Is Language a Prerequisite to Thought?

[Modred]

We brought this question up in my Rhetoric class during one of the first classes, but it had passed from my mind until tonight while up till the wee hours of the morning working on a paper for said rhetoric class. While studying an article about the deaf, I discovered that many deaf children pass the prime age for learning language without acquiring any language, be it sign or English, and this affects their ability to develop higher level cognitive functions. In other words, forcing a deaf person to learn an overlly difficult language such as English as opposed to sign could actually cause retardation. The argument resolves that sign could be taught as a first language and English learned as a second langauge, similar to how hispanic children generally learn Spanish at home and pick up English after beginning school.

Anyway, that is merely an introduction to how I arrived at this question. According to the preceding argument, language must be available to a person in order to advance cognitive abilities. Of course, this applies to all persons and not just the deaf. As far as I can tell, language provides a method for organizing thought and reasoning.

But could it be possible to think entirely in abstracts, without the use of language? If so, is there a cap to how far a mind may develop in such an abstract state before the lack of language becomes a handicap?

[GenocideAlive]

Well, my first point would revolve around the technical definition of "language". If it's a method of communication between two people, then I would be inclined to say "yes". There are centers of a child's brain that grow and develop neural networks as they age. However, those networks are formed and defined by use. So if they remain underused or not used, then they atrophy and the child is developmentally stunted ("retardation", as you put it).

By the same token, I'm not sure language itself is as important as stimulus and learning. Children need someone to teach them and interact with them most importantly, to develop the centers of their brain dedicated to stuff like socialization, cognition, perspective, etc. If they have that interaction, they will grow up perfectly normal in almost all aspects, perhaps even superior in some categories since their brains will be almost wholly dedicated to them. As I said earlier, though, they will never be able to fully develop a normal working vocabulary or sense of language once they pass that critical stage.

In most cases, though, it's difficult to find one without the other.

[hammocksleeper]

Someone asked me this question a while ago and I gave a long answer. Well I don't feel like a long answer right now but I will say this:

Language is not prerequisite to thought. You can think without using words in your head. You can even think without using images. In general you can think much more quickly if you don't say sentences in your head of everything that you're thinking. Language is a somewhat dumbed-down way of articulating our very complex thoughts to other people who don't share the same brain.

[The_Maker]

^^^
What hammock said,
I think it was called "Is language required for thought?" or something like that... =/

*Meh*

[kongurous]

http://www.warboards.org/showthread.php?t=8565

The first thread about this particular subject.

[The_Maker]

So this thread is more less a redundant clone which will sooner or later turn into skippy's paradise o' spam.

[Modred]

Meh, I thought there had been one already, but my search didn't turn up any. Oh well, I guess it's just beyond our ability to have a decent conversation on a topic more than once.

[GenocideAlive]

Language is not prerequisite to thought. You can think without using words in your head. You can even think without using images.
As I said, language isn't a prerequisite for thought, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one without the other. Most children that weren't taught a language were severely neglected and thus received little-to-no interaction as a side effect.

Your comment "you can even think without using images" seems completely fabricated and more than a little of a hyperbole. If you would, please link to any/all studies that support this claim. I'm pretty sure the paradigm in both neural biology and behavioral psychology is that humans' thought processes are sorted by imagery.

[DragonPaladin]

Words stand for general ideas. These ideas are used to form our knowledge and thoughts.

[TheBB]

I don't think language are a perequisite for thought, but it's perhaps debatable whether or not it's a perequisite for higher thought in one for or another. I.e. abstract thinking perhaps - or something else.

It's interesting though, because I don't - and I'm sure none of you do either - think without speaking words in your mind. At least not consciously.

Even if you found someone who didn't know a language you wouldn't be able to know whether he or she could think, instinctively, consciously, abstractly or in any other way, because he or she wouldn't be able to communicate this to you anyways.

[hammocksleeper]

It's interesting though, because I don't - and I'm sure none of you do either - think without speaking words in your mind. At least not consciously.
This was one of my points in my first post. I definitely think most of the time without "speaking words in my mind," and by doing so I think better and more efficiently. Only when I am thinking about how I will relay my thoughts to others is when I may think words in my head.

Even if you found someone who didn't know a language you wouldn't be able to know whether he or she could think, instinctively, consciously, abstractly or in any other way, because he or she wouldn't be able to communicate this to you anyways.
It's true, it's a bit of a paradox. :) Which is why it's easy to assume that the person with the more advanced language capabilities has more advanced thought.

[GenocideAlive]

Words stand for general ideas. These ideas are used to form our knowledge and thoughts.
So you're basically stating that without ideas, there is no language. QED, there is no language without thought, not thought without language.

[Darmago]

What I beleive is that the mind struggles for a language.

The mind expresses itself in language, but with a lack of an external language provided by parents, whatever. It will choose a language to suit its own needs. so if we had a person who was not exposed to language in a confined room, and every 3 hours somone would check on them, the mind would have in its own language a feeling of "the person who comes frequently" it wouldnt be able to be interpereted but it would still be a language.

[Morkeliph]

As for language being essential to the development of "advanced cognitive abilities," I'd have to reply with a few questions.

1) What do you mean by "advanced cognitive abilities?" The inference that you make with this statement is that cognitive ability is some almost tangible thing within an individual, but research up until this point has not proven this to be the case. That is, cognitive ability refers to some sort of mystical component of the so-called "mind," which is something that has never been seen, measured, and porved to exist. What has been proved to exist is behavior, and behavior is something that everyone can see and something that we can measure. Now, if your question means "Is proficient verbal behavior essential for thinking?," I'd have to ask...

2) What do you mean by thought (thinking)? If thinking is defined, as it should be, as covert verbal behavior, then yes, of course you would need to have some sort of verbal experience before you can engage in it covertly. If by thinking you mean imagining (imagination), and this as a behavior and not some other component of the "mind," then I'd have to say no. That is because imagining, in the behaving sense, doesn't involve the use of verbal repertiore or language, but is merely re-seeing, or re-experiencing. That is, when we imagine something "visually," what we are doing is engaging in several covert behaviors similar to those we would if the thing were literally before our eyes. This is better explained in terms of memory. Remembering something, like what Rome looks like (assuming you've been to Rome), involves behaving in the same way (on a smaller degree) as we did when we were actually seeing Rome. We do not see Rome because we have stored some copy of Rome encoded in our "memory," but we are firing some of the same neurons as were fired when we were at Rome and responding to to various visual stimuli that we were exposed to.

Now, it is important to realize that the greatest difference, other than biology, between humans and animals is the use of language, or complex verbal behavior. Much of what is considered thinking, as in that thinking involving words and sentences and "talking with oneself," is a result of having been exposed to and brought under the control of verbal behavior. Now, animals do not have this luxury, but that does not mean that animals do not think in different fashions than humans do. Perhaps animals think in abstracts, not in a verbal language to themselves, but in a series of images and emotions that represent contingencies in the natural environment.

[Kaervek]

Your comment "you can even think without using images" seems completely fabricated and more than a little of a hyperbole. If you would, please link to any/all studies that support this claim. I'm pretty sure the paradigm in both neural biology and behavioral psychology is that humans' thought processes are sorted by imagery.

Well, why didn't you provide links to any/all studies that support your claim that "most children that weren't taught a language were severely neglected and thus received little-to-no interaction as a side effect?"

Sounds like you grabbed that right off of a Newsweek poll. ;)

[Modred]

Well, I thought this thread was long dead, but since it's been posted on within the last week (barely), I don't feel so bad.

What do you mean by "advanced cognitive abilities?"
Analysis, drawing conclusions. The upper regions of Bloom's taxonomy. You would call them behaviors, although internal ones. Of course, where do these internal behaviors, imaginations as you called them, occur? The neurons of the brain fire in the same pattern regardless of rather an object is actually seen or imagined. However, this does not account for sentient thought, but rather how information is stored and retreived in the brain. Where do these internal thoughts occur? Neither the brain, nor the heart, nor any other organ or system within the body can account for sentience, so it is either a seperate and currently unexplainable entity, or it is created by some combination of organs, chemicals, and electical signals. I'll let you deliberate on that in the psychology thread.

Anyway, what happens to "re-experiencing" something if it has never been experienced before? To classify, understand, analyze, and draw conclusions from a new experience, would a person require language? The first one appears to be "no" from your camp; classification is purely storage related and deals directly with brain function. But what of the others?

[GenocideAlive]

Well, why didn't you provide links to any/all studies that support your claim that "most children that weren't taught a language were severely neglected and thus received little-to-no interaction as a side effect?"

Sounds like you grabbed that right off of a Newsweek poll.
I thought it was pretty much common sense. I'm not sure which societies don't use language as a part of teaching their children; I'd be perfectly content saying "none". No studies can be done on the freaking thing, because it'd be considered inhumane by anybody's standards to deprive a child of the ability to communicate.

[Morkeliph]

Sentience, or conscious thought, does not need to be explained mentalistically. The behavior commonly referred to as thinking can be understood in the sense of verbal behavior that is not spoken. It can be explained in the same way that imagination or remembering can, neural activity that mimmics auditory and visual behavior. The notion that the brain stores "copies" of things seen or heard is as unsound as "the mind." The behavior referred to by cognition occurs within the organism as neural activity that is learned through environmental conditioning as opposed to developing components of the mind. Sentience, or self-awareness, is also a combination of learned behaviors, mainly the discrimination between self and environment.