This raises the question of thought's relation to language. Can one have a thought which is not framed in a language of some sort, be that language English, Algebra, the diatonic scale, etc? It would seem that one could, otherwise pre-verbal children and our ancestral forbearers never had a thought. What's more, if thought never existed before language, then what was the impetus for language? While it seems to me that thoughts must be possible without a language to frame them I cannot think of ever having had a thought without it being in a language. Thinking within a language would seem to put up a fence around one's thoughts*.
If something cannot be expressed with the languages one uses, can it still be thought?
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* Albeit a very, very large fence. At it's 1st publication the Oxford English Dictionary had 414,825 entries. So what language can express is infinite but bounded - infinite, because, as German demonstrates sometimes beautifully, but often quite cumbersomely, we can combine preexisting words to form new words, and there is no end to this. Yet it is bounded, because language can only express what can be said with words and syntax. Words such as indescribable clearly show that we are aware of this.
As you say, it seems pre-verbal children prove that thought has precedence over language. And no doubt, by our early teens, the two are practically inextricable. What’s more, I take it as a given (a PoI?), that our linguistic background heavily conditions our thought (your fence). However, I’m not so sure that the limitations of our thought are co-extensive with the limitations of our language. If they were, how could we coin new terms? How could we invent or formulate unprecedented insights?
ReplyDeleteMight language have arisen as a way to communicate our thoughts? Thought, an internal process by which we order the world; language, a means to convey the order we conceive and further delineate it?
Dharmakirti, a 7th c. Indian epistemologist, figured thought and language operate along similar principles, the most relevant here is the use of signifiers.
Sense perception has immediate access to visual forms, sounds, odors, flavors, and tactile sensations. Thought (or conception) however can only get at such sensory data through the medium of a generic image. For example, while at the hospital, you think of your dog at home. The mental image of Carl that arises in mind isn’t Carl but a generic image that signifies Carl. Just so, the name ‘Carl’ is a generic sound that signifies your dog.
All of which leads to some very knotty questions. Like, do conceptual and linguistic constructs exist in the same sense as the objects they represent? If not, does that undermine knowledge based on such constructs?
Plato spoke of the realm of pure Form, where universal ideals existed unsullied by their imperfect instances. He privileged such Forms over the particular objects that instantiate them. But Dharmakirti (according to some interpreters) takes the opposite position, arguing that only particular instances are real, universals are simply unreal constructs of mind.
Good point Lovesong. To get to the heart of this question you must define language a bit. I'm not a linguist, but i have heard one and i believe his points were that language is slightly more than signifiers and signified items. There is also a need for syntax and rules. With that implication of a more rigourous definition of a language, i think it is clear that you can have a thought without a language.
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