Thought is pre-language Our thoughts are not in language

How can a being understand what I am saying without understanding what I mean?

Imagine some alien humanoid species that can reason, but does not have emotion. If you say to him "I feel sad" he would be able to understand what you say, but not what you mean because he has no experience of sadness.

Since this being has no experience of sadness, what use is his reason in understanding it? Reason does not work by itself, it works in conjuction with experience to create the knowledge which enables one to understand.

Furthermore, it seems to me that even our ability to reason is aided by experience. If your alien being has never experienced sadness, then his ability to reason effectively would be drastically hindered when it comes to understanding sadness, or any emotion for that matter.

Anthropologically language and thought probably co-evolved.

But the real question philosophically is the following:

Which can exist without the other?

Language cannot exist without thought. There is no way. But thought can indeed exist without language.

How complex could thoughts be without language? Well, if you took a potential brilliant philosophical genius at infancy, raised him in a room with no features, never let him interact with other humans, never taught him a language, and he survived to adulthood, what could he think? Could he ever generate complex thoughts? Could he understand anything more than the most basic cause and effect relationships?

The thing is that our thoughts are trained and nurtured by interaction with others, chiefly our parents and siblings, but also in school. And language (whether spoken or Braille or sign language or whatever) is the common currency of that growth process.

Imagine some alien humanoid species that can reason, but does not have emotion. If you say to him "I feel sad" he would be able to understand what you say, but not what you mean because he has no experience of sadness.

Since this being has no experience of sadness, what use is his reason in understanding it? Reason does not work by itself, it works in conjuction with experience to create the knowledge which enables one to understand.

Furthermore, it seems to me that even our ability to reason is aided by experience. If your alien being has never experienced sadness, then his ability to reason effectively would be drastically hindered when it comes to understanding sadness, or any emotion for that matter.

But it seems likly the brain would only have a need for the mind, if it was first intended for the act of self-presavation, by mean's of communication with one another collectively, which would mean we would have to have the same mean's of displaying are thought's and action's within the same perception of are own and other's.

correct, there would be know way for him to know what that person truly felt, but he would preceive how the word was used, and macth it to the action's that led him to using the word sad, therefore after time a understanding of what makes that person sad and what dose not can be created,

But it's hard to say that he could not experience sadness, but mostlikly there bodies wouldnt have the same physical reaction, to compair are sad action to.

...

Translation and understanding of another's action's and the same shared perception of those action's are a needed. other wise he couldnt see through the eye's of the other, as if he was really the other.

It is argued that thought is pre-linquistic. That any attempt to find the essence of thought ends in self-contradiction or paradox. Any attempt to assign an essence to thought ie language images concepts or any "thing" ends in self-contradiction What ever thought is it cannot be rationally discovered What ever constitutes thought will remain forever a mystery Its nature or essence is outside the possiblities of language and logic to discover. Analytical philosophers claims that thought is language-that without language there can be no thought collapse into self-contradiction and with it the whole anayltical philosophical enterprise of a language based language centred thought philosophy


http://gamahucherpress.yellowgum.com/books/philosophy/contentlessthought.pdf Contentless Thought: Case Study in the Madhyamika demonstrations of the meaninglessness of all views].

those philosophers who say you cannot think without language are wrong. i know this because i have actually tried it. you can have a complete thought without putting it into words. the point of linguistic thought i think, is it helps us communicate with ourselves more clearly. that certainly doesn't explain why we do it though.

It is all about context, the enviroment which surrounds you that charges the words with meaning. Semantics is difficult to determine without the exact same context as the writer or speaker. Many ideas can be viewed from very many more perspectives and the meaning behind these ideas is the summed perspectives that the expressor has considered and how he has drawn upon other experiences to weigh the perspectives and determine the value of each of them to form his conclusions which are then used to make decisions. This is how it seems to me that words are given meaning and then applied.
Not sure about any of you, but I often feel somthing before I translate it into words, I often have to translate physical feelings and visual mental images into words. In other words; I will often know that i have the answer to somthing before I can put words to it or I might see a visual answer to somthing before I have it translated into the correct words or symbols.

however he could still understand "I am sad"

I'm of the belief that language is thought. You can sense things without langauge, but I don't believe you can think about them. I think thought & language are synchronous.

Then how is it that I sometimes feel unable to articulate a thought that I'm having?

... and he kept a portable radio handy, in order to periodically test his ability to comprehend what he heard on it. In other words, he was fully conscious and able to cope with the situation, despite the absence of language. Moreover, he had full recall of the episode later.

The extent to which he retained the ability to cope with practical challenges was quite remarkable. One episode, while he was traveling in Switzerland, was particularly striking. He found himself at the peak of one of his seizures as he arrived at his destination, a town he had never seen before. He took his baggage and managed to disembark. Although he could not read or speak, he managed to find a hotel and show his medic-alert bracelet to the concierge, only to be sent away. He then found another hotel, received a more sympathetic reception, communicated by mime, and was given a room. He was able to execute various procedures which formed a framework for linguistic operations; for example, he was able to point out to the desk clerk where in his passport to find the information required to fill out his registration slip, while not being able to read it himself. ...

A number of important conclusions can be drawn from this case. First, despite the complete absence of language, internal or external, (he) was able to cope in ways that are uniquely human. He was capable of coherent thought, able to recognize music, voices, and faces, and the use of objects and places. His spatial orientation and basic mechanical intelligence were intact. His episodic memory for the events of his seizures was accurate ...

Finally, both gestural ability and practical knowledge were intact. He could imitate or reproduce on demand a wide variety of gestures. He could tune a radio, operate an elevator, and, as the Switzerland episode shows, assess and respond appropriately to a social situation of some complexity. All of this was achieved in the absence of visual or oral language, and in the absence of internal speech as well. In his own retrospective account, he claimed that he could not "find the words" for things and events. Nevertheless, he could think about them coherently, deal with them appropriately, and remember them later.