Language

This is in response to the question about Hellen Keller and whether or not there is thought without language [http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/question/459]. How could a thoughtless person ACQUIRE language? It seems that the process of learning a language (or anything else, for that matter) would require thought. Doesn't this argument prove that thought exists prior to language acquisition? The same can be said of babies. Not many would argue that pre-verbal babies are incapable of thought. Otherwise they would never learn anything.

Comments

Many philosophers and psychologists find this argument compelling. I, for example, am a philosopher who finds the argument compelling. (See also Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought, for an extensive discussion of this kind of consideration.) But not everyone finds the argument compelling, and even those of us who do need to be careful here.

The most we can really conclude is that some kind of cognitive activity is present in pre-linguistic creatures. Someone might think that there are important differences between the kind of cognitive activity present pre- and post-linguistically, and one might think that the reason has very much to do with the acquisition of language. One view I have heard expressed, for example, is that language plays an important role by providing a common form of representation that allows otherwise isolated cognitive systems to "talk" to one another. Whether that is so is, presumably, an empirical question. There are some interesting experiments that point in this kind of direction, but the question is certainly still open.

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