We could also cut down on the clutter if the SDMB would implement a feature that scanned for phrases like “reading people’s minds” and pop up little warning windows that pseudoscientific claptrap will not be received well on a message board dedicated to fighting ignorance.
I’ll stop there before this turns into a Pit rant. If you want to continue the conversation, we’ll be happy to meet you there.
Cervaise, lad, steady up there! I read the Honorable Poster’s remarks, I think they are posited for thier intrinsic interest, and fulfill that modest intent well enough. Nothing there that demands a stern rebuke.
Take it a step further: if there were any sort of mechanism for detecting thoughts, it would most likely be repressed. Like the aforementioned psycho-guy, the noise factor would be confusing. So: normal people don’t hear thoughts/read minds. Who does?
Crazy people. Ever wonder why “hearing voices” is such a prevalent symptom of mental breakdown, psychosis, whatever?
Now keep in mind: I have no plan to present this case before the Review Board for the Journal of Pious Science. It is conjecture, interesting or not for its own sake.
Without conjecture, the facts would never be found in the first place. And the facts, when we do find them, are frequently more astounding than our wildest conjectures.
Thank you, City Gent, that books sounds like an interesting read.
You are a rare and precious gem, sua. 
To respond to a few posts:
Humans are the only animals known to use tools with any sort of situationally modifiable dexterity: birds and even termites build marvelous nests, but they do so instinctually, as spiders weave their webs. I have observed apes fish for termites with sticks, and even wipe their butts with leaves, but that’s a far cry from what our hominid ancestors did with tools.
Neither apes nor any other vertebrates exhibit a right/left preference for forelimb manipulation. Some apes seem to have a preference for reaching, but it is individual and not species generalized, and the actual manipulative actions are clumsy compared to human manipulation. The development of unilateral dominance for manipulation seems to be directly associated with the development of cerebral hemispheric dominance for language.
3)Cetaceans do seem to have a robust language ability that may even be greater than that of chimps and gorillas. They obviously do not exhibit handedness, since they lack hands… They manipulate objects with their snouts, for the most part. They did derive from terestrial vertebrates.
To come at the subject in historical rather than thread order … Sofa King wrote
Probably The Wild Boy of Aveyron by Harlan Lane (published in the UK in 1977), or something derived from it. This is the story of a boy, estimated to be 12 or 13, who was found living wild in the south of France in 1800. Sent to Paris, he was named Victor and taught by one Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, though as suggested above his education was only partially successful and he never quite developed into a “normal” adult. The case was well-known before Lane - I believe Truffaut’s 1969 film L’Enfant Sauvage is based on it - and Lane’s book is mainly concerned with contemporary ideas about Victor rather than modern ones, but it’s well worth reading by anybody interested in these issues.
There are several similar cases of children deprived of a normal exposure to language being studied and educated. Helen Keller is the obvious example where this process was, by most standards, successful and it’s quite clear from her own account that she was concious prior to being taught language. A similar case is that of Laura Bridgman, who was the subject of a New Yorker book review in the last week or two (it was on their website, but they appear not to allow access to stuff later than the current issue).
The OP by JFMichael expresses a common, but naive, view that thinking = talking to oneself in one’s native language. This was the common academic view at one time; Lane cites Condillac as an influential proponent and Itard as a follower. However, probably no philosopher or cognitive scientist currently holds to this view. A useful demolition of the position is given at length in chapter three of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. Basically, cases like Victor, Keller, Bridgman and newborns in general show that it’s quite possible to think without being able to talk. There are also far too many cases - painting, music, theoretical physics etc. - where there is clear intellegent content, but where the practitioners (or anybody else) find it difficult to articulate what is going on in conventional language.
The argument about being able to “think in a foreign language” is misleading. In learning most tasks one passes from the condition of having to deliberately think about what one’s doing to “just doing it”. The shift is from processing the task conciously to processing it subconciously. It’s not that, e.g., one starts to think in French, it’s that one becomes unaware that one has to translate into it. In just the same way that people can drive cars without thinking.
A more subtle, and controversial, issue is that of “mentalese”. The suggestion here is that we think in some language, but this isn’t our native language. Perhaps newborns think in this language, but have to learn how to translate from mentalese to English, Spanish or whatever. Thus, for example, Pinker concludes
“People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in the language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languages… But compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others … Now it could be that English speakers think in some kind of simplified and annotated quasi-English [and Apaches quasi-Apache] … [but] it is likely that they are the same; a universal mentalese.
Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mantalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects.”
On the other hand, some people think that mentalese doesn’t exist. Thinking is thinking, though the invention of human languages is a convenient expressive tool that our brains exploit for efficient thinking in some instances. Daniel Dennett’s an example of this school.
Don’t you ever get tired of singing that same song? I’m beginning to seriously believe that all you do is troll around looking for somebody to start a disagreement with just so you can post that stupid link.
:rolleyes:
Considering that there were humans on this planet for several hundred thousand years who had little or no language but were capable of tool use, artistic expression and organized cooperative behavior, there is certainly grounds for the existence of some sort of “mentalese” mode of thought. Tool use and language do not require consciousness or necessarily propagate it, as seen in chimps and other higher order mammals.
Language originally shaped consciousness quite dramatically, but more recently conciousness now shapes language.
Well, yes. On the other hand, one can argue that the existance of such activity for so long in the absence of language is evidence that thinking doesn’t involve mentalese. If we were successfully talking to ourselves for so long, what delayed us realising that we could talk to each other? People who don’t believe in mentalese see thinking as a non-linguistic activity (by definition) and so can easily envisage intellegent, concious behaviour in humans prior to the invention of language.