Topics Language

Question Is the experience of thoughts as predominantly verbal universal, or nearly so? What alternatives are there?

Accepted:
October 23, 2005

Comments

Suppose you trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B. Do you always do so verbally? Or do you sometimes find yourself imagining going from A to B, seeing important landmarks, imagining the turns you'd take, and finding yourself getting there? Or not?

There has been a good deal of research on visualization and other sorts of imagistic thought. Whether imagistic thought is, ultimately, verbal, and if so in what sense, is much debated.

There may be other sorts of thought that are neither verbal nor imagistic. Think about considering how something one does or says might make someone else feel. In doing so, one might attempt to empathize with that person, and again it is not obvious that such thought is purely verbal. One is, as the saying goes, trying to put oneself in that person's shoes and feel what he or she would or might feel. Or again, are prayer and meditation forms of thought? (Note that it is irrelevant here whether one thinks there is any point to such activities.) Are they verbal?

Temple Grandin (a high-functioning autistic who is a professor of animal science at Colorado State) describes herself as 'thinking in pictures' rather than linguistically. Her book Thinking in Pictures is quite interesting.

Question Is the experience of thoughts as predominantly verbal universal, or nearly so? What alternatives are there? Accepted:October 23, 2005

Question Is the experience of thoughts as predominantly verbal universal, or nearly so? What alternatives are there?

Accepted:
October 23, 2005