Mini-Feature: Rational Thought Without Language?
Mini-Feature: Rational Thought Without Language?
Can rational thought exist without language?
"In beginning was the word..." but the word for "word" in that sacred text is "logos," which also refers to reason, both within human beings and throughout nature itself. What differentiates human beings in traditional western thought according to thinkers like Aristotle is our intertwined potential for rational thought and language. The connection between the two is tight. Let me suggest that reason itself requires an inner word or language in the sense that there is an understanding of things and their relation to each other in the mind that is not the same thing as what we perceive outside ourselves. There is thus a way in which language in the deepest sense (a sign of something else) always exists coterminously with rational thought. But the verbal expression of that thought in a particular shared language, of course, is not necessary for rational thought to occur. We can think while remaining silent or thinking about particular words, per se. Still, a particular language does indeed arises necessarily from our ability to reason: man naturally names the animals in Genesis as a kind of first act. But these are very deep waters indeed, and much is hidden within them.
-Matthew Peterson, founding editor of The American Mind
If rational thought could exist without language, I don’t know how we’d know it, much less access it. Reason and logic are so bound up with language that it’s hard to spin up even a fantasy form of communication that doesn’t involve it.
And it’s even difficult to see the point in trying to express the communications of lower animals in other terms. What could be more rational than (e.g.) emanating odors or conveying feelings that other animate beings pick up on so as to fight, flee, collaborate, kill, or procreate? Even subrational thoughts or sub-thought communications express and lead on toward patterns of life intelligible to rational thought.
Nature—it’s knowable... although, importantly, the truth about nature and the nature of truth both involve certain mysteries, including the mystery OF the ineradicability of mystery, that rational thinking must not get hung up on trying to master through explanation, and which may not even be communicable through thought, reason, or speech alone.
-James Poulos, executive editor of The American Mind
Animals don’t have language in the human sense of a symbolic system of communication. Yet they are capable of simple calculation, making informed decisions, and figuring out problems. They remember things, and pass tests demonstrating their consciousness of other minds.
At the same time, they don’t appear to do much in the way of conceptualization. They don’t reflect on their capacity to think, develop heuristics, or unite with their colleagues to improve the world for their future generations. They are good learners, but not very good teachers.
So it is pretty clear that animals are capable of ratiocination without the use of symbolic elements. But whether humans can do the same thing is another question. If the language function is hardwired into our brains, maybe we are unable to think without it. One hears stories about prodigal geniuses who can perform complex calculations instantly, seemingly without any symbolic intermediation—maybe they have some shortcut.
-Seth Barron, managing editor of The American Mind
Aristotle says that all thought is "phantastic"—a lovely word meaning couched in phantasmata, which are the sense perceptions of the world that impress themselves upon our soul. No thought is really possible without this phantasmagoria, which is a kind of language—or rather, which is structured in the same underlying way as language. What do we do when we speak? We use audible or visible symbols and tokens to stand in for our experiences of things in the world. When we think—even if it's in images—we do something similar: we reproduce the form of something—of a color, of a sight, of a sound—in the matter of our souls.
Merely to visualize things is to encode their essential structure into our souls much as it is encoded into matter "out there." Even this is rational thought, because the world is rational—i.e., structured with discernible rules of proportion, order, and harmony. That this is so suggests to us another mind in which all these forms are ultimately encoded—for whom creation is itself a kind of language, spoken into being and repeated in our microcosmic minds.
-Spencer Klavan, associate editor of The American Mind
Hello -
I'm a scientist who studies conscious brains in humans and animals, and I substantially agree with what you say - although I might want to be a little more explicit. But it's good to err on the side of caution, since there is so much we do not know.
The distinctive. human language capacity has been studied for centuries, going far back into the recorded past. It is full of good ideas, and today I would still be challenged to know exactly where to draw the line between animal cognition and the human language-aided kind.
Young children have an amazing capacity to learn words and their referents in the world, and to play pragmatic language games with caregivers and other kids. The linguist Derek Bickerton has pioneered the study of child language on islands where none of the parents speak a common language - in Tahiti it might be Japanese and English, both mutually difficult languages to communicate with. Phoneme learning is amazingly good in early childhood, and then essentially disappears with puberty, so that adolescents and adults are often stuck in their childhood phonology. Another mystery, but very real.
If Bickerton is right (whch he is) then much language change must be driven by children before adolescence, something we can often see with the new lingo of the web, for example. Siblings also can develop their own "idiolects," essentially private languages that parents do not speak or understand. These are true languages, in the sense that they have syntax and (secret) words.
The language of children is also full of "non-linguistic"" whoops and hollers, as anyone can tell by really listening to four-year olds. A great deal of early language variation is experimental, in a sense, and may not survive in later years. But the sheer existence of non-speech sounds, a huge variety of them, suggests that musicality developed before and perhaps separately from spoken speech. This is consistent with the very different evolutonary origins of vocal communication (about 200 MYA) and the alleged origin of speech (only 200 KYA!).
It is also interesting that other young mammals often seem to be attracted by human baby-croons, not the words, but the melody. This is relevant to the domestication of dogs, for example, because hunting peoples usually keep track of canid hunting packs, as well as raptors in the sky, which give reliable signals when they sense an edible carcass or an animal trying to esccape pursuit. If puppies wander into the human campgrounds, they might be welcomed by kids and moms - until they grow up and start to hunt.
The notion of endogenous visual imagery is very plausible, but I do not know of direct research on it - which should be easy using brain imaging. Vision is our most accurate spatial sense, and our brains alllow for interaction between the conscious senses, so that once we've seen a valley from a high vantage point, we can plausibly link prey odors or snake scents to the visual map we have acquired from afar. Cross-sensory integration happens in the parietal cortex, and it must have many uses.
Olfaction and taste also have to have a big spatial component, because the very ancient olfactory bulbs are not just able to detect scents --- they also have to try to locate the sources of specific scents. Knowing there is a predator leaving urine marks on a bush is not helpful, if you don't know where the predator might be hiding right now. So sophisticated source localization and time-marking is absolutely necessary for the chemical senses in nature.
Olfaction and taste evolve even before the mammals, and yet they are clearly conscious sense modalities. They terminate in cortex.
As for memory, olfaction is probably our most powerful memory cue, for the simple reason that natural animals die from toxic chemicals if they cannot do one-trial learning. As wolves have been shown to do. One trial, 24-hour associative learning that lasts forever.
These basic bio capacities also have impact on the emotions and even on personality disorders, especially in the biology of disgust, for example, which may be linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder and hoarding behavior. Disgust and sexuality also interact in surprising ways.
So these very deep pre-human adaptations are still haunting our lives. And they lend that extra spice to cooking and perfumes, of course.
Bernard Baars
baarsbj@gmail.com