When do you suppose humans first began to think? Perhaps I’m jumping the gun here. We best first ask what is thinking? Do we really know? I think we can safely say that our brain continues on its synaptic way while we try to sleep. Is having a dream, thinking? We seldom describe it as thinking. When we have had a dream we don’t say we’ve had a thought. Indeed, we distinguish a thought from a dream. In our discussions we are never heard to say ‘Here’s a new dream.’ in place of ‘Here’s a new thought.’ Obviously something is going on in our brain when we dream but we try to distinguish it from thinking. This seems odd. When we daydream we are said to be thinking. Is this because a daydream is voluntary whereas a sleep dream is not? There is something in this that gives us a clue to understanding thinking.
Thinking is a voluntary act. Thinking doesn’t just happen because our neurons become excited. We cannot think against our will. Merely looking at something for the first time is not thinking about it. Thinking is a process and a thought is an element of this process much as a sentence is an element of the process of writing. If you have read my other posts you will recognize that I am convinced that we think in language but not all linguists hold this view.
Robbins Burling, in an otherwise very fine book, separates thinking from language. Indeed, he holds that “Language so persistently floats through our minds that we often feel that we think in language… Anyone who has had a word on the tip of his tongue but failed to dredge its pronunciation from memory knows that it is possible to think of a concept without having an accessible word for it. [I dealt with this problem in The Humpty Dumpty Effect] We do not need all this apparatus in order to think…The specific features of language, its words, phonology and its syntax were all selected to let us communicate, not as a way to help us think.” (The Talking Ape, Oxford University Press, 2007 .91)
Burling’s evidence is soft and he is overlooking a very hard indisputable fact. If we can’t put it into language then it is nothing to speak of. It is indisputable because it cannot be spoken and it is hard because there is no evidence to show that it is more than nothing.
Burling is not clear on what constitutes a concept but from the above quote it seems that he thinks having a concept is like recognizing the face of an actor on television but being forced to rack our brain trying to remember his name. We can discuss other things about the actor, who he is married to, other shows he has been in and with who but we just cannot put a name to him. While this may show we have a concept of the actor it does not show that language is not necessary for thinking. Indeed, quite the opposite.
“The term [concept] is the modern replacement for the older term idea, stripped of the latter’s imagist associations and thought of as more intimately bound up with language.” (The Oxford Companion to Philosophy)
Here we must understand that merely having an image in our head is not holding a concept. Having a concept is what enables us to use a word correctly. A concept entails rules for its use which are determined by public criteria (See the Humpty Dumpty Effect) which have been accepted by members of our speech community.
Thinking, of course, is concerned with such things a reasoning, believing, reflecting, calculating, deliberating, joking, analyzing, fantasizing, pondering, etc. which are all voluntary activities involving language and concepts. As an experiment, try thinking of something for which you have no language. We must have a language even to describe those things that go bump in the night.
Though much of reality is based on shared concepts, many concepts are personal (but not private) to the individual, for reality is how we describe the world: it is how the world seems to us to be. Therefore the foundation of our reality also relies on language use.
We must resist the tendency to think of reality as a fixed state of affairs that language merely identifies or labels. Reality is the product of language. The impressions that flood our mind provide food for thinking, and the language we use provides us with the means to ‘cook up’ a reality. Peter Winch states it clearly: “Our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in the language that we use. The concepts we have settle for us the form of the experience we have of the world.” (The Idea of Social Science, Humanities Press, p15.)
What we know of the world we can only know through language, and as our language is subject to change, so too is our reality. The world will not change in the sense that physical objects may come into existence as a result of language use, but our comprehension of our impressions of the world (our experiences) often change as a result of language. When Harvey discovered that blood circulates he did not discover red and white corpuscles or plasma. But though corpuscles and plasma existed as part of the perceived world they were not realized. They held no place as conceptual elements of reality. Realization is an act of discovery governed by language use.
In this sense, cultural differences in language use often create cultural differences in realities. New Guinea mountain tribesmen who have only two basic colour words (light and dark) have a different prehension of reality to us. They live in the same world we do and they are capable of receiving the same impressions, but their reality is different from Europeans as their language use obliges them to divide the world into different categories.
But what about animals? If they have no language, is it the case they have no reality? Don’t animals think? Animals remember things as anyone who has had a pet knows. They must think and have concepts how else could they remember things?
Let’s see if I can answer this. First, animals have no reality and they don’t need a reality. Reality is what is realized; thought about. Animals confront the world directly whereas humans create many different realities. When we go to the theatre and become involved in a play we are experiencing a different reality. When we play with our children we conjure up a different reality. Video games promote different realities. We enter into a reality when our belief is captured by the events we participate in thereby making them real. Our lives are full of different realities and we use them to advance our understanding.
As I mentioned earlier, we create our realities with our language use; we distinguish between what is real and what is actual. We are always aware that what we hold to be real today may be shown to be not actual tomorrow. For a long time scientists believed that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light but recent experiments with the Hadron Collider at Cern have shown this belief to be not actually the case.
When I was a reckless teenager I foolishly drank a lot of straight Gin and was sick for two days. That was over forty years ago but to this day a mere whiff of Gin makes me nauseous. When I was in acting school we described this as sense memory recall. Embedded in my sense of smell is the memory of the odour of gin that still promotes a nauseous reaction. It has nothing to do with language, it has to do with the senses. I imagine sounds have a similar effect on some people bringing on an uncomfortable or pleasant feeling. Certain tastes have been known to repel persons as a result of previous experiences. These are not examples of conscious memories, rather they are instinctive ones.
Animals survive by their senses. A fox or a deer that gets a whiff of a hunter is off in the other direction quick smart. If a fox eats something which makes him sick he can tell by the smell that it is not to be eaten again. Some animals can accommodate colour and most can accommodate shape. Vision is a sense that has a memory just as taste, hearing and smell does. We have all seen dogs that are hand shy as a result of being abused. By the opposite token animals are trained by rewards relying on the sense of touch, taste, smell and comforting familiar sounds which are pleasing experiences This is how animals confront and contend with the world. Animals don’t need to think, their senses do the thinking for them. (I will deal with this confusion by linguists and psychologist in part II of this essay.)
Launt Thompson
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