Is it possible to have non-linguistic thoughts?

[Wyote]

When it comes to philosophy questions at least, I am always approaching them in the latter way. I just learn and enjoy myself more in that way, than by trying at all costs to be right.

Bonus feature: keeping your sanity

 

[wolly.green]

We discussed a number of papers in the field that made the claim that "All knowledge is inherently social". I think this is an idea that is not exactly linguistic, but is very directly related to linguistics, because language is a sort of inescapable part of socialisation. Our ability to think, to understand our own thinking, is so enmeshed with our education to apply language, that our thinking is inherently social.

I absolutely reject this claim. My objection is that this hypothesis about all knowledge being social is untestable. It is an extremely poor hypothesis, there is actually no hypothesis at all involved, but it is rather, a statement of supposed fact, a personal belief that is being stated as a fact, an assumption about the limits of possibility. Our ability to test the hypothesis is dependent on the limitations of what is being tested, so it can't be tested. My feedback to the class was that because it is impossible to test this hypothesis, that it is impossible to make such a statement that all knowledge is social.

I just wanted to point out that philosophy is not science. Neither is mathematics. The statement you are objecting to is actually philosophy, so testability is quite irrelevant.

In fact, you successfully refuted it by showing that it contains no explanation. You are correct in suggesting any statement that does not contain an explanation can be summarily rejected. This is because there are literally an infinite number of ad hoc modification that can be made. If you cannot explain one of them, you have absolutely no reason to choose one over all the others.

 

[invisible]

I just wanted to point out that philosophy is not science. Neither is mathematics. The statement you are objecting to is actually philosophy, and not science. So testability is quite irrelevant.

In fact, you have successfully refuted it by showing that it contains no explanation. You are correct in suggesting any statement that does not contain an explanation can be summarily rejected.

It's just my opinion that philosophy and science don't exist in separate worlds. I provided an alternative perspective from another discipline.

 

[Elis]

Thought doesn't exceed language, instead I'd care to say that language is much broader than just verbal communication. Abstract thoughts or spatial awareness I think can be expressed in a language of its own. Now if this holds up to any strict definitions I have no idea.

 

[sprinkles]

Anything can be a language. Does that mean anything is a language though?

 

[sprinkles]

Also if thought is language then all thoughts should be perfectly explainable using the very language which they're supposed to be made of.

 

[Elis]

Also if thought is language then all thoughts should be perfectly explainable using the very language which they're supposed to be made of.

I haven't really given this much thought, but I suppose so in a technical sense. I think it's generally hard to verbalize thoughts from our internal logic without first translating it into a more verbal language.

 

[sprinkles]

I haven't really given this much thought, but I suppose so in a technical sense. I think it's generally hard to verbalize thoughts from our internal logic without first translating it into a more verbal language.

I think the main feature of language is communication to others. Wittgenstein also said that a private language which can only be understood by one person would be incoherent.

There might be some proto language there because anything really can be a language, but I think it takes some work to actually make it a true language.

 

[Elis]

I think the main feature of language is communication to others. Wittgenstein also said that a private language which can only be understood by one person would be incoherent.

There might be some proto language there because anything really can be a language, but I think it takes some work to actually make it a true language.

I don't really think coherency should matter much to the definition. Personally I'd separate language from communication, at least in the sense that it has to be communicating with others. I think that's too much of an artificial bound, but for any practical purposes maybe.

 

[sprinkles]

I don't really think coherency should matter much to the definition. Personally I'd separate language from communication, at least in the sense that it has to be communicating with others. I think that's too much of an artificial bound, but for any practical purposes maybe.

It might be possible, but what can you do with a language that isn't coherent? Other than maybe experience it?

I mean I can think of some things since I have an affinity for gibberish but my ideas might seem quite out there for most people.

 

[Elis]

It might be possible, but what can you do with a language that isn't coherent? Other than maybe experience it?

I mean I can think of some things since I have an affinity for gibberish but my ideas might seem quite out there for most people.

I skimmed through your previous posts and I relate to your idea on how you solve problems and when you say you can solve for something faster when you don't have to put it in words. Weather we call this internal language or something else that's what I'd say it's used for. Sometimes when I'm faced with a statement or situation I'll think to myself does this make sense. I often don't go through each step "verbally" by annotating words to my thoughts, instead I just -and I can't explain this in words- I just think it through sweepingly. Sometimes I'll go through it afterwards because I don't trust my own instinct on this, but it is generally something I feel I can rely upon.

Bit of a tangent there, basically I think this might not be something useful to express outwards but rather something useful when it's used to more quickly think something through. But rather I wouldn't call this internal language as something that is either useful or isn't. I just see it as how we interpret things, and if it is incoherent then that just means it is ever changing. I think more structured languages (as in our shared verbal languages) lays down rules that we can work by to help navigate our thoughts more in a more lucid fashion.

Another tangent: I think language helps us shape our thoughts, for good and bad.

 

[sprinkles]

@Elis
I see. Do you think you need to understand your own thoughts, or do you just know them because they're yours?

 

[Ginny]

So perhaps we could relax the definition a little, and take what “I know” to mean what “I think”

That is not exaclty possible for everyone. Because what you think at any one time is still less than the knowledge that you have. What you can do, though, is expand your knowledge by putting your knowledge in a different perspective to create new thoughts, and therewith new knowledge.

What I mean is that what you know can't be what you think, because everything you know influences what you think and the other way around.

But let’s maybe define language as a socially constructed system of signs that represents the objects of the world and structures the propositions via which we speak about those objects. I think the key here might be whether, when we think about an object, we really only think about that single object, or whether we only ever think about it in relation to other objects, the concatenation of which is the thought (the “logical picture of the world” in W’s words). Maybe directing consciousness towards the representation of a single object, just like the landscape, is not really a thought, because it is not really about anything at all, it is “just” a representation, like a mental replay of a sensory experience.

Maybe we do that through language. The heater and the cat are things/beings in the world grasped as objects in the mind through the signs (“cat”, “heater”) that we have at our disposal to represent not just each of them separately as mere mental representations, but how they interact with one another in a completely virtual way, by means of signs and through the linguistic apparatus that connects signs together – call it logic or grammar. Of course, when we “perform” such thinking, we are not constantly telling ourselves under our breaths that “this is a cat and he’s now jumping on the heater to have a nice long cozy sleep”. But it’s possible that we are implicitly operating from the very beginning, without realising it, with an understanding of the heater and the cat as signs (linguistic signs) that can interact with each other through the grammar that connects them. And if we can find a way to show that all objects, circles included, fall into that category of signs, and that only in that way does one articulate thoughts and string them with other thoughts, maybe W has a point.

I do believe that our minds have an inherent form of grammar that helps us communicate among our species (as in the fauna), only we have expanded our language to talk of things that are intangible, we gave them names. Not just mere displacement, or double articulation, or any other officially language-defining feature. (I mean the Role and Reference Grammar, based on Noam Chomsky's work on universal grammar.)
Coming from there, we have an established framework of innerspecies communication, which structures our thoughts so we are able to communicate them. But language is not only comprised of grammar, but also a lexicon, both which is different wherever you are on the globe, but we can still learn every other language. Therefore, judging by the way we are able to communicate through language barriers, there must be an inherent understanding of the other's mind's structure, which leads to the assumption that there is a UG. However, the thing that complicates things is that, while the base components can be superimposed over any present data, not all base components are present in all languages and also in different compositions.
This is how every language changes the way we think. But there is an underlying way of thinking by which we are enabled to communicate cross-culturally. Thus, there must also be an inherent structure of thought underneath the language-level. I think it may be more of a biological (or neurological) phenomenon.

I should add that to my mind, this understanding of the relationship between language and thought would in no way necessarily “blunt” creativity and original thinking. You could even suggest that the more numerous the objects that interact with one another in thought, and the more complex the grammar that provides the rules under which the interaction takes place, perhaps the more likely the thoughts strung together are to produce novel insights. Language does not limit thought as such, it only provides the boundaries beyond which a thought isn’t a thought, but a mere phantasm. But perhaps the phantasm can be objectified into a sign by means of language, and subsequently made to interact with other objects in thought, to produce a novel insight, perhaps even a new word. Here language really seems omnipresent and inseparable from the activity of thinking: the “voice of thought”, endlessly extending along with thought.

Language is a means of structuralisation, but as I already argued, it is merely superficial and does not impact that we think, but only what we think. There must be a source of thought, and we need to find it.

@Ren
Also some times a cat is just a cat. When you see an actual cat on an actual heater, it's not symbolic, it's a thing being itself. It might become a symbol when you recall it later as memory or knowledge, but I'd argue it's only trivially a symbol for the sole reason that your memory is not the actual cat.

This is a very language-like thought. A little like words, which are comprised of morphemes, an image may be disected into its constituent parts, which grow ever more smaller. I could have mentioned grammar here too, but morphology concerns itself with word-structure as well, and not only the arrangement of words. We could go ever more deeper, without ever reaching an answer that lies in structure.


What you haven't thought of, @Ren, is that there must have been means of thought before there was communication, or words and signs to communicate with. Otherwise, we wouldn't have any means of communication now.

 

[Elis]

@Elis
I see. Do you think you need to understand your own thoughts, or do you just know them because they're yours?

This was a very good question, I don't know. I have no idea what it means to actually understand your own thoughts.

 

[sprinkles]

This was a very good question, I don't know. what does it mean to actually understand your own thoughts?

Well to understand something you have to make an inference about it's fundamental meaning. Understanding a thought would be concluding the meaning of it separately from the thought itself.

In other words, do thoughts convey meaning, or are they meaning unto themselves?

 

[Ginny]

In other words, do thoughts convey meaning, or are they meaning unto themselves?

I think they make up meaning, as a sentence does, but contains other meaningful elements, i.e. pieces of knowledge you possess.

 

[Lady Jolanda]

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. All I know is what I have words for." Ludwig Wittgenstein

What we are actually asking here, is: "Is language necessary and sufficient for thought".
And then we can ask, how do you define language, and how do you define thought.
Now let's define thought as our cognitive capacities.
Let's define language as human language.
Say, you want to start using language, as one does as a toddler.
A first word then. "Mama".
Mama is something, an object, in the other world.
But in order to talk about this object, the child must already have identified and isolated objects into 'concepts' with certain properties in his mind that correspond to the objects in the outer world.
If this 'ordering' if you will hasn't taken place, there is nothing to talk about.
Therefore, thought precedes language and therefore language cannot give rise to thought, as that violates causality.

 

[Elis]

Well to understand something you have to make an inference about it's fundamental meaning. Understanding a thought would be concluding the meaning of it separately from the thought itself.

In other words, do thoughts convey meaning, or are they meaning unto themselves?

That is way abstract for me to tackle. At some level thoughts manifest themselves in the physical world. In terms of data it can be examined. meaning is interpretation, so thoughts themselves I wouldn't say have inherit meaning.

I can't answer your previous question without some premises that I really haven't thought through. I want to recall it's been argued that the human brain isn't as singular as one might think, in that light what does it mean that "I" understand my thoughts?

Is it when I can in a verbal language explain my thoughts to examine them, or is it enough that I can think them through in a non-verbal language. This is really beyond me at this point.

What are your thoughts on the matter? @sprinkles

 

[Ginny]

meaning is interpretation, so thoughts themselves I wouldn't say have inherit meaning.

why?

 

[sprinkles]

@Elis
I ask because I don't think knowing is the same as understanding.

For example there's this game that I play in Japanese where I don't understand the buttons but I know what they do. As in the buttons have a kanji on them which I can't read, but I still know the purpose of them. So really I don't know the linguistic meaning of the button, but I know the applied purpose of it.