Jul 7, 2016 03:34 AM
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-link-between-l...ed-herring
EXCERPT: [...] No one is going to admit to murderous thoughts, stinginess or being a jerk. People lie all the time, so why would they stop in front of a psychologist who writes down everything they say? [...] I am in fact relieved to work with subjects that don’t talk. I don’t need to worry about the truth of their utterances. Instead of asking them how often they engage in sex, I just count the occasions. I am perfectly happy being an animal watcher.
Now that I think of it, my distrust of language goes even deeper, because I am also unconvinced of its role in the thinking process. I am not sure that I think in words, and I never seem to hear any inner voices. [...] Am I a man without a conscience, or do I – as the American animal expert Temple Grandin once said about herself – think in pictures? [...] In his 1972 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, tellingly entitled ‘Thoughtless Brutes’, the American philosopher Norman Malcolm stated that ‘the relationship between language and thought must be… so close that it is really senseless to conjecture that people may not have thoughts, and also senseless to conjecture that animals may have thoughts’.
Since we routinely express ideas and feelings in language, we can be forgiven for assigning a role to it, but isn’t it remarkable how often we struggle to find our words? It’s not that we don’t know what we thought or felt, but we just can’t put our verbal finger on it. This would of course be wholly unnecessary if thoughts and feelings were linguistic products to begin with. In that case, we’d expect a waterfall of words!
It is now widely accepted that, even though language assists human thinking by providing categories and concepts, it is not the stuff of thought. We don’t actually need language in order to think. The Swiss pioneer of cognitive development, Jean Piaget, most certainly was not ready to deny thought to preverbal children, which is why he declared cognition to be independent of language. With animals, the situation is similar. As the chief architect of the modern concept of mind, the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, put it in The Language of Thought (1975): ‘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....’
EXCERPT: [...] No one is going to admit to murderous thoughts, stinginess or being a jerk. People lie all the time, so why would they stop in front of a psychologist who writes down everything they say? [...] I am in fact relieved to work with subjects that don’t talk. I don’t need to worry about the truth of their utterances. Instead of asking them how often they engage in sex, I just count the occasions. I am perfectly happy being an animal watcher.
Now that I think of it, my distrust of language goes even deeper, because I am also unconvinced of its role in the thinking process. I am not sure that I think in words, and I never seem to hear any inner voices. [...] Am I a man without a conscience, or do I – as the American animal expert Temple Grandin once said about herself – think in pictures? [...] In his 1972 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, tellingly entitled ‘Thoughtless Brutes’, the American philosopher Norman Malcolm stated that ‘the relationship between language and thought must be… so close that it is really senseless to conjecture that people may not have thoughts, and also senseless to conjecture that animals may have thoughts’.
Since we routinely express ideas and feelings in language, we can be forgiven for assigning a role to it, but isn’t it remarkable how often we struggle to find our words? It’s not that we don’t know what we thought or felt, but we just can’t put our verbal finger on it. This would of course be wholly unnecessary if thoughts and feelings were linguistic products to begin with. In that case, we’d expect a waterfall of words!
It is now widely accepted that, even though language assists human thinking by providing categories and concepts, it is not the stuff of thought. We don’t actually need language in order to think. The Swiss pioneer of cognitive development, Jean Piaget, most certainly was not ready to deny thought to preverbal children, which is why he declared cognition to be independent of language. With animals, the situation is similar. As the chief architect of the modern concept of mind, the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, put it in The Language of Thought (1975): ‘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....’