The Language of Thought - Literature review Example

LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT INTRODUCTION: Language and thought are central to all human activities since they are the medium of our mental and social lives. Language is used both to communicate with others and to monitor our internal thoughts, states Lund (2003). Language and thinking are inter-dependent according to cognitive psychologists. Harley (2001) and Garnham & Oakhill (1994) consider language together with the nature and complexity of our thought processes to be an essential part of what it means to be human, thus partly distinguishing us from other animals. Miller (2003: 141-142) found that cognitive processes responsible for the structural aspects of human language were based on syntactic theory. “They are mentalistic hypotheses about the cognitive processes responsible for the verbal behaviours we observe”. It has been observed that thought and language cannot exist without one another; and there are opposing views about language being a key element of thought, or conversely: thought as crucial to language. “The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) states that thought and thinking take place in a mental language. This language consists of a system of representations that is physically realized in the brain of thinkers and has a combinatorial syntax and semantics such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations”. According to LOTH, thought is a representation that has a constituent syntactic structure with appropriate semantics (SEP, 2004). Language of thought is called as Mentalese by Fodor (1975). Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity and systematicity of thought and thinking. There are alternative approaches to the study of human thought and language, such as connectionism advocated by Crane (2003), and there are regress arguments against the language of thought, as stated by Laurence & Margolis (1997). DISCUSSION: Western philosophy and linguistics are other disciplines besides cognitive psychology which have long-standing interest in the relationship between thought and language. Most accept that there is a close connection between thought and language. In answer to Plato’s question, Socrates answered that “thought is the discourse of the mind with itself”, as given in Theaetetus, 189e (Cropsey, 1995). Descartes, who did much to re-orient the course of philosophy in the seventeenth century, did not straightforwardly identify thought with language. However, researchers have found Descartes’ conception of thought to follow that of Plato’s, and also anticipated the twentieth century computational conception. Preston (1997) asks whether thought must always take place “in” language, as stated by linguists. Thinking In Language: Gleitman and Papafragou (2004) state that language cannot, or in practice does not, express all and only what we mean. Rather, language use offers hints and guideposts to hearers, such that they can usually reconstruct what the speaker had in mind by applying to the uttered words a good dose of common sense pertaining to thoughts, inferences, and plausibilities, in the world. The question of just how to apportion the territory between the underlying semantics of sentences and the pragmatic interpretation of the sentential semantics, of course, is far from settled in linguistic and philosophical theorizing. In both linguistic as well as philosophical theorizing, it is difficult to determine the degree of significance of the underlying semantics of sentences, as against the pragmatic interpretation of the sentential semantics. Gleitman and Papafragou (2004) observe that the exact division of labour between linguistic semantics and pragmatics has implications for the language-thought issue, because the richer the linguistic semantics is claimed to be, the more likely it is that language guides our mental life. It is seen that linguistic semantics cannot fully envelope and substitute for inferential interpretation, and the representations that populate our mental life therefore cannot be identical to the representations that encode linguistic (semantic) meaning. Construing thought as inner language makes it possible to explain several parallels between thought and language. Preston (1997) states that thoughts and utterances exhibit semantic similarities. The particular thought concept produced as an utterance in an identical situation, must have the same meaning, reference and truth-value. Linguists insist that whatever we are capable of thinking, in principle we are capable of saying, and vice versa. According to Miller (1963), how much emphasis to place on language in the study of thinking was still a debatable issue in psychology. Opinions ranged all the way from psychologists who were of the opinion that thought was the implicit movement of speech musculature to theorists who did not relate language to thinking. However, though subvocal monologues do not comprise the entire area called thinking, they do merit attention. For example, many people who converse with themselves, when interrupted, say that they were thinking; thus establishing that thought and language were synonymous at that point of time. Jerry A. Fodor (1975) stated that the nature of human thought requires that there by a language of thought that is not one’s native language. According to the book Brainstorms (1981: 92), Fodor’s message has three parts: The first part is that his hypothesis can be called as neocognitivism, “for it is not markedly continuous with earlier schools of cognitive psychology nor is it all clearly psychology”. It has developed mainly due to the decreasing significance of behaviourism, and its ispiration is drawn largely from linguistics, computer science and epistemology. Fodor’s second task is to show that this best hope for a confirmed, powerful psychological theory requires internal representational systems. These systems, though designed for computation rather than communication, have structures and other features which are like those of natural languages. They are the medium in which the computational transactions are performed, and that ultimately govern our behaviour. Fodor’s third task is to show how evidence from linguistics and psychology establishes answers to questions relating to the structure of the internal code. The inner code is innate and one’s innate vocabulary of predicates must be sufficient to represent by logical construction any predicate of any natural language one can learn. We are not born with an inner code word for “airplane”, but if we could not form at the outset a predicate of inner mentalese co-extensive with “airplane”, we could never learn what “airplane” meant, could never add an “airplane” synonym to our basic stock (Brainstorms, 1981). Language is Sketchy, Thought is Rich: According to Gleitman & Papafragou (2004: 637), “linguistic representations underdetermine the conceptual contents they are used to convey: Language is sketchy compared with the richness of our thoughts”. It is natural to conceive conversation as beginning with a thought or mental message one wishes to convey. This thought is the first link in a chain of mental events that, on most accounts, gets translated into languagelike representations, creating a series of commands to the articulatory system to utter a word, phrase, or sentence (Levelt, 1989; Dell, 1995). Therefore, there is a clear distinction at the two ends of this process: what you meant to say and how you express it linguistically. On the other hand, several commentators, notably Dan Slobin (2003), have raised the possibility of a more dynamic and interactive process in which what one chooses to mean and the expressive options that one’s language makes available are quite similar. Gethin (1999) states that thought is not language and thought is not based on language. Thought does not depend on language and language is not dependent on thought. There is no essential connection between thinking and language except in two ways: language is a translating device for the imperfect expression of thought, or of the awareness of experience, and without thinking humans cannot produce language. Language has a corrupting effect on thought. The existence of language leads to thought. However, language and thought are separate and different from each other. The thought must come first, independently on its own, it cannot be based on language. It is the thought that chooses the particular word to describe what it is. Thought can and should be quite independent of language. For example, people often think about things that they do not know the word for. On the other hand, the philosopher Wittgenstein would oppose the above statement. He was of the opinion that human concepts are impossible without language. Wittgenstein said that one can look at a triangle, and first see this as apex and that as base, and then look again and see that as apex and this as base. One has two different experiences, although what one’s eyes see is actually one and the same thing. But without knowing the geometry words apex and base, one could not have these experiences. However, Gethin (1999: 33) states that this is untrue. For instance, many patterns on floors or wall tiles can be “interpreted” or “looked at” in different ways. For most of them one may not have any words, but the various alternative patterns are none the less clear. A simple example is a chess board (Gethin, 1999). One can see this as lines of white diamonds tip to tip on a black background, sloping diagonally up from left to right – or right to left. Or as lines of black diamonds on a white background, tip to tip, sloping diagonally up from left to right or right to left. Or as vertical columns of alternating black and white squares. A child of five is able to observe the above patterns without knowing any of the technical words to describe the various patterns one can experience on a chess board. And of course, there again arises the question: how do words like base, apex, diagonal, horizontal, vertical, etc come about in the first place? Once again, they can only be the response to something already experienced. This distinction between words and concepts is confirmed by the cases of people with brain damage who do not remember the name of an object, but can still draw it. In the same way, by the Wittgenstein argument, it would be impossible for children to learn their native language at all. They can only do it by recognizing in the continually new words and expressions they hear, things they have already thought about. If they had not thought about them, the new words would be meaningless. In other words, if thought is language or depends on language; then children cannot think anything before they learn language. Even when they begin to do that, they cannot think any particular thing they have not got words for yet. This cannot be true, states Gethin (1999: 33). Pre-verbal Concepts and Language Mapping: Preverbal thought has shown that the conceptual basis necessary to understand simple language develops over the course of the first year. During this time infants develop extensive concepts of objects such as animals, actions such as drinking, and spatial relations such as containment. They can put these together in a form sufficient to recall the past, solve simple problems, and make inductive inferences. At the same time, their concepts are often more general than the words used in daily speech. This mismatch between concept and word leads to the familiar phenomenon of overextension, in which early words have a broader extension for children than they do for adults. Even at age 2, as many as 30% of common nouns are still understood too broadly, for example, understanding (and using) the word dog to include foxes, and the word cake to include pies. A similar phenomenon occurs with verbs. For example, young English learners use the prepositions “off” and “out” to convey a similarly wide variety of acts of separation (Mandler, 2004: 512). Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis in Relation to Connectionism: An Alternative Approach: Fodor (2001) emphasizes that there are empirical reasons that although a theory of the content of thought might be able to satisfy the condition of adequacy, it is unlikely that a theory of the content of language could do so. “Between thought and language, whichever is compositional is the one that has content in the first instance. The evidence from research suggests strongly that language is not compositional. So, unless the evidence is misleading, it is thought rather than language, that has content in the first instance” (p.14). According to Thornton (1998), the language of thought hypothesis provides a version of representationalism: mental representations are symbols in a language of thought in a compositional syntax and semantics. The most direct motivation for this thesis is an explanation of systematicity. Not only is there systematicity of thought, but also of language. A language capable of representing the fact that Romeo loves Juliet, is also capable of representing the fact that Juliet loves Romeo, by reversing the symbols for Romeo and Juliet in the representing sentence. So one obvious explanation for the systematicity of thought is to say that thinking comprises the manipulation of inner representational symbols in a language of thought. The language of thought hypothesis claims that the internal bearer of this content of thought that Romeo loves Juliet; is a structured or compositional symbol in an inner language. The language of thought versions of representationalism can make use of a similar account to explain the rational structure of thought. For this reason, mental representations comprise symbols in a language of thought, the syntax of which governs their causal interactions such that the demands of rationality are respected. In other words, the mind is a computer, the computations of which involve the manipulation of internal symbols. Thinking comprises the causal manipulation of internal symbols according to a system of laws that matches the rational structures of the contents of thoughts encoded by the symbols. While the language of thought and the mental model hypotheses attempt to explain the syntax in the case of language of thought, and an internal structure akin to syntax in the case of mental models, they do not explain the intentional or semantic properties of thought. The intentionality of thought is explained by causal relations between mental representations and the world (Thornton, 1998). Crane (2003: 156) says that Mentalese sentences have their meaning in a very different kind of way to the way that public language sentences do. Public language sentences may acquire their meaning by being intentionally used by speakers, but this cannot be how it is with Mentalese. The sentences of Mentalese, as Fodor has said, have their effects on a thinker’s behaviour “without having to be understood”. They are not understood because they are not consciously used at all: the conscious use of sentences stops in the outside world. The whole crux of the Mentalese hypothesis is that thinking is the rule-governed manipulation of mental sentences. As one of the main arguments for syntactic structure was the idea that mental processes are systematic, it turns out that the crucial question is: is human thinking rule governed in the sense in which the hypothesis says? Are there laws of thought for cognitive science to discover? Indeed, can the nature of human thought be captured in terms of rules or laws at all? (Crane, 2003). Connectionism and Language: Pinker and Prince (1988) have studied language and connectionism, which is an alternative approach to Fodor’s hypothesis of the language of thought. Rumelhart and McClelland have described a connectionist (parallel distributed processing) model of the acquisition of the past tense in English which successfully maps many stems onto their past tense forms, both regular (walk/walked) and irregular (go/went), and which mimics some of the errors and sequences of development of children. Yet the model contains no explicit rules, only a set of neuronstyle units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the stem, a set of units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the past form, and an array of connections between the two sets of units whose strengths are modified during learning. Rumelhart and McClelland observe that linguistic rules may be merely convenient approximate fictions and that the real causal processes in language use and acquisition must be characterized as the transfer of activation levels among units and the modification of the weights of their connections. By analysing both the linguistic and the developmental assumptions of the model in detail, it was found that (1) it cannot represent certain words, (2) it cannot learn many rules, (3) it can learn rules found in no human language, (4) it cannot explain morphological and phonological regularities, (5) it cannot explain the differences between irregular and regular forms, (6) it fails at its assigned task of mastering the past tense of English, (7) it gives an incorrect explanation for two developmental phenomena: stages of overregularization of irregular forms such as “bringed”, and the appearance of doubly-marked forms such as “ated” and (8) it gives accounts of two others (infrequent overregularization of verbs ending in t/d, and the order of acquisition of different irregular subclasses) that are indistinguishable from those of rule-based theories. The authors show that many failures of the model can be attributed to its connectionist architecture. It was concluded that Connectionists’ claims about the dispensability of rules in explanations in the psychology of language must be rejected, and that, on the contrary, the linguistic and developmental facts provide good evidence for such rules (Pinker and Prince, 1988). CONCLUSION: This paper highlights the salient points of Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis, and the reasons why thought comes first and is fundamental to language, rather than vice versa. A unique mental language known as Mentalese with its own syntax and semantics, as stated by Fodor, has been discussed. He believed that Mentalese was used unconsciously, and though the sentences may not be clearly understood, they had an effect on the thinker’s behaviour. Other psychologists, philosophers and linguists’ views have also been discussed. The study of the language of thought is found to be of interest to scholars from several disciplines. There are areas in this topic which will benefit from future research: such as, whether the nature of human thought can be captured in terms of rules and laws? --------------------------------- REFERENCES Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. (1981). Massachussetts: The MIT Press. Crane, Tim. (2003). The Mechanical Mind: A Philosophical Introduction to Minds, Machines, and Mental Representation. London: Routledge. Cropsey, Joseph. (1995). Plato’s World. London: University of Chicago Press. Dell, G. (1995). “Speaking and Mispeaking”. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (Eds.), Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press. Fodor, Jerry A. (1975). The Language of Thought. England: Harvard University Press. Fodor, J.A. (2001). “Language, Thought and Compositionality”. Mind and Language, Vol.16, No.1, February, 2001: pp.1-15. Garnham, A and Oakhill, J. (1994). Thinking and Reasoning. Oxford: Blackwell. Gethin, Amorey. (1999). 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