thought without language?

@BrightNoon,

When i think something to myself i don't actually hear a voice. Same thing happens to me when i hear some speaking(and i understand what they say), me speaking to myself or to someone else.

ideas that i get from all thoose 'voices' around me are not words. words only help people to transform their ideas in matters. and matter's building stone is idea.

1 Reply

@grasshopper,

grasshopper wrote:

When i think something to myself i don't actually hear a voice. Same thing happens to me when i hear some speaking(and i understand what they say), me speaking to myself or to someone else.

ideas that i get from all thoose 'voices' around me are not words. words only help people to transform their ideas in matters. and matter's building stone is idea.

You don't hear people's voices when they are speaking to you, and you don't hear your own voice?

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@BrightNoon,

no. do you hear me now?
what i was trying to say that i don't hear voices but i understand ideas. and that is basicly a real conversation

how do you think deafs communicate?

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@grasshopper,

grasshopper wrote:

no. do you hear me now?
what i was trying to say that i don't hear voices but i understand ideas. and that is basicly a real conversation

how do you think deafs communicate?

Hello Grasshopper,

You did say in your first message that you "hear some speaking", which made it very difficult to understand how you "don't hear a voice".

If people are talking to you, and you understand what they say, it seems to me you that you can only be understanding their ideas through words, isn't that true?

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@BrightNoon,

yes but you don't have to hear them to understand what they say/their ideas.

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@grasshopper,

grasshopper wrote:

yes but you don't have to hear them to understand what they say/their ideas.

I can see that you could understand a person's ideas from their gestures, a nod or a smile or raised eyebrows, and then there is sign language, which I don't know much about. But it is still a normal human language, isn't it? If I could read someone's hand movements when they were signing, I could put everything they were saying into words, there wouldn't be any other "ideas" that I couldn't put into words?

1 Reply

@Oh phil,

Oh! wrote:

If I could read someone's hand movements when they were signing, I could put everything they were saying into words, there wouldn't be any other "ideas" that I couldn't put into words?

are you asking me the point where 'signing' is no longer enough? as a deaf, i may not be able to answer that.i dont know 100% of thoose ideas that are in people's minds. i do understand when people express themselves in the way that i can understand.

and you can not be sure that your idea reaches to the person just like u have it in your mind. maybe i do get what people say in another way, still you 'talk' same 'words'

1 Reply

@grasshopper,

grasshopper;45633 wrote:

are you asking me the point where 'signing' is no longer enough? as a deaf, i may not be able to answer that.i dont know 100% of thoose ideas that are in people's minds. i do understand when people express themselves in the way that i can understand.

No, as I understand it you can use gestures to say anything that can be said in writing, if you don't have a gesture for a word, you can spell it out in letters. What I was asking is, can signing convey any information that writing can not?

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@BrightNoon,

it is easier to express yourself sometimes with gestures, signing, instead of writing all the time.

1 Reply

@grasshopper,

grasshopper wrote:

it is easier to express yourself sometimes with gestures, signing, instead of writing all the time.

It's easier to talk than to write sometimes too. Spoken language is the original form, it came before writing.

1 Reply

@BrightNoon,

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@BrightNoon,

BrightNoon wrote:

I have a question, here it is:

If a person is born deaf, never having heard anything, including a human voice, what happens when he thinks something "to himself." Without an inner monologue, what is the nature of his thought?

I think that all thoughts are nothing but the simulteineous existance of many more or less related sensations, of varying intensities, relative to their original intensity and their distance from the present. Does this mean that such a person as mentioned above would have an inner powerpoint, an inner kinesthesia. an inner tongue? I suppose that, for whatever reason, auditory sensation is the manner in which most information is stored in most people; and so, I suppose that some other sense would probably become dominant, probably vision.

Any thoughts?

We think in words or pictures. Without language, only the pictures are left.

1 Reply

@Elmud,

Elmud;50290 wrote:

We think in words or pictures. Without language, only the pictures are left.

Your claim is either false, if literal, and thus highly misleading, or figurative (poetic, metaphor). Are you going for the latter?

We do not think in any medium. We think into language, not in language. Thought is not a quasi-language or a quasi-method of expression. To use idiom such as "the language of thought" is to speak figuratively. A necessary condition for a word is that it consist of a finite concatenation of symbols or markings; a picture a finite set of strokes, markings, shapes, lines, etc.

Thoughts, or thinking, do not satisfy, and thus do not depend upon or presuppose, such a necessary condition. Thus, to claim that we think in terms of words or pictures or symbols is to claim something that is literally false. So, again, I ask: Are you claiming something literal or something non-literal?

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@BrightNoon,

I agree nerdfiles that we think into language. If we thought in language that would mean we would all have an innate library of vocabulary in a universal language to derive our thoughts--or even the more bizarre possibility that specific languages are hereditary. There would be no need to learn vocabulary and usage if we thought in language.

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@nerdfiles,

nerdfiles;50305 wrote:

We think into language, not in language.

I believe that this is correct, but I think it's nearly impossible to assert with confidence. The presence of thought cannot be ascertained in the absence of language to express it, so in someone without language how do you know they are thinking?

Now, the reason I believe that you are correct is that I've observed the absence of language in stroke patients. People who have knocked off the territory of their left middle cerebral artery lose language. All language, written and spoken.

But one thing they DON'T lose is agonizing frustration at being unable to comprehend or to communicate -- and you don't need language to express that thought.

You could do other experiments -- take someone without language and have him run a maze or solve some other problem. People could probably do it.

But complex, abstract thoughts probably cannot exist without language. It's only by having language that we learn such a thing as abstraction.

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@nerdfiles,

nerdfiles wrote:

Your claim is either false, if literal, and thus highly misleading, or figurative (poetic, metaphor). Are you going for the latter?

We do not think in any medium. We think into language, not in language. Thought is not a quasi-language or a quasi-method of expression. To use idiom such as "the language of thought" is to speak figuratively. A necessary condition for a word is that it consist of a finite concatenation of symbols or markings; a picture a finite set of strokes, markings, shapes, lines, etc.

Thoughts, or thinking, do not satisfy, and thus do not depend upon or presuppose, such a necessary condition. Thus, to claim that we think in terms of words or pictures or symbols is to claim something that is literally false. So, again, I ask: Are you claiming something literal or something non-literal?

The original question was, "if a person is born deaf". If one were to never experience language, what would be left? I imagine it would be images or pictures.But, that is just my imagination . I understand language because I can hear and have experienced language. Therefore I am unable to fully comprehend how a person would think that has not, unless it would be in images. Anyway, that is how I see it.

1 Reply

@Elmud,

Elmud;50335 wrote:

The original question was, "if a person is born deaf". If one were to never experience language, what would be left? I imagine it would be images or pictures.But, that is just my imagination . I understand language because I can hear and have experienced language. Therefore I am unable to fully comprehend how a person would think that has not, unless it would be in images. Anyway, that is how I see it.

You don't think in images.

Quote:

I understand language because I can hear and have experienced language.

This says nothing about "images" and this is your own claim.

1 Reply

@nerdfiles,

nerdfiles wrote:

You don't think in images.

This says nothing about "images" and this is your own claim.

This is much ado about nothing but, I think in images sometimes. Pictures. No words are involved. Let me ask this, just out of curiosity. Is sign language a form of imagery, or a form of language ?

1 Reply

@Elmud,

Elmud;51335 wrote:

This is much ado about nothing but, I think in images sometimes. Pictures. No words are involved. Let me ask this, just out of curiosity. Is sign language a form of imagery, or a form of language ?

I do not deny that we picture things at time. But we must make the distinction between two claims here.

I am claiming that we do not think in pictures. You are claiming that we sometimes think with pictures. I do not deny your claim. I sometimes picture something before I affirm it or deny it, or say it. Thus, my claim is utterly different from yours. I take this effort to explain my position so that you might understand how we are not in disagreement and, generally, because it is helpful to dispel certain realist confusions about...well, just about anything.

I am claiming that thought does not consist of a finite or infinite set of markings which can be combined in certain or other ways to form finite constructs like sentences and words. Thought does not have a vocabulary, for instance. It cannot be "grammatical" or "ungrammatical." Thought cannot be "correct" with respect to a dictionary or a thing like a dictionary. There is no public standard which determines the correctness or incorrectness of a thought insofar as its form, syntax, etc because thoughts do not have a form nor a syntax.

As is evidenced by its name, sign language is a language. All language corresponds to images. Words are images, letters images, sentences are combinations of images and thus they are themselves images. Phonetically, words are images as well: sound-pictures, etc. Gestures are images, hand gestures, sign language, etc. This depends on what it means to say a thing is an image of another thing.

"God created man in his image" makes perfect sense so long as you don't narrow the definition of "image" to just mean "picture with a frame" or "something like what we see at the art museum."

Do you understand the distinction between our claims now? All language consists of images which are mapped to a form. Images are the semantics; form is the syntax (grammar). Images can correspond correctly or incorrectly, accurately or inaccurately, rightly or wrongly; form can be structured or unstructured, grammatical or ungrammatical, etc.

"Correctness" and "grammaticality" are concepts that stand or fall, are ultimately judged, by public criteria: social, conventional, etc.

So sign language is not "a form of imagery" as opposed to "being a language." All language is a "form of imagery," though language at the same time also includes a form of form. Two necessary conditions to be a language are that the language has a syntax (vocabulary, grammar--imagery) and a semantics (meanings--which correspond to the images).

Sign language has both. Gestures are the syntax, and these gestures more or less map to the meanings of our other natural languages. Yes, sign language is a natural language (just like English).

1 Reply

@BrightNoon,

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thought without language?

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