Topics Language

Question What do we mean when we say that we think "in words"? When I think, I don't "hear" speech or "see" written words. So what is it, exactly, that we are aware of that indicates that thought is linguistic?

Accepted:
July 5, 2008

Comments

I don't have an answer because I have always been puzzled by the same expression!

Maybe the whole way of putting the problem is muddier than we thought. The memoir My Stroke of Insight: a Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Taylor vividly explains the left and right brain functions - and what happened to the author following a stroke to her ‘logical’ left side.

After checking out this book I am really not sure that all thought is done 'in words' ... whatever that is supposed to mean.

Indeed, not all thought is done 'in words'. Sitting in front of the chess board, I'm certainly thinking hard (and it's serious rational planning, not wool-gathering!). But I'm imagining sequences of moves on a board, not going in for inner speech. Likewise, when Roger Federer out-thinks his opponent, he probably isn't giving himself a wordy running commentary in English (or Schweizer-Deutsch) -- how distracting would that be!? Gilbert Ryle long ago wrote much good sense about this. (One fairly characteristic piece is available online here.)

But yes, some thought is naturally described as being 'in words'. And not just my written thoughts here on the screen but, so to speak, the private ratiocinations as I was sorting out my ideas and thinking what to say here. My thoughts weren't in some other medium that I then had to translate into words: I was rehearsing these very words "in my head", as we say. But what does that mean? A good question. What we want here is a general story about what is involved in doing something "in your head" as opposed to overtly -- whether it is thinking to oneself as opposed to out loud, running through chess moves "in the mind's eye" rather than by moving pieces on a board, thinking through a sequence of dance-steps rather than trying them out across the floor, and so on.

Question What do we mean when we say that we think "in words"? When I think, I don't "hear" speech or "see" written words. So what is it, exactly, that we are aware of that indicates that thought is linguistic? Accepted:July 5, 2008

Question What do we mean when we say that we think "in words"? When I think, I don't "hear" speech or "see" written words. So what is it, exactly, that we are aware of that indicates that thought is linguistic?

Accepted:
July 5, 2008