with objective linguistics.

That's a broader definition than I sense (or intuit?) the OP intended.

For our species, language acquisition was a trade-off, and it was worth it by far (IMO), but we did lose some of our capacity for fully experiencing. Language becomes a buffer zone between a person and their experiences.
 

nightning

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What I'm saying is that we cannot ultimately separate rational thought from language-- even though we're capable of thinking wordlessly, we're still thinking wordlessly in a mind constrained (and, in other ways, set free) by language. There's still the one-degree-of-separation between the ineffable and our thought processes, and it's because of our language. It is still ineffable, but the rigor that language imposes on the brain prevents us from fully experiencing the ineffable.

Do you remember how emotions seemed so much more raw before you had the linguistic skills to symbolize them? Now that you can say "I feel angry," anger has less potency.

Hmmmm doesn't language in turn give us the ability to explore abstract ideas better? For only by limiting the scope of what we focus on can we puzzle out the details...
 

Ivy

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Hmmmm doesn't language in turn give us the ability to explore abstract ideas better? For only by limiting the scope of what we focus on can we puzzle out the details...

Absolutely. I'm not saying language isn't worth the many new levels of thinking it offers.
 

cafe

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The joys of childhood... I really miss it too. :cry:

So there can be rational thoughts without words? I'm not sure if anybody else have done this, but I sometimes talk to my ummm altered ego? in my head. It's a way of clearing things up by talking to myself. I really wanted to track these conversations but whenever I tried to do that it just doesn't work well. Typing it out, way too slow. The process of typing means I have to repeat everything that is said to myself in order to type. Even speaking out loud and recording doesn't work. Because then I have to repeat what the voice in my head said. It interrupts the flow of the conversation. Also you can convey thoughts about an idea so much quicker in your head without words. It's almost like flashing isolated images with continously running emotion as commetary. The whole incident is over within a second or two. Something you just can't record in words. But that has always been more about experiencing something rather than like thinking to me. Hmmmm...
I think I kinda know what you're talking about. That's exactly what gets me called "Off the wall."

When I'm having a conversation with another person, my brain is still having it's own running conversation with itself. Sometimes I forget that the other person is not privy to this, and when I begin to speak again, I say things that have no obvious relationship to what we were talking about.

I can almost always grab the mental thread (if that makes any sense) and backtrack, explaining how I got from point A to point E, but by then the other person is thinking :offtopic: if I'm lucky and :crazy: if I'm unlucky.
 

SolitaryWalker

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That's a broader definition than I sense (or intuit?) the OP intended.

For our species, language acquisition was a trade-off, and it was worth it by far (IMO), but we did lose some of our capacity for fully experiencing. Language becomes a buffer zone between a person and their experiences.


It is true that language becomes fundamental to our thought, yet again when we deal with raw ideas, we seem to be working with entities that are devoid of symbolism. But when we go on to reflect on it and present it in an objective fashion, even to ourselves, we then utilize symbolism. Everybody's thought is deeply influenced by language, Js more so than Ps. Yet we should note that ideas in themselves is what actually gave rise to symbols and new ideas can only be influenced by them, yet symbols in themselves could not be immanent within our minds because they first derived from an external source.
 

Ivy

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It is true that language becomes fundamental to our thought, yet again when we deal with raw ideas, we seem to be working with entities that are devoid of symbolism. But when we go on to reflect on it and present it in an objective fashion, even to ourselves, we then utilize symbolism. Everybody's thought is deeply influenced by language, Js more so than Ps. Yet we should note that ideas in themselves is what actually gave rise to symbols and new ideas can only be influenced by them, yet symbols in themselves could not be immanent within our minds because they first derived from an external source.

I don't see how you can separate it like that. Either we have a linguistic brain or not. I'm not disputing that we can think wordlessly-- I've acknowledged that we do in each of my posts in this thread. But thinking wordlessly in a language-capable brain is probably very different from thinking wordlessly in a wordless brain, IMO.
 

nightning

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It is true that language becomes fundamental to our thought, yet again when we deal with raw ideas, we seem to be working with entities that are devoid of symbolism. But when we go on to reflect on it and present it in an objective fashion, even to ourselves, we then utilize symbolism. Everybody's thought is deeply influenced by language, Js more so than Ps. Yet we should note that ideas in themselves is what actually gave rise to symbols and new ideas can only be influenced by them, yet symbols in themselves could not be immanent within our minds because they first derived from an external source.

Thoughts from some Js are no more influenced by language then Ps... it should be based on what your dominant introverted function when it comes to thinking, whether that's perceiving or judging. Question about symbols... Where do the first words orginate from if not within the mind of an individual? Therefore somewhere way back in time... the first symbol was synthesized internally.
 

SolitaryWalker

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I don't see how you can separate it like that. Either we have a linguistic brain or not. I'm not disputing that we can think wordlessly-- I've acknowledged that we do in each of my posts in this thread. But thinking wordlessly in a language-capable brain is probably very different from thinking wordlessly in a wordless brain, IMO.


Thinking does not require symbols, if symbols are profoundly ingrained within our psyche, they may become unconscious influences on us, but again the pure essence of an idea does not involve symbolism.
 

SolitaryWalker

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Thoughts from some Js are no more influenced by language then Ps... it should be based on what your dominant introverted function when it comes to thinking, whether that's perceiving or judging. Question about symbols... Where do the first words orginate from if not within the mind of an individual? Therefore somewhere way back in time... the first symbol was synthesized internally.


Of course symbols were synthesized internally, they are made up of ideas anyways, but my point is that ideas do not depend on them for their existence.
 

Jezebel

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Ask Helen Keller.

It's a good point. I think those deprived of language are good examples to study to see what thoughts are like without language.

What's interesting about Helen Keller is that she wasn't born deafblind. She had a childhood illness that left her deaf and blind around the age of two, after she had already gotten a taste of learning language. Of course, she had only just began to form her first words and not communicate complex thoughts, but it was enough to lay down the groundwork. She did come up with simple gestures on her own to communicate to her family before Anne Sullivan came along. And once she was taught sign language as a child, she was able to fully grasp language and read and write, and it turned out she had lots of thoughts going on in her head. She even had memories of the time before she understood objects had names, and so the story goes.

The thing is, at least from what I've read, it isn't the same case for people who are born deafblind. Those people who aren't taught language early on have tremendous difficulty grasping language, expressing rational thought and just taking care of themselves. The success rate is much higher with those who had gotten a taste of language (even if they couldn't speak yet) and later became deafblind.

If someone is born deaf and blind and deprived of tactile communication, are they capable of rational thought?

I don't consider reacting on instincts and comfort vs discomfort as being rational thought. I don't doubt that emotional thought, moods and feelings are possible. However, I consider rational thought as requiring structure (as from language or some other symbolism) to organize thoughts and use reason.
 

Bushranger

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I think it ties in with the working of long and short term memory.
While reading this entry in the "Developing Intelligence" blog (which I recommend to people interested in cognition)
http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/03/why_the_brain_is_not_like_a_co.php
I found a link to this paper
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15377128&dopt=Abstract

The suggestion is that short term memory makes extensive use of pointers to long term memory in order to avoid the difficulty of completely representing the entirety of a complex thought in the region that handles short term memory. It seems to me that our internal running conversations have to use words/symbols in the same way. If we don't abstract away concepts using these words/symbols then our ability to represent complex ideas in concious short term memory becomes severely limited.
 

Xander

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Errm rational thinking? Of course language is necessary. No doubt about it.

We understand things by defining them and pidgeon holing experiences. We then construct using these blocks as defined. The process of definition involves language in that to seperate things we have to label them and their connections. This labelling itself is a language.

Now thought itself requires no language unless we believe that we are preprogramed with a language or don't think when we're born, which would make nasty implications into the whole abortion arguments.

Now I recall Lee once mentioning Mentalese as the language your brain thinks in, not english nor german nor chinese.... Even if such were true then that is merely a language specific to that individual and whose inner language is then processed to produce the communicable form such as english.....

That could actually explain why some people have trouble with words. Perhaps their conversion process is corrupted? If when taught how to convert their mentalese into english or whatever, because their brain worked differently than the one which the conversion process was made for (markedly different) then it causes the process to go haywire every so often.
 

HilbertSpace

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Holland (of genetic algorithm fame, and one of the early pioneers in what would come to be known as artificial life) said that one of the defining characteristics of an agent (which could be anything ranging from a bit of software to a bacterium to a person) was an internal model.

The internal model can be thought of as a collection of states and transitions. We can use the word "language" to mean two things - the 'translation layer' that captures the transition between the environment and the internal model (including the dynamics of the model), and the code used to transmit model state in communication. In any case, I think we have to make note of the process of encoding - it is the 'code' that is the language.

There is nothing in the word 'happy' that really means 'happy' - it's just the code. Likewise, there's no 'happy' in the Mandarin word 'xin.' Analogously, there's no 'happy' in a dog wagging its tail. Dogs evolved (first naturally, and later by breeding) the ability to communicate their internal state with other dogs and with people. It's speculated that one possible fitness-based reason that dogs which have any white whatsoever tend to have white on the tips of their tails is to make tail-signals easier to see, and it's believed that tail-wagging can communicate about a dozen different things depending on speed and the position the tail is held.

When it comes to human models, you have a difference in the numerosity and richness of abstractions, but all life communicates via abstracted codes both internally and externally. So the situation is the same whether you're talking about bacteria flinging around molecules, dogs wagging their tails, or Bob saying "You know, I think the Yankees have a pretty good chance of taking it all the way this year."
 

Rajah

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I've skimmed, so if I'm failing to touch on something, or touching on something erroneously... eh, sorry.



First, there needs to be a clearer distinction between spoken and written language. Orthography is just a system to commit language to posterity, so we need to discuss oral communication.

Which brings us to language acquisition. There are two big schools of thought regarding language acquisition (really scaled-down here).

One is universal grammar (Chomsky, et al.) which basically says babies have an innate language-learning template. All humans have the same template. Based on what they're exposed to, kids figure out their native language's structure.

The other approach is that language acquisition is more dependent on the acquirer interacting with his community.

Here's a cool, basic article.

Arguments for and against both positions are really, really complicated and technical, and frankly boring to 99% of the world (See Rajah's mediocre Syntax grade).


We don't get to see many cases of adults or older kids who've had no language exposure, but the cases we have seen suggest maybe language might be a requirement (though there are obvious extenuating in these cases) for higher-level thought. See this. There's also a very famous story of a girl locked in a closet for years, who was basically a blank slate. Damn if I can remember her name... Meh.


Second, I don't know that we're asking the right questions. Once we learn language it is tied up in everything we do. Language is you. You can't separate language from anything you're thinking about. Either (1) we all have an innate language template, and the question is moot, or (2) all but a very few exceptions are exposed to language at a really young age and formalize it before we are capable of full-blown rational thought, in which case the question is pretty much moot.


Third, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." I get that this argument is coming. I maintain language is too inextricably tied up in what we do to divorce it from our thoughts.


Fourth, this post is convoluted. I'm sick of looking at it, so I'm going to post it.
 

Ivy

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Second, I don't know that we're asking the right questions. Once we learn language it is tied up in everything we do. Language is you. You can't separate language from anything you're thinking about. Either (1) we all have an innate language template, and the question is moot, or (2) all but a very few exceptions are exposed to language at a really young age and formalize it before we are capable of full-blown rational thought, in which case the question is pretty much moot.

This is EXACTLY what I was trying to say, but you've said it much more clearly.
 

SolitaryWalker

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This is EXACTLY what I was trying to say, but you've said it much more clearly.

There were many philosophers who asserted that we have an innate language template and that rational thought depends on linguistics for its existence. Among them, a very eminent thinker who is still alive today, Noam Chomsky.

I think this is a mistake.

There happened a terrible catastrophe over this just in the 20th century at the behest of a Linguistic Analyst Ludwig Wittgenstein who nearly commited philosophicide in a literal sense of the word.

He insisted that everything that is meaningful can be spoken about very clearly, and all these confusing philosophical questions do not exist because we can not speak of them very clearly. Therefore, Ludwig says, whatever we can not speak about, we shall pass and silence. Oh, and by the way, Queer things happen in this world, this is all that I have really learned in my life.

Than after him many Analytic Oxford philosophers took his method as set in stone and insisted that every philosophical questions is contingent upon how we use our words, so they went from working ideas to just solving word puzzles. The results were disastrous, we completely lost touch with all objectivity.

We could not even talk about philosophy meaningfully because we kept on getting into fights over meanings of pesky words. This is what gave rise to Post-Modernism.

This did not change untill Karl Popper a champion of objective knowledge argued that Truth is immutable, yet our perceptions always change. Therefore words at best document our perceptions of the truth and not the truth in itself and the reason why words are imprinted over our minds is because we have been exposed to them and the view that language is innate is non-sensical. We all have ideas in our minds that we can not find clear-cut words to express and there are many ways of expressing the same idea in different words, so it doesnt make sense that every single idea is attached to only one word. Hence he insists that we should be much more lax with the words that we use and be loyal to ideas, establish a method of communication where we understand what one another says, despite our linguistic prejudices. We can easily be using the same words to depict two different phenomena and we need to watch out for that. Hence it is ok to even make words up as Popper himself did, as long your discussion partner knows what you're saying.

Basically, Popper's work in Conjectures and Refutations and Logic of Scientific Discovery spell shipwreck to Linguistical analysis and pretty much all notions about how language is necessary for rational thinking. Language is only necessary for recognition of rational thinking, rational thinking is contingent upon ideas and nothing else.

Schopenhauer has foreseen this problem too and once noted 'Philosophy is a science in concepts, not a science of concepts'.

In short CONCEPTS or WORDs... is not what philosophy should be dealing with.. it must transcend them.
 

Rajah

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In short CONCEPTS or WORDs... is not what philosophy should be dealing with.. it must transcend them.
And because we're human, philosophy doesn't have a choice but to contend with limitations imposed by language.
 

hereandnow

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Schopenhauer has foreseen this problem too and once noted 'Philosophy is a science in concepts, not a science of concepts'.

Seawolf/SW: You have killed Schopenhauer for so many. Please, in the course of a rather long response, give the poor bastard a break.
 
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