Mind

Is it possible to have a thought that has never been thought by anyone else before? A thought or notion that is so unique and individual to oneself that it surely could never have been thought by anyone else previously?

Comments

I think that the answer to this question depends on what one take a thought to be. If by 'thought', one means an actual, occurrent mental state, then surely it is possible to have a thought that no one else has ever had: if sensory perceptions are thoughts, then every distinct event that one experiences is a thought that no one else has ever had (or will ever have again, for that matter); if thoughts are taken to be conceptually mediated, and hence--here I simplify--linguistically mediated, then, given that we often generate new sequences of words that have never been uttered before (as we learn from Chomsky), then surely many of our linguistically mediated thoughts will constitute new sequences of words, and, hence, be thoughts that no else has ever had before. But it is more likely that by 'thought' was meant the content of the thought--that is, what one was thinking about. Given that one may think about one's sensory experiences, it seems to be trivially true that the contents of one's thoughts were never even accessible to another person. Moreover, given that one may have access to concepts that no other person has ever had--consider, for example, a chemist formulating an altogether new compound--then one may surely think about matters that no one else has ever thought about. Now one might think that even the thoughts of the chemist in the preceding example are themselves shaped by what s/he has learned about chemistry, and, thus, in a certain sense, are determined by previous thoughts and, hence, not genuinely new. While I think that I understand the picture that underlies this question--a picture according to which all knowledge builds on preceding knowledge and hence, in some sense depends on it--I don't think, even if one were to accept this picture, that it would therefore follow that one couldn't have a genuinely new thought.

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