Language and Cognition?

[Tharmas]

Over on Freethought Blogs, Mano Singham discusses a new book by Frans de Waal, a psychologist and primatologist, about the relationship between cognition and language. Basically, de Waal argues that language and thought are not all that connected, and that many non-verbal animals can think. The book is Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Here is an excerpt from the book.

Singham makes the point that it is often very difficult to translate our thoughts into words, an observation I have found to be true.

 

[steve_bank]

That has been demonstrated.

Champs fashion stone tools to crack nuts. The tool making skill is passed on by observation and mimic. Birds learn to put nuts in front of cars to crack nuts. The list is long. Squirrels puzzle out how to defeat squirrel proof bird feeders.

 

[DBT]

Rather than language and words alone, thoughts may be experienced as mental images, the action of picking up a stone to crack a nut when nothing else is available coming to mind without verbal reasoning or planning.

 

[Tharmas]

I agree that there’s not much new about the fact of animal cognition, although apparently de Waal adds a good deal of detail. What interests me though is the corollary that human cognition is not dependent on language –language and thought may not be interconnected to the degree (my) intuition has always suggested they are.

Rather than language and words alone, thoughts may be experienced as mental images, the action of picking up a stone to crack a nut when nothing else is available coming to mind without verbal reasoning or planning.

As for “thinking in pictures,” DBT, I agree that’s a good suggestion. I myself do not think in pictures, and never have, but I’ll allow for the possibility. I like the terminology you use when you say “thoughts are experienced" as language/picture, which implies that language and/or visualization shape thought, but are not the same thing as thinking. So, I wonder, what is a thought that is apart from its expression? What is the experience of thinking when it is pre-verbal or pre-pictoral?

I feel unfortunately at a loss for words myself in trying to communicate these ideas. Perhaps a cognitive linguist will come along and give me the vocabulary I need.

 

[steve_bank]

Which came first words, thoughts, or cognition. Not knowable.

Differnt kinds of grunts can have meaning.

 

[untermensche]

These questions are way too big.

We don't understand how or why insects are doing things.

Trying to understand something like how human cognition arose is a million miles beyond our capabilities at this time.

 

[Copernicus]

Did somebody call for a cognitive linguist? I can't speak for all of them, and I haven't read de Wall's book. So I'll confine my remarks to what has been said in this thread and Mano Singham's brief remarks on the book.

Generally speaking, I agree with de Waal's point of view on this. Probably all animal brains are cognitively aware reasoning machines to some extent, and language is not essential to that process. This is particularly easy to see with more intelligent animals, such as other primates, dogs, cats, and livestock. The whole point of the brain, from an evolutionary standpoint, is not just to react to environmental circumstances, but to anticipate future circumstances. It is also the case that animals communicate with each other. That is, they make guesses and assumptions about the future behavior of other animals. A communication system is a method of thought transference by physical means. Human language is an extremely sophisticated type of communication system--word-guided mental telepathy, so to speak. (The renowned cognitive linguist, Charles Fillmore, once described it to me that way.)

What is a "thought"? Well, used as a singular or plural count noun, the word "thought" probably does refer to a linguistically-circumscribed piece of the non-linguistic thinking process. As Noam Chomsky is credited with pointing out, language is a "window on the mind". However, phrases and sentences do not exhaustively express the full content of the thoughts that we have. They only directly express part of a train of thought that allows us to piece together a much larger picture of what the speaker is saying and the listener is inferring. To put it another way, one cannot fully understand any linguistic expression independently of the nonverbal context in which it occurs. Even a simple question such as "Are you satisfied?" can have a wide range of nonliteral meanings, depending on the context. For example, it could refer to no longer being thirsty, hungry, horny, or in a state of yearning for something. So the ultimate interpretation is not bound to just the literal meaning of the words, and the literal meaning is never enough to figure out what the sentence really means.

The brain is fundamentally a machine that creates associations with experiences. So the meaning of a word can never be fully described with other words alone. Definitions are crude descriptions of a word sense, but they only serve as pointers to a fuller range of associations that is different for every speaker of a language. So the meaning of "dog" is going to be different for ordinary pet owners and zoologists, because both will have had different associations that are invoked by the word even in the same conversational context. In fact, word meanings always have fuzzy boundaries, so people often end up in heated disputes over just what we should intend them to mean and how we should use them conventionally. But this will not be news to any member of an internet discussion forum.

 

[untermensche]

Chomsky also believes the language capacity arose as a "thinking device", not as something for communication.

If the language capacity is really a thinking capacity then it is hard to separate language from the kind of cognition humans have.

 

[fast]

Words aren't necessary for the most basic primitive thoughts, but without words, even ordinary seemingly mundane thoughts can be difficult to process. Deep thought with intricate nuances and layers of abstract distinctions without words, impossible.

Words are the rails for roller coasters, the tracks for trains, and the roads for cars. Without them stepping stones, any semblance of clarity of thought, let alone the expression of them, is beyond a monumental task.

Words give us something to latch onto--to clasp for and grasp. It gives us something, hopefully firm, upon which foundations can be grounded and later built upon.

 

[untermensche]

Words are created at some point.

But thinking can occur without them.

I can think about all the things I have to do tomorrow without a word.

I can think about the contingencies of the terrain as I try to kill something with a spear.

But we all have a stream of thoughts in words that runs most of the day.

 

[steve_bank]

Bicameralism

A conclusion was that initially people saw images superimposed on reality as a way of working things out. It was suppressed by the rise of Aristotelian logic and articulate language. True or not one might say language can be a limitation if it overpowers a higher non verbal non linear reasoning.

After decades of problem solving my feeling is logic is a subset of a higher function of the brain and can be limiting. If words and logic are required then humans would never have gotten started.

There was a series of books based on Null A non Aristotelian logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Null-A

http://taggedwiki.zubiaga.org/new_content/182137b8185392ce9e1f428eff7193b5

The term was coined by psychologist Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality, that is to say a mental state in which there are two distinct sections of consciousness, was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3000 years ago. He used governmental bicameralism to metaphorically describe such a state, in which the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere of the brain are transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. This mental model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought, which Jaynes argues is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language. The idea that language is a necessary component of subjective consciousness and more abstract forms of thinking has been gaining acceptance in recent years, with proponents such as Daniel Dennett, William Calvin, Merlin Donald, John Limber, Howard Margolis, and Jose Luis Bermudez.[1]

 

[fast]

Words are created at some point.

But thinking can occur without them.

I can think about all the things I have to do tomorrow without a word.

I can think about the contingencies of the terrain as I try to kill something with a spear.

But we all have a stream of thoughts in words that runs most of the day.

I agree with pretty much everything you said except that middle sentence.

To think about ALL of the THINGS you have to do TOMORROW without any thought couched in words seems to be problematic--unless of course, sleeping covers most of the day in its entirety.

 

[untermensche]

Words are created at some point.

But thinking can occur without them.

I can think about all the things I have to do tomorrow without a word.

I can think about the contingencies of the terrain as I try to kill something with a spear.

But we all have a stream of thoughts in words that runs most of the day.

I agree with pretty much everything you said except that middle sentence.

To think about ALL of the THINGS you have to do TOMORROW without any thought couched in words seems to be problematic--unless of course, sleeping covers most of the day in its entirety.

Tomorrow can be thought of without words.

You just imagine yourself doing something and also imagine it is happening tomorrow.

Tomorrow existed before there was a word for it.

That light that follows darkness. That waking that follows sleeping for hours.

 

[Copernicus]

Bicameralism

A conclusion was that initially people saw images superimposed on reality as a way of working things out. It was suppressed by the rise of Aristotelian logic and articulate language. True or not one might say language can be a limitation if it overpowers a higher non verbal non linear reasoning.

After decades of problem solving my feeling is logic is a subset of a higher function of the brain and can be limiting. If words and logic are required then humans would never have gotten started.

There was a series of books based on Null A non Aristotelian logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Null-A

http://taggedwiki.zubiaga.org/new_content/182137b8185392ce9e1f428eff7193b5

The term was coined by psychologist Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality, that is to say a mental state in which there are two distinct sections of consciousness, was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3000 years ago. He used governmental bicameralism to metaphorically describe such a state, in which the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere of the brain are transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. This mental model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought, which Jaynes argues is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language. The idea that language is a necessary component of subjective consciousness and more abstract forms of thinking has been gaining acceptance in recent years, with proponents such as Daniel Dennett, William Calvin, Merlin Donald, John Limber, Howard Margolis, and Jose Luis Bermudez.[1]

Steve, I honestly don't know what significant role, if any, that the bicameral architecture has to play in cognition, but there have been cases of people who have had the  corpus callosum severed by an operation known as a corpus callosotomy. Usually, the operation has been used to stop the occurrence of grand mal seizures in serious cases of epilepsy. This can sometimes lead to language disorders, but the side effects vary. What does seem to be the case from experimental evidence is that both sides of the brain develop separate consciousness. Hence, I don't believe that bicameralism is essential to reasoning. It is probably more likely that there are many levels of consciousness in a brain that interact with each other.

As for "articulate language" and Aristotelian logic, language, I don't see those as significant factors in human cognition. There has never been any evidence of a human culture that did not possess a fully developed "articulate language", but there is plenty of evidence to support the existence of cultures that have never been exposed to Aristotelian logic. The truth is that we really don't know when spoken language first appeared in hominid species (having access to only the one such example of the species today), so we don't even know how many millennia our type of animal has been jabbering away. Nor, for that matter, do we really understand all of the intricacies of communication systems in other animals.

As a teenager, I was a big fan of AE van Vogt and other science fiction writers who doted on L Ron Hubbards' work, but nowadays it isn't really taken seriously even by the community of fiction writers.

 

[DBT]

I agree that there’s not much new about the fact of animal cognition, although apparently de Waal adds a good deal of detail. What interests me though is the corollary that human cognition is not dependent on language –language and thought may not be interconnected to the degree (my) intuition has always suggested they are.

Rather than language and words alone, thoughts may be experienced as mental images, the action of picking up a stone to crack a nut when nothing else is available coming to mind without verbal reasoning or planning.

As for “thinking in pictures,” DBT, I agree that’s a good suggestion. I myself do not think in pictures, and never have, but I’ll allow for the possibility. I like the terminology you use when you say “thoughts are experienced" as language/picture, which implies that language and/or visualization shape thought, but are not the same thing as thinking. So, I wonder, what is a thought that is apart from its expression? What is the experience of thinking when it is pre-verbal or pre-pictoral?

I feel unfortunately at a loss for words myself in trying to communicate these ideas. Perhaps a cognitive linguist will come along and give me the vocabulary I need.

Just to indulge in a bit of nitpicking, I don't think that calling it thinking in 'pictures' truly represents thought in the form of mental imagery

For example;

1. Meanings and Connotations of ‘Mental Imagery’

''Mental imagery is a familiar aspect of most people's everyday experience (Galton, 1880a,b, 1883; Betts, 1909; Doob, 1972; Marks, 1972, 1999). A few people may insist that they rarely, or even never, consciously experience imagery (Galton, 1880a, 1883; Faw, 1997, 2009; but see Brewer & Schommer-Aikins, 2006), but for the vast majority of us, it is a familiar and commonplace feature of our mental lives. The English language supplies quite a range of idiomatic ways of referring to visual mental imagery: ‘visualizing,’ ‘seeing in the mind's eye,’ ‘having a picture in one's head,’ ‘picturing,’ ‘having/seeing a mental image/picture,’ and so on. There seem to be fewer ways to talk about imagery in other sensory modes, but there is little doubt that it occurs, and the experiencing of imagery in any sensory mode is often referred to as ‘imagining’ (the appearance, feel, smell, sound, or flavor of something). Alternatively, the quasi-perceptual nature of an experience may be indicated merely by putting the relevant sensory verb (‘see,’ ‘hear,’ ‘taste,’ etc.) in actual or implied “scare quotes.”

Despite the familiarity of the experience, the precise meaning of the expression ‘mental imagery’ is remarkably hard to pin down, and differing understandings of it have often added considerably to the confusion of the already complex and fractious debates, amongst philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists, concerning imagery's nature, its psychological functions (if any), and even its very existence. In the philosophical and scientific literature (and a fortiori in everyday discourse), the expression ‘mental imagery’ (or ‘mental images’) may be used in any or all of at least three different senses, which are only occasionally explicitly distinguished, and all too often conflated''

 

[steve_bank]

When I was problem solving as an engineer I often thought it out in images without a verbal or word based logic. Anong peers there was a lot of picture based communication.. metaphor, analogy and imagery.

There was a STNG episode about a culture that communicated solely by metaphor.



Not to belabor the point. Back in the 90s someone in England set up a series of difficulties for wild squirrels to overcome to get to food. The squirrels cleary went through observation sitting and looking over the obstacles, then going through a series of trial and error to get the food. The video is called Daylight Robbery and should be on the net.

 

[Tharmas]

Well, I’ve reconsidered, or re-thought this (HA!). I do see images when I think. For example, when I think of my car, an image forms in my head instantaneously.

However, I’m not sure which comes first, the word of the image.

Thanks for the clarifying definitions, DBT. I may read the whole article if I have time. I have to admit I have long used the “memory theater” technique (described by Yates, referenced in the article) as a tool for memorizing lists.

However, I’m still not clear about what actually thinking in images might mean, other than just copying other actions, but I am open to the possibility. It seems to me that there is some layer of thinking that comes before visualization or words.

Steve: Interestingly, there are linguists (e.g. George Lakoff) who posit that all language (and therefore all thought?) is built from metaphor. Lakoff even has a book out describing mathematics as metaphor. I look forward to viewing the squirrel video as soon as I locate it.

 

[steve_bank]

I'm just philosophizing off the top of my head. Other than psych 101 and cognitive psychology classes haven't read much. I am out of my depth.\\In enginneering it is difficult to communicate solely by math. Often impossible by words. A good analogy aur metaphor works to to bring understanding.

If you look at daily speech or watch cable news and TV you will see a bit of metaphor and analogy.

Slam dunk, being a team player, three strikes and you're out, being myopic or unable to see beyond the tip of your nose.

 

[Copernicus]

Steve: Interestingly, there are linguists (e.g. George Lakoff) who posit that all language (and therefore all thought?) is built from metaphor. Lakoff even has a book out describing mathematics as metaphor. I look forward to viewing the squirrel video as soon as I locate it.

I like that book by Lakoff and Nunez, but it is one of several that Lakoff has written on the subject. The original 1980 monograph by Lakoff and Johnson was Metaphors We Live By. A short paper by the same authors and same title can be found here (Metaphors We Live By PDF). That work led to quite a few more technical publications later, including his 1987 tour de force  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

 

[Juma]

Well, I’ve reconsidered, or re-thought this (HA!). I do see images when I think. For example, when I think of my car, an image forms in my head instantaneously.

However, I’m not sure which comes first, the word of the image.

Thanks for the clarifying definitions, DBT. I may read the whole article if I have time. I have to admit I have long used the “memory theater” technique (described by Yates, referenced in the article) as a tool for memorizing lists.

However, I’m still not clear about what actually thinking in images might mean, other than just copying other actions, but I am open to the possibility. It seems to me that there is some layer of thinking that comes before visualization or words.

Steve: Interestingly, there are linguists (e.g. George Lakoff) who posit that all language (and therefore all thought?) is built from metaphor. Lakoff even has a book out describing mathematics as metaphor. I look forward to viewing the squirrel video as soon as I locate it.

Images? Are you sure? Not more like 3D renderings or clouds of structures? That what experiences. Not flat 2D images