Blog 6 - The Language of Thought

Steven Pinker is coming out with a new book! I suppose I should be more excited than I really am, because, although I’ve heard his name thrown about a lot and I’ve heard good things about his writing, particularly The Blank Slate, sadly I’ve never read any of his books. So, when I saw 3 articles about his upcoming work The Stuff of Thought, I decided that I should take a peek.

When I started reading the article, I was struck by Pinker’s seemingly larger-than-life presence in academic circles. He’s described as “academia’s rock star” (to be entirely fair, this designation should have been no surprise, since after all he was an assistant professor at Stanford from 1981-1982). As I kept reading, however, I found myself more and more fascinated by the subject matter of his book.

Pinker claims, among many other things, that although we think using language, we are not, as Nietzsche termed it, trapped in “the prison house of language.” Pinker disagrees with Wittgenstein’s theory that “the limits of [his] language mean the limits of [his] world.” Instead, Pinker argues that although languages may be limited in some senses since they are human constructs, we can work beyond these limitations by co-opting language structures to do things aside from their original purpose. To use less technical and verbose jargon, we naturally do things such as thinking metaphorically. Pinker gives the example of how we often think of time in terms of space, thing along the lines of “We’ve come a long way together.” We thereby can put abstract concepts, such as time, in terms of concrete and familiar things, such as space and distance.

While the idea of using metaphors to expand our capacity for thought certainly grabbed my attention, I found the first part of Pinker’s claim even more intriguing. Namely, to what degree do people use language to think? Many seem to implicitly answer this question by saying that people always think in languages. For instance, the 2001 Swiss National Census form had a question “In which language do you think?” Today, I tried to think without using language a couple times. Despite my best efforts, I always lapsed back into thinking in English (except perhaps when I felt the deep pain of seeing my beloved Red Sox lose). I don’t think that I can formulate rational thoughts without words. Without verbally based language, my thoughts are merely vague notions. Because for as long as I can remember I have thought rationally in a language, I previously assumed that everyone has had a similar experience.

Yet, when I read a commenter on one of the articles, I realized that my experience with thought might not be universal. The commenter pointed out that there are “jungle kids” who don’t display any power of speech or language. Despite their unfamiliarity with speech and language, I think that these “jungle kids” must be able to think rationally, just like deaf and mute people who have never had any exposure to spoken language. In fact, an abstract for the scientific article “Thinking without Language. Psychological Implications of Deafness: By Hans G. Furth” indicates that there several “impressive clinical and experimental findings lend support to the hypothesis that ‘intellectual functioning cannot depend basically upon language.’”

After having read these articles, I think that people don’t all think using language. However, I think that people do tend to use symbolic structures to think about the world around them. According to that same abstract, “all thinking activity which is directly concerned with events not perceptually present employs symbols.” In other words, to think beyond the immediate present, we, as humans, all use symbols to some degree. I (and I think the majority of us) use a verbal language as the primary system of symbols with which we think. So, in studying these languages that we use as symbolic structures, we are studying the mechanism by which we think.

See you all tomorrow!

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http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/science/article2645198.ece
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2651465.ece
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/science/article2637228.ece
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/longbio.html
www.hyponoesis.org/download/Thinking_and_Language.pdf
http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=paq.036.0617a