Language and its influence on thought

[sallynewell]

I'm also interested in the idea or experience than you can think and reason, at higher levels, without language as necessary and sufficient. For instance in art, complex concepts and experience are transmitted without abstract language... Somethings are just too fast for language, playing tennis, other complex motor tasks ... supposedly we make most of our daily judgements from some amalgam that is extra or pre verbal ... is this amalgam which might loosely called experience, then to be judged as insuffiencent? and what is habit?

[Miranda]

I think it will be best if I address the OP...

I have a hypothesis that language is necessarily abstract, and its learning of expression of abstract thoughts influences not only the expression of those thoughts, but how those thoughts themselves are created and expressed. The often quoted yet incorrect reference to thirty some odd names for snow by "eskimos" comes to mind.

So, how does one's language affect not only one's ability to describe the world around them, but also how one perceives the world around them?

It seems you have brought up the issue of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Their hypothesis more or less states that 1) we interact with the world; 2) we form a lexicon of grammatical categories that reflect our experiences and thoughts; 3) our thoughts and cognition are influenced by the resulting grammar of our language. Many linguists have found contention with the latter point, and it happens to be quite debated.

 

Perhaps you are going more in the direction of linguistic determinism, which is the idea that one culture’s language can express things that are unique to that culture that another language cannot, and thus the speakers have a different worldview. It may certainly seem that way, but I think this gives a lot of unnecessary responsibility to the power of words. Language represents what we have to work with, in a sense ‘reflectionary’. JMJones0424 mentioned the common 'eskimo' example, which says that Eskimos have many words for snow and that a speaker of another language such as English would not be able to understand snow in the way Eskimo’s do. For the record, this example has been proven more or less useless due to further research that says that Eskimo’s really don’t have that many snow words. But let’s pretend it’s true; even if they had a million words for snow, the words do not influence their conception of snow, but reflect the categorization that already took place in their mind that made them create the many terms in the first place.

 

We categorize all kinds of things, and such categories are arbitrary, much like the words we assign to them, as words do not have inherent meanings beyond our cognition. There may be a group of people out there who’s culture does not have the concept of “airplane”, and thus lacks a word for it. However, stating the word “airplane” to that group of people would not create this new concept in their mind from the word alone. They would have to develop the understanding of what an airplane is and then create a word for it. It is of course true that different cultures have different worldviews, but it is not because of their languages. Their language may only reflect various cultural values, but those values arise separate of the language itself.

 

If we agree that our words or subsequent grammatical patterns are able to influence our thoughts, then it implies that such a relationship can be empirically observed and is testable. It also gives way to more questions. If language affects our worldview, then what part of language does so, and why? How does this influence take place? What part of cognition would syntactic structure affect? And so on. It also implies a sort of language modularity… that our language is some entity that imposes itself on our brains, or perhaps is encapsulated from other cognitive faculties.

 

Someone mentioned Steven Pinker in an earlier post, and I'd like to recommend his book The Language Instinct, which talks extensively about this topic in his chapter on 'mentalese'.

[sman]

That is why the phrase "cognitive thinking" does not refer to just any kind of thinking, or just any mundane sort of brain activity. Almost by definition, it refers to the kind of rigorous thinking that can only be done by a mind capable of categorization, symbolic labeling, abstraction, attribute determination, evaluation, comparison, enumeration, conceptualization and logic.

 

Are we defining "cognitive thinking" as some wierd thing that only humans do. Are there no precursors in other animals. Language is strictly human. Though there are precursors, the whole functioning thing is only found in humans. I'd be very surprised if this were the case for any definition of cognition.

[Pyrotex]

Are we defining "cognitive thinking" as some wierd thing that only humans do. Are there no precursors in other animals. Language is strictly human. Though there are precursors, the whole functioning thing is only found in humans. I'd be very surprised if this were the case for any definition of cognition.

Actually, given my definition, one can make a case that some animals exhibit cognitive thinking. One can make the case. You can't prove it, however. Part of the problem is the definition itself. It is impossible to definitively categorize every "kind" of thought as cognitive or not. Some thinking may be a mixture, hard to tell.

 

A lot of thinking does not require language.

storage and recall of visual images,

all "feelings" and pure emotions, like pleasure and pain,

the spacial calculations required to throw and catch and do gymnastics,

development of muscular skills,

making music.

 

But much of human thought, even when you are NOT conscious of using words, does in fact involve languaging. Our world is full of things -- many of those things have no physical existence except as concepts -- concepts which are defined entirely in terms of languaging and semantic structures. For example, our schedules, and obligations, and relationships, and property, and status, and judgements, and needs, and desires, and fashion, and self-image, and so forth.

 

There's more to languaging than meets the eye.

[Boerseun]

Interesting thread! Kudos all round...

 

There's another angle to the story, which I might illustrate with an analogy - (if you'll bear with me for a second...:))

 

Consider the ancient Romans, if you will.

 

They were awesome architects and engineers, but their maths were insufficient to be applicable to much more.

 

The will was there, and the ability was there to achieve bigger things, but they were stymied by the essential inefficiency of their mathematical language. You can only do so much with III, VII and MCMXCLIII. Not to mention the obvious omission of not only a sign for zero, but the entire concept of zero being a number you can work with.

 

The Roman omission of zero says nothing about the ability of their mathematicians to comprehend the concept, if it was explained to them - as later generations of Italian mathematicians would show.

 

...but here's my point:

 

If we compare the functionality of current language with the functionality of mathematical language, might we be missing a concept such as "zero" in our verbal language, where the understanding of more advanced concepts is rendered impossible because we don't have the verbal analogy of "zero"? And how would we even know that we're missing it? The Romans had no inkling of a better numeral system until they got it from the East.

 

So, to plug in to the question raised in the original post, could our current language actually be a detriment to advanced thought, like the Roman numeral system was a detriment to advanced mathematics?

[lemit]

I am pleased to see mathematics included in this discussion. They are definitely a form of language and it is only by including them that we can fully frame the questions.

 

This post is going to be a jumble. I apologize for that. Many thoughts are competing for attention and do not seem willing to wait for me to organize them, so I'm going to try to get them from the electronics of my brain to the electronics of word processing and then to the electronics of the internet in some rational order, but I'll probably fail.

 

Those electronics are the first thing. Is the thought process different in humans from the thought process of artificial intelligence? Are we processing individual pieces of information? Do we create complicated thought from discrete pieces of information labeled and categorized by language? If we do, could there be a different way to label the discrete pieces of information? Are we limiting ourselves? Are we saying "What I can see of the earth appears flat, therefore the earth must be flat?" ("What I think is formatted in language, therefore thought must equal language.")

 

An inherent problem in writing about the failings of language is that I am taking the position that the way I am explaining things, language, is maybe not the only way to explain things. If I succeed, I might possibly succeed so well that I will illustrate the power of language. That is not my purpose. What I am hoping for is an eloquent argument against ascribing special powers to eloquence.

 

There is a philosophical question that goes back to Meno's cave, but is mostly, I think, Empiricist. This question is about labels, or shadow vs. substance. Would we say that, for example, a tree falling in the forest doesn't make a sound if one person does not tell another it does? Does art or music or film become complex, nuanced, and intelligent only when a critic explains it? Is the question of cognitive thought different?

 

(By the way, Shadow won the court case; Substance won in the ring, by TKO, as had been expected.)

 

I don't think Kluge Hans has been mentioned here. (Clever Hans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) One thing that is often ignored is that Hans was using a complex form of understanding, just not one that mimics human language. In other words, the limitation is not in Hans, who was using his intelligence; it is in our failing to understand the nature of that intelligence and our response, which is equivalent to that of a group of chimps, hooting and throwing sticks.

 

Language is an artifice, a system of labeling the world around us and inside us. At its best, it accurately labels reality. It can fail us, as it did in the case of Kluge Hans. If real thought is complex conditioned response to our environment, as I think can be demonstrated, then the labels we apply to those responses come after the responses; they can't be the source of the responses.

 

You know, I don't think I should apologize for the random nature of this post. The process to which I'm trying to give some legitimacy is messy, at worst the primordial soup of intelligence, at best a dark matter of thought, an unexplored contintent that will not go away just because we can't see it as easily as, say, Russia can be seen from Juneau, Alaska. (I may have taken illustration a little too far there.)

 

As I edit this, I see it is a repetition of the same concept, an attack on deep-seated notions of what it means to be human and just how important it is to be human. It is an extension of Lillian Roybal Rose's (Welcome to LillianRoybalRose.com) concepts of understanding, a complexity that, like learning to drive a car, can be realized even by humans, the ultimate earthly example of those in power.

 

There is something going on beyond our traditional understanding of the interrelationships of language and thought. I'd like to explore it. Anybody else?

 

--lemit

 

p.s. The more I think about it, the more I come to believe that equating thought and language might well best be explored in my Pseudoscience thread.

[sman]

A lot of thinking does not require language.

storage and recall of visual images,

all "feelings" and pure emotions, like pleasure and pain,

the spacial calculations required to throw and catch and do gymnastics,

development of muscular skills,

making music.

 

But much of human thought, even when you are NOT conscious of using words, does in fact involve languaging. Our world is full of things -- many of those things have no physical existence except as concepts -- concepts which are defined entirely in terms of languaging and semantic structures. For example, our schedules, and obligations, and relationships, and property, and status, and judgements, and needs, and desires, and fashion, and self-image, and so forth.

 

I agree with everything here, accept your examples. Thoughts about kinship, status, needs, desires, self-image...are all represented in the other primates. Possesion is more debateable, but I think thoughts about posession in the human line is probably as old as bipedalism, which is an order of magnitude more ancient than the most liberal estimates for language.

 

But I think you're right that there are examples of thought, or concepts, that are only made available to us through language.

 

Consider the ancient Romans, if you will.

 

They were awesome architects and engineers, but their maths were insufficient to be applicable to much more.

 

The will was there, and the ability was there to achieve bigger things, but they were stymied by the essential inefficiency of their mathematical language. You can only do so much with III, VII and MCMXCLIII. Not to mention the obvious omission of not only a sign for zero, but the entire concept of zero being a number you can work with.

 

The Roman omission of zero says nothing about the ability of their mathematicians to comprehend the concept, if it was explained to them - as later generations of Italian mathematicians would show.

 

This example passes the chronology test. Language definately predates mathematics, and mathematics may very well depend on it. But math is a recent invention, that language supplied lables for as soon as the concepts became available. The Romans had no words, nor concepts for, "distributor", "carborator", "catalytic converter"... and this correlates with their apparent ineptitude in the field of auto mechanics.:)

 

The most extreme version of this is found in isolated tribes, like the Hottentots or Yammomammo, who have no words for numbers beyond "one", "two" and "many". But as soon as these people are introduced to western cargo et al, they immediately develope a full-blown counting system, whether based on thier own language or the local pidgin.

 

There's more to languaging than meets the eye.

 

Indeed! But I really think cognition is the engine of language. The illusion that it is the other way may come from the fact that language can catalyze congnition, as in mathematics. (I don't know if this allusion to chemistry is the best way to put it, but there it is. If linguists can use "speciate", I can use "catalyze".)

[Galapagos]

Haven't read this one yet, but I'm placing it here both as a bookmark and because I know some of you mind/language nerds will dig it:

Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

[Larv]

Thanks, Galapagos, I will read that one, too. I like what she says, and I tend to agree with her.

 

Perhaps the OP question can be approached by using Helen Keller as a case in point. She managed to find an external reality by learning to use language as a tool. She possessed human consciousness of course without the benefit of language, and she must have had thoughts without the benefit of language before Annie Sullivan, her teacher, came along. Or did she?

 

She must have leaned a “language” that comes with touching and caring and caressing, assuming her mother’s love was felt and assimilated by Helen. As such, she must have had thoughts before she knew anything about the symbolic language of humans. And for her to overcome her handicaps she must have been highly intelligent.

 

This leaves me in a quandary about the importance or predominance of the metaphors in our symbolic language. Clearly, we gain advantages by using them. Ordinary people cannot survive without them. But Helen Keller seems to tell us that her natural intelligence enabled thoughts to occur in her brain before she had any knowledge of symbolic language and its metaphors.

 

Given that, the only counter argument I can think of is the possible difference between a thought and an experience. I seem to want to believe that they are two different things: we assemble thoughts from our experiences. Thoughts are reflective; experiences are sensory occasions. Or not? Did Helen Keller have only experiences before she learned a symbolic language? Which brings us back to the OP question: How much does language and all of its metaphors influence our thinking?

[Miranda]

Haven't read this one yet, but I'm placing it here both as a bookmark and because I know some of you mind/language nerds will dig it:

 

This article was posted by another member in this thread.

 

I happen to think there's some flaws in her article, but that's just me.

[Pyrotex]

Interesting thread! Kudos all round......

If we compare the functionality of current language with the functionality of mathematical language, might we be missing a concept such as "zero" in our verbal language, where the understanding of more advanced concepts is rendered impossible because we don't have the verbal analogy of "zero"? And how would we even know that we're missing it? The Romans had no inkling of a better numeral system until they got it from the East.

 

So, to plug in to the question raised in the original post, could our current language actually be a detriment to advanced thought, like the Roman numeral system was a detriment to advanced mathematics?

Boerseun, you're brilliant.

 

Yes, of course, our ability to comprehend (in its most profound sense) is entirely limited by the "building blocks" of cognitive thought with which we DO our comprehending.

 

Even Newton could not fully comprehend light, because he had no concept of "wave". It was only after Liebnitz and others worked out the nature of a "wave" and its attendent behavior, and the math that described it behavior, that Science could comprehend light.

 

The human mind often comprehends via the utilization of Metaphors and Analogies. We have to already have metaphors and analogies powerful enough to use as semantic "building blocks" before we can stack them up to explain a new phenomenon.

 

I believe Quantum Mechanics and sub-atomic Particle Physics have run into exactly these barriers. We are grasping for metaphors: strings, branes, fottacytes, mortistats, befuddling pins -- but none of them have sufficient power and explicity to carry our comprehension further.

 

Language is everything.

[Pyrotex]

I agree with everything here, accept your examples. Thoughts about kinship, status, needs, desires, self-image...are all represented in the other primates. Possesion is more debateable, but I think thoughts about posession in the human line is probably as old as bipedalism, which is an order of magnitude more ancient than the most liberal estimates for language...

I am well aware that most people would agree with you. At first.

 

But just because a chimp has a mother does not mean that the chimp comprehends her unique status as "my mother", nor is able to abstract to the general class of "mother", nor is able to deduce that some other chimp also "has a mother".

 

Our chimp may show lots of affection and spend lots of time around its mother. That may be entirely because he was in physical contact with her for the first X months of its life.

 

The concept of "mother" is an entirely semantic concept, requiring a sophisticated language engine. My other examples require the same. A chimp may "have" status (from OUR point of view), but the chimp does not comprehend status. It only knows, don't kick the big gray chimp under the tree. A chimp may "desire" sex or food, but that chimp cannot comprehend the abstract state of desire. A chimp may behave and react in ways that WE HUMANS would anthropomorphize as "love" and "hate". But the chimp does not comprehend either, or have abstract mental states or verbal symbols for either.

 

My cat, Harley, jumps on the bed, purrs and rubs against my hand. I say, "Harley loves me!" But Harley doesn't have a language engine. Harley FEELS certain things. Harley has fear sometimes and has pleasure sometimes, and has been operantly conditioned to associate certain actions with certain feelings. Harley associates rubbing my hand with getting scratched and rubbed, and associates that with pleasant skin sensations, and associates that with purring.

 

But Harley has no abstract concept of "love". If I wanted to get really picky, I would say Harley does not love me because Harley cannot comprehend the concept "love". But I DO love Harley, and I love it when he rubs my hand, and I say to myself, "awwwww, does Harley want some loving??" and I scratch his head and he purrs, and THAT FEELS TO ME just like "Harley loves me". And I can comprehend that. And it gives me pleasure, too.

 

Picture of Harley attached.

[Pyrotex]

...Helen Keller as a case in point. She managed to find an external reality by learning to use language as a tool. She possessed human consciousness of course without the benefit of language, and she must have had thoughts without the benefit of language before Annie Sullivan, her teacher, came along. Or did she?...

Helen Keller was often asked, what did you think about before Sullivan taught you language? Her answer was that she had no memories of thinking about anything. She did not "think" at all, in the way she eventually learned to do. She felt. She touched. She hungered and tasted. She hurt and feared. She experienced. She yearned. But she had neither an external nor an internal world until Sullivan taught her that first "symbol" for water.

[Miranda]

Helen Keller was often asked, what did you think about before Sullivan taught you language? Her answer was that she had no memories of thinking about anything. She did not "think" at all, in the way she eventually learned to do. She felt. She touched. She hungered and tasted. She hurt and feared. She experienced. She yearned. But she had neither an external nor an internal world until Sullivan taught her that first "symbol" for water.

 

Excuse me while I attempt to re-trace what we're talking about, as I have gotten a bit lost. Are we trying to determine whether one can have cognitive function prior to language, or symbolic thought prior to language? I would assume that the latter would only come after the onset of language, but that we surely had 'thought' processes beforehand.

[lemit]

Excuse me while I attempt to re-trace what we're talking about, as I have gotten a bit lost. Are we trying to determine whether one can have cognitive function prior to language, or symbolic thought prior to language? I would assume that the latter would only come after the onset of language, but that we surely had 'thought' processes beforehand.

 

There are, I think, a couple of things going on. The title of the thread is something I agree with. Language does frame our thoughts.

 

The idea that language is a necessary precursor to thought is one I've always disagreed with. What's wrong with the idea of symbolic thought prior to language? There are all kinds of symbols in the world, not all of them linguistic. Do we not frame concepts of place, self, family, pain, pleasure, guilt, joy, hope, and fear on non-linguistic symbols? And do not those concepts, in various combinations, give us a pretty good basis for thought? Or am I the only one who developed in that way, putting those things together before I had language to apply to them?

 

I've done all right with language, but I prefer nonverbal visual and aural mediums of communication. Maybe that's why any time I'm at a party, I seek out the household pets to associate with. I seem to be able to get along with them more easily.

 

If I am the only one who learned in this way, I can accept that. Helen Keller's story is certainly exceptional. Maybe mine is too. I guess I really would like to know if I'm alone. I'll let the cat, guinea pigs, birds, squirrels, and raccoon know what the answer is.

 

Thanks.

 

--lemit

[Pyrotex]

Excuse me while I attempt to re-trace what we're talking about, as I have gotten a bit lost. Are we trying to determine whether one can have cognitive function prior to language, or symbolic thought prior to language? I would assume that the latter would only come after the onset of language, but that we surely had 'thought' processes beforehand.

Well, it all depends on what you mean by "thought", doesn't it? :cup:

 

The books I read (like "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel C. Dennett) seem to agree that the word "symbol" makes no sense at all except in the context of a linguistic system that manipulates symbols.

 

The cow has no symbol for grass in its "mind". It recognizes grass, responds to grass, eats grass, interacts with grass, and associates grass with internal feelings, like hunger, satiation, pleasure. There can be a lot of mental activity going on that responds to grass, but it's not symbolic thinking, cognitive thinking or linguistic thinking.

 

Cognitive generally implies that you know what you're doing. If I'm engaged in cognitive thinking, I know that I'm thinking, I know what it is that I'm thinking about, I know the goal of my thinking, I intentionally engage in that thinking, and I know when I have reached a conclusion and why.

[lemit]

I've had a chance to think. I was out driving, with a lot of sensory, non-linguistic input, when it occurred to me that Helen Keller is a perfect example of what I've been trying to say. Of course language gave her a world. It filled a void, a void none of the rest of us has. We all have nonverbal input into our senses from birth. If, as in my case, the nonverbal input is far enough ahead of the verbal input, we form thoughts and ideas without language. On the opposite extreme, Helen Keller had absolutely no chance to form thoughts and ideas. She had none of that multi-sensory input the rest of us have. The objects were there, but without the context the rest of the humanity has used to inform language.

 

The reason learning language was so tortuous for Helen Keller is that she hadn't had the senses to make her start to learn the world, including those strange sounds, and had not wanted to learn. That's really about the only way we do learn, out of desire or necessity.

 

I'm glad Helen Keller was available to support my point of view, although I'm not sure that's why she was introduced into the thread.

 

--lemit