Hello!
I’m trying to write an essay on whether it is possible to think without language or not. I have been able to think of a whole bunch of reasons as for why it is possible, but, ironically enough, only 1 reason as to why it is not possible. The argument is that the original founders of language must have been able to think and make sense of things before they created the “language.”
I would be very appreciative if somebody could help me think of some other reasons as to WHY IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO THINK WITHOUT A LANGUAGE.
Why, yes, obviously he knows what he is talking about, but I only have a few more days to do this, and getting the book and reading it is something I definitely don’t have time for…
If you, or anyone else, can manage to think of a reason right now, however, it would be AMAZING!
According to the very influential early 20th century psychologist J.B. Watson, the founder of the Behaviorist school of psychology that dominated the science for half a century, thinking is nothing but subvocal, silent, talking to oneself, and he thought it ought to be possible to detect people’s thoughts by measuring slight movements of their larynx.
This theory (together with most of Watson’s other ideas) has been thoroughly discredited, however.
Some thinking is almost certainly possible without language. However, it is very plausible to believe that language makes much more sophisticated forms of thinking possible than are possible without it. Conscious thought depends on mental representation, and the only form of conscious mental representation that is not linguistic in form seems to be mental imagery (in various sense modes), which, by itself seems to be a an extremely limited medium for thought. The only form of thought that imagery by itself seems to allow for is simple association of ideas, which will not get you very far. Language allows for much more fine-grained representations than images seem to (how would you tell an image of “John is smiling,” apart from one of “John is happy,” or, come to that, one of “John was happy”?) And it also allows for the building up of complex structures of concepts, something that, again, does not seem to be possible with mere image-thinking. This is not universally agreed - some cognitive scientists think that image-thinking (or “perceptual symbol systems”) may be much more powerful than is generally believed - but there is very good reason to think that having a language vastly increases one’s thinking power, and very likely accounts for human beings’ ability to dominate other animals.
One thing that always got me is that as a native English speaker, I can’t look at written English text and not read it. I.e. when I look at the sunblock bottle currently on my desk, some unconscious part of my brain tells me that the bottle says “sunblock” without me having to think, “well, that’s an S, followed by a U, followed by a N, &c… so it must mean…” Reading English is so internalized in my brain that I can’t even look at English text without reading it.
Conversely when looking at Chinese (which I don’t read even a little of) text, I process it just like any other non-text marks on paper. But presumably native Chinese readers read Chinese in the same subconscious automatic way that I read English.
Obviously I wasn’t born knowing any language and at some point I learned English so these aren’t fundamental functions of the human brain, even though English reading feels unconscious now. So I imagine that my English inner monologue, no matter how natural it feels now, could have arisen from a blank slate.
What’s really annoying is when you glance at something and trap a few words in your head, and then can’t figure out where you just saw those words, so you have to look all around the room to find what it was.
Yep, there’s your problem. As Candyman says, there is no reason why it would not be possible to think without language, because it is in fact possible.
However, there is some evidence that the kind of thinking we do without language is pretty different from the thinking we can do with it. Check out the podcast of the excellent episode “Words” of the program “Radiolab” (transcript here). The portion at the end with Susan Schaller, author of A Man Without Words, is particularly interesting, because she provides an account of someone who went from being languageless to having language, but the whole program is relevant.
I’d research your prof before you go into that territory. I have no doubt that the man in Schaller’s book has ‘language’, but he wouldn’t sign like a native speaker.
Does your professor want you to answer if we can think or just what kinds of thinking? Stream of consciousness? Logic? Somewhere high on Bloom’s taxonomy? The short answer is yes, of course. I’ve worked with non-verbal kids and I can assure you they most certainly think - but keep in mind that some people, deaf included, are more likely to think ‘in pictures’. ASL is also a spatial language; it makes sense it would be easier to pick up past the ‘sensitive period’. I haven’t read that book (but thanks Heart of Dorkness, it’s on my list now! :)), but I do know The Master answered this.
The first thing that I thought of after reading the OP was my dog. Of course my dog thinks. She makes hundreds of decisions a day: she jumps up on the bed, she jumps down to get a drink, she lays on the top of the couch and looks out the window, she has a few bites of kibble, she “asks” to go outside, she grabs a toy and starts playing with it, she barks like crazy at the door bell, she whines at me to tell me it’s walk time, etc. All of these entail though processes.
Yes, some thinking can be done and is done in images. However, if you want to talk about abstract thought, it usually involves language because all complex concepts can not be expressed, or defined, without having words for it.
And we know this because there are studies that show how different languages partly shape the way people think about things. (Go to www.cracked.com and search for the article - I don’t want to look for it again, do your own work. And yes, cracked is a humor site, but they link to serious studies).
This doesn’t mean that some of the extreme linguistic hypotheses are true; it does mean however, that language shapes our point of view at the world to a larger extent than many people think or imagine.
If you don’t have a word for a concept like Fernweh*, then it becomes more difficult to think about that concept, or even to consider that concept at all. You can, if there is a serious enough need, invent a new word**, import a word from another language, or use a paragraph to describe that concept, but it is an additional step.
The German word for the opposite of homesickness: the longing to go off travelling away into the far lands.
** Which is what many of the famous philosophers end up doing: coining a new concept, and a new word to describe it shorter.
Thinking without language is possible at very basic levels, but isn’t it impossible for a deaf mute child to not end up mentally retarded unless they are given special training early on to develop communication skills? I thought it was well established that all children end up developmentally stunted if they don’t develop SOME kind of language skills? Doesn’t matter if it’s sign language, chinese, english or binary.
Yes, quite right. That’s why it’s important to start teaching sign language to deaf children as early as possible and why the whole oralist movement (teaching them lip-reading instead) was such a harmful idea: learning sign language happens at the same speed as hearing children learn a spoken language, so the deaf child’s mental development progresses normally.
By contrast, learning lip-reading takes up to four times longer (because lip movements are up to 70% indistinguishable), which does delay the development of the brain and higher reasoning functions.
In her autobiography she describes the years until her teacher Anne Sullivan arrived as dark chaotic place.
The difficulties Sullivan had teaching her the concept of language herself - that each object has its own name, or that water in many different forms has the same name - was high and shows how difficult it is for the brain to learn language after the formative period has passed.
I used to have a deaf friend when I was younger who I could somewhat communicate with, but I’ve long since atrophied almost all of my ASL away. But I did agree with what you said… I think the OP needs to investigate the deaf community which deals with these issues constantly, for example before the established ASL, there were segments of the community (including hearing parents) who wanted their deaf children to learn basically deaf english called “fingerspelling”, which is using sign language to spell out every letter of every word using the same grammar as spoken english.
This is a horribly slow and inefficient way to communicate, and is rarely used anymore… modern American Sign Language can be said to be “english based” but really is only vaguely related. I find ASL much more abstract than spoken English from my memories of using it. I could be wrong but I’ve never encountered a sign for the word “The” for example…you really don’t need it and plenty of languages don’t have one.
I think it has been well-known that young children need some kind of language in the formitive years or else they will never mentally develop, I believe when Helen Keller was found to be so intelligent it was fairly shocking to the experts at the time, the norm for deaf-mutes was lifelong severe retardation.
