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Straight Dope's answers are often quite illuminating but on this one they've really dropped the ball. First, consider the statement "I think in English, because

by Jun8 16y ago

Straight Dope's answers are often quite illuminating but on this one they've really dropped the ball. First, consider the statement "I think in English, because that's what I speak." This is an extremely naive view of, what is to linguists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, etc., a huge enigma, or actually two: 1. Is our thought process based on language, i.e. does it use syntactical transformations that are characteristics of language. Note that introspective evidence immediately reveals that at least part of our thinking are in images. This type of thinking is clearly now linguistic. So, let's limit the question to the other modes of thinking, e.g. reasoning. 2. If the answer to (1) is affirmative, then in what language do we think? Is it our native language? What if we have two native language? What happens for deaf people? If we think in our native tongue, then how strong an influence does it exert on our thought process (i.e. was Whorf right?) AFAIK, (1) is now accepted by most philosophy of language people. (2), however, is a matter of some debate. Some people, like Fodor, claim that we think in an innate language. This position is hard to defend for various reasons. With the recent rise of linguistic relativism (suppressed for about thirty years by Chomsky and his followers) more and more researchers are delving into the question of language of thought and the effect it has on our cognitive processes. For an excellent introductory survey on the philosophical issues, see Murat Aydede's article (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/). If your cup of tea is more along the lines of cognitive psychology/linguistics, check out Lera Broditsky's work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lera_Boroditsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lera_Boroditsky)

ph0rque 16y ago
My native language is Russian. I learned English when we emigrated to US, at which point I was 9 years old. I also learned German as an exchange student when I was 17. I can say that somewhere along my language learning experience (before I learned German), I learned to abstract my thoughts to ideas, then 'implement' them to whatever language I needed to speak at the moment.
- Jun8 16y ago
  Think about one of your "abstract" thoughts: What language are they in :-)
  - axod 16y ago
    Why do they need to be in a language? You could represent everything as images/video sequences.
    - Jun8 16y ago
      At least some has to be in a linguistic representation (check the Aydede article I linked above, it's interesting). Why? Because (i) You cannot represent everything using images, e.g. "brother", "justice", "tesseract", but more importantly (ii) it is impossible for image representations to support complex syntactic manipulations necessary for reasoning. As a very simple example, think about the syllogism that starts with "all men are mortal". How would you convert the deduction to a representation based on images. One final thing: The most common words in all languages are grammatical functions words, e.g. "the", "a", "every", etc. How can these be represented using images? This is why, no ideogram based writing systems have ever been devised (although people thought for a while that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters had this characteristic).
      - villa1n23 16y ago
        This answer seems to be Begging the Question. You can represent brother and justice, via imagery, but what you would be doing is using a token example, comparing and creating a type out of the two situations. Now communicating that idea without a linguistic representation would be near impossible(I can't imagine an easy way) but to apprehend it without a linguistic layer is possible. (ii) It could just be my own misunderstanding of what is being said, but does having a visual representation system, mean that symbols cannot be manipulated to interact, or does that by definition make them a language? Is this a functional definition we are working with? As well, with words like "every" "the" "a" it sounds like these things are objects to you, and not emergent connectors inherent in a linguistic system, they exist by virtue of the language existing. A visual system may not have need for such conventions. Many of these questions or examples assume an almost external objective (at least thats my interpretation) existence of linguistics, but this is coming from a linguistic mind, and assumes the necessary existence of it.( hence my begging question comment at the beggining). I held much the same view, until I experienced ineffable idea's and concepts in non linguistic form. Anecdotally, one can try salvia or dimethyltryptamine and gain the qualia experience of a thinking or experience without linguistics. Good points, but I feel Impossible is too strong a conclusion based on whats been said. :)

by Jun8 16y ago

ph0rque 16y ago

My native language is Russian. I learned English when we emigrated to US, at which point I was 9 years old. I also learned German as an exchange student when I was 17. I can say that somewhere along my language learning experience (before I learned German), I learned to abstract my thoughts to ideas, then 'implement' them to whatever language I needed to speak at the moment.

Jun8 16y ago
Think about one of your "abstract" thoughts: What language are they in :-)
- axod 16y ago
  Why do they need to be in a language? You could represent everything as images/video sequences.
  - Jun8 16y ago
    At least some has to be in a linguistic representation (check the Aydede article I linked above, it's interesting). Why? Because (i) You cannot represent everything using images, e.g. "brother", "justice", "tesseract", but more importantly (ii) it is impossible for image representations to support complex syntactic manipulations necessary for reasoning. As a very simple example, think about the syllogism that starts with "all men are mortal". How would you convert the deduction to a representation based on images. One final thing: The most common words in all languages are grammatical functions words, e.g. "the", "a", "every", etc. How can these be represented using images? This is why, no ideogram based writing systems have ever been devised (although people thought for a while that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters had this characteristic).
    - villa1n23 16y ago
      This answer seems to be Begging the Question. You can represent brother and justice, via imagery, but what you would be doing is using a token example, comparing and creating a type out of the two situations. Now communicating that idea without a linguistic representation would be near impossible(I can't imagine an easy way) but to apprehend it without a linguistic layer is possible. (ii) It could just be my own misunderstanding of what is being said, but does having a visual representation system, mean that symbols cannot be manipulated to interact, or does that by definition make them a language? Is this a functional definition we are working with? As well, with words like "every" "the" "a" it sounds like these things are objects to you, and not emergent connectors inherent in a linguistic system, they exist by virtue of the language existing. A visual system may not have need for such conventions. Many of these questions or examples assume an almost external objective (at least thats my interpretation) existence of linguistics, but this is coming from a linguistic mind, and assumes the necessary existence of it.( hence my begging question comment at the beggining). I held much the same view, until I experienced ineffable idea's and concepts in non linguistic form. Anecdotally, one can try salvia or dimethyltryptamine and gain the qualia experience of a thinking or experience without linguistics. Good points, but I feel Impossible is too strong a conclusion based on whats been said. :)