by NonHyloMorph
7 subcomments
- I think the terminology here isn't sharp. One of the first headlines is: "Language is not necessary nor sufficient for thought" I disagree. Language is not necessary for cognitive processes in individuals/organisms. It is absolutely necessary for what we commonly refer to as thought (bit of a pretentious we: it involves you in the group of people who have some idea about philosophy (e.g. baseline-heidegger)/the humanities/psychoanalysis etc.) that which we refer to as thought.
Thought can be a decentralised process that is happening "between" individuals ("Die Sprache spricht" - Language is speaking by heidegger points into that direction). Thought is also, imho, a symbolic process (which involves sign systems, mathematics, languages, images). Not everything going on as a cognitive process is therefor constituting thought. That's why one can act thoughtless- but not "cognitionless".
- When I was a kid a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three languages. Which one do you think in?"
I was bemused, and thought... "people think in words?"
Apparently people with ADHD or Autism can develop the inner voice later in life.
In my 20s, language colonized my brain. Took me years of meditation to get some peace and quiet back...
- Might be correct for reasonably narrow definitions of language and thought, but it falls a bit short in considering the extended mind thesis. A whole lot of our thinking happens with pen&paper, their digital successor or other items out there in the world. We don't solve complex problems in our head alone, we solve them by interacting iteratively with the real world, and that in turn often involves some kind of language, even if it's just us reading our own scribbles.
Another issue is that a lot of tasks in the modern world are rooted in language, law or philosophy is in large part just word games, you won't be able to get far thinking about them without language, as those concept don't have any direct correlate that you could experience by other means.
Overall I do agree that there are plenty of problems we can solve without language, but the type of problems that can and can't be solve without language would need some further delineation.
by iainctduncan
0 subcomment
- Any improvising musician or athlete of a complex sport knows with absolute certainty that language is not necessary for thought. And in fact, we spend years learning to turn off all linguistic thought –it degrades performance.
- Not sure how well this dovetails with the research presented in the article, but Grinder and Bandler's work -- which they named Neuro Linguistic Programing (derived I understand from analyzing the brief therapy and hypnotherapy techniques of Milton Erickson) -- postulated that people have dominant modes of thought: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. They correlated these modes with eye movements they observed in subjects when asked to recall certain events.
In my personal experience, my mind became much less busy as a result of several steps. One being abandoning the theory of mind -- in contrast to spiritual practices such as Zen and forms of Hinduism, where controlling the mind, preventing its misbehavior, or getting rid of it somehow is frequently described as a goal, the mind's activity being to blame for a loss of a person's ability to be present in the here and now.
As a teenager, I can remember trying to plan in advance what I will say to a person when faced with a situation of conflict, or maybe desire toward the opposite sex, doubting that language will reliably sprout from my feelings when facing a person, whose facial reactions (and my dependence on their good will) pulls me out of my mental emotional kinesthetic grounding.
As humans we use language, however, it seems possible to live in our experience. Some people who are alienated from their experience, or overwhelmed by others, seek refuge in language.
There is obviously a gap between research such as this, and how someone can make sense of their agency in life, finding their way forward when confronted with conflict, uncertainty, etc.
by ineedasername
0 subcomment
- There are a few things here.
First) This is correct in a trivial and incorrect in profound ways.
Trivial Correct: Clearly language is, at best, a lossy channel for thought. It isn't thought compressed, it is thought where the map would be too complex for language and so we draw a kindergarten scribble we all agree on, and that covers a lot of ground as a an imperfect pointer. This description is itself imperfect, but as a rough sketch not too controversial.
Profound Incorrect: As pointers, it facilitates thought in complex ways that would be incredible difficult otherwise. Abstractions you can build on like building blocks and, so long as your careful about understanding where the word ends and doesn't encompass the full thing, you reduce the risk of reifying the word overmuch. It's not thought, but is isn't thought in some-- not all-- of the ways in which a building's walls is not its interior spaces. Of course it isn't. The space would be there either way, but keeping it all arranged so nicely and easily to reference different elements of it, that is more than just convenience and it is inextricable from language, or at least some representational system for doing this sort of thing.
Second) It is so strange to see this sort of thing written about, in this way, as if it were a new conception, a new view of language. But then I look at the researchers involved: near always backgrounds outside the formal study of linguistics, language itself, and instead focused in other areas adjacent or related. Even computational linguistics-- perhaps especially computational linguistics. The educational pathway there is much more commonly coming from computational paths to applications to language, rather than vice versa. This is much less the case with Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, where traditional biology is much more often within a student's foundation. (This is not anecdotal, analysis of student pathways through academic studies is a past area of my own professional career)
Through the lens of the history of academia over the past few decades, this is not all that surprising. Chomsky's fault (my opinion) for trying to wall off the discipline from other areas of study or perspective other than his own.
by DrierCycle
0 subcomment
- The key is that there is no content to thought. It's all nested oscillations. It can't be extracted as symbols, so there is no connection between them. Words play the role of a sportscaster reading the minds of the players by observing their behavior. How accurate are they or are we about ourselves? Not very.
- Doesn't hellen keller provide a counterexample? She seemed to imply pretty strongly that before acquisition of language she operated more on stimulus and bodily perception rather than higher-level thought.
- Thinking is communicating with yourself
by heavymemory
0 subcomment
- If thought needed words, you’d be unable to think of anything you can’t yet describe
by heavymemory
0 subcomment
- 6th time in the last year that this was posted, apparently
by Peteragain
0 subcomment
- A beautifully written paper but I do feel it missed a major point. Vygotsky pointed out that "in ontogenesis one can discern a pre intellectual stage in the development of speech, and a pre linguistic stage in the development of thought"[Kozulin 1990 p153]. The pre intellectual nature of language can be interpreted as "performative" language (eg "ouch!" or "I pronounce you man and wife") but what does pre linguistic thinking look like? The contemporary answer I'd propose is that it looks like situated action/ radical enactivism / behaviour-based robotics.(see for example Gallagher's 2020 "Action and Interaction") In terms of LLMs, the idea is that rather than "distributed representations", LLMs are indeed using "glorified auto complete" to predict the future and hence look like they are thinking symbolically to us humans because that is how we (think we) think. Paper plug: see Https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08403
by netfortius
0 subcomment
- Excellent, comprehensive, extremely thorough work behind all this. Maturana would love it!
- I think it depends what you mean by language. There is a kind of symbolic logic that happens in the brain, and as a programmer I might liken it to a programming language, but the biological term is defined differently. Language, as far as it is unique to humans, is the serialisation of those internal logical structures in the same way text file is the serialisation of the logical objects within a programming language. What throws most people here is that the internal structures can develop in response to language and mirror it in some ways. As a concrete example, there is certainly a part of my brain that has developed to process algebraic equations. I can clearly see this as distinct from the part that would serialise them and allow me to write out the equation stored internally. In that way, the language of mathematics has precipitated the creation of an internal pattern of thought which one could easily confuse for its serialisation. It seems reasonable to assume that natural language could have similar interactions with the logical parts of the mind. Constructs such as “if/then” and “before/after” may be acquired through language, but exist separate from it.
Language is, therefore, instrumental to human thought as distinct from animal thought because it allows us to more easily acquire and develop new patterns of thinking.
by suddenlybananas
0 subcomment
- I don't know how Federenko squares this view with her own work which directly contradicts it [1]. In this work, they find that the language network activated for "meaningful" non-linguistic stimuli such as the sounds of someone getting ready in the morning (e.g. yawning, brushing teeth, etc.). It seems entirely contrary to her arguments in this article and she doesn't even acknowledge it.
[1] https://direct.mit.edu/nol/article/5/2/385/119141
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- I have no clue, have not read the PDF, and am naive and dumb on this topic. But my naive thought recently was how important language must be for our thought, or even be our thoughts, based on how well LLMs work. Needless to say I'm no expert on either topic. But my naive impression was, given that LLMs work on nothing more than words and predictors, the evidence that they almost feel like a real human makes me think that our thoughts are heavily influenced or even purely based on language and massively defined by it.
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