by David J. Lobina
(This is Part 2 of a brand new series of post, this time about the relationship between language and thought; Part 1 is here)
A provocative title, perhaps, and perhaps also counterintuitive. One thinks in the language one speaks, everybody knows that. Why would anyone ask bilingual speakers which language they think in (or dream in) otherwise?
I suspect that what people usually have in mind when they ask such questions is related to the phenomenon of inner speech, the experience of internally speaking to ourselves, which may well be ubiquitous in adults (but probably not in children), though not entirely universal. I certainly think that inner speech plays a role in thinking, but not as central a role as most people seem to think (I will come back to this on a later post, probably in Part 4 of this series, where I will also discuss how writers of fiction use the narrative technique of “interior monologue” to outline some of the mental processes of a given character (thinking, feeling, etc.) – but mostly to argue that authors generally go about it the wrong way!).
The point I want to make in this post is that no-one thinks in any natural language; not in English, or Italian, or whatever, but in a language of thought, an abstract, unconscious and moreover inaccessible, conceptual representational system of the mind. Or at least I intend to provide some of the evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, that suggests that this is indeed the state of affairs.
The idea of a language of thought is in fact a rather old one. It effectively refers to the old doctrine that we think in a mental language that is not a spoken language. Traceable back to Aristotle, Boethius and William of Ockham (among others), the doctrine is to a large extent premised on the general observation that speakers of different languages can refer to the very same “things”, though they may employ different words to talk about them. As the French philosopher Claude Panaccio has aptly put it in a recent historical overview of the mental language, the French can talk about un homme whereas the English would say a man and the ancient Romans homo, but they all would have had the same “idea” in mind – the same concept, as cognitive scientists call such things, and as I myself mentioned last time around. Crucially, the same logic applies to the sentences in which the mentioned words can appear: homo currit, un homme court and a man is running simply describe the same event – the same thought – in different languages.
This, at the very least, suggests a general intertranslatability among different languages, what the philosopher Jerry Katz once called the “effability principle” – namely, the intertranslatibility of whatever thought one might be able entertain in one language into another language (in rough outline, of course, not in precise, linguistic detail, and certainly not in terms of a one-to-one correspondence between words or phrases).
From 3 Quarks Daily, here.