look i’m not a linguist so i’m not going to make the proper argument here but the defining features of our type of human are the specific adaptations for language, how people behave is culturally defined and culture is understood and communicated through language.
frankly likening the experience of sensations to knowledge of them without language sounds very silly to me.
reducing ideas to sensations is some sensualist reductivism (sensations is what we get from outside world from our sensory organs, thoughts is your brain stuff doing something), i can do math or imagine things without inner voice vocalizing it, unless language comprehension area of a brain is lowkey involved in this. Of course higher order thinking, reflections/comparisons start to slow down and you can start to employ language inside to hold an idea for some time more. (i am language of thought simp i guess)
Language is a medium of transmission of ideas (to another implied person), not medium of ideas itself, you can have an idea without language, you cannot have language without ideas, as it would be just bunch of non-sense (as in - not carrying any sense). (as an aside, social conformity can be transmitted by body language perfectly well).
i’m not trying to do reductivism, -this is admittedly outside my expertise- i simply don’t understand how you square this concept of ideas existing outside language when that’s inexpressable without language.
as an aside, social conformity can be transmitted by body language perfectly well
i hope i didn’t make it sound like verbal speech was the key here, the muscle and bone adaptions that make complex speech possible were accompanied by brain stuff. people with disabilities making some forms of language inaccessible still use language!
i simply don’t understand how you square this concept of ideas existing outside language when that’s inexpressable without language.
I think the easiest way to conceptualise it is when you’re trying to explain something but struggling to find the right words - the idea is there fully formed in your mind, but you still have to search for the language to express it to someone else.
i mean that you have language of a brain (thoughts/shapes/associations/memories) that float inside brain in some patterns, like waves on a pond. You can decide to express them, to explain/translate them to another person or not. I’m saying what i believe, opinions of course differ, some people think language guides ideas.
(as an exercise, what is decision in language form, explicitly? while i can buy that thoughts and objects-symbols might be closely related, verbs and actions are very far removed, feely-wise, to me)
as aside if something is not expressible by language, it doesn’t mean it’s not real (nor is it real because i like to think it exists tbh), not something as private (and as of yet, due to mri restrictions, immeasurable) as thoughts. *(as an absurd example, is electromagnetic wave real for ancient egyptian? i don’t think a single word will match or concept of light fits with ancient egyptian ideas)
fascinating article. i definitely think more along ‘language-first’ lines but the case raises interesting questions. i’m unsure if the idea of languagelessness or thinking about language in a more inclusive way would be the way forward. it’s fascinating how Ildefonso was without language but also kind of enveloped in language-- like understanding/demonstrating ‘macho’ for instance. very cool.
i enjoy that you and the author can experience/perceive this non linguistic thought while having language, it must be a ymmv type of thing cause i really don’t, not only is my brain colonized with words i’m also all-in on cultural relativism lol
if i were to express how i think, like low level school problems or imaginative exercises (imagining physical objects , fantasizing/remembering sensations, gaming logic) occurs completely silently, more like vague shape-like or action-reaction-type thingies (?best words i can describe them), i don’t catch single words related to that. I do catch snippets of vocalized ideas if i start to focus more on something, and if i have to think from multiple sides or harder problem, i definitely start to symbolize/inner-vocalize ideas in some sense, cause if i don’t - they just flee from memory without trace, so for me inner-language is like freezing something intangible inside the mind to have time to “look” at it. (also multiple languages play funny stuff with inner monologue, so that’s why i’m sympathetic to idea i’m translating from some kind of inner thought language into real language, instead of real (first) language being primary)
*as a point of interest, do you speak 1 language or more? because i definitely don’t run word to word translations when i speak (fluently, shittily known languages definitely stall out in inner monologue of “fuck, que la worda for la chaise” mini-panic), it’s kinda self-obvious to me (not so much in written language, where i can sense reading/writing thoughts expressed explicitly in words)
also multiple languages play funny stuff with inner monologue
this is super cool because i take the same thought to the opposite conclusion, some ideas just being more right in one language than another just indicates to me how language ‘captures’–for lack of a better word(lmao)–everything.
but like even very simple arithmetic or instantaneous reactions to me feels like responding to a language, purpleworm is coming at me for such a loose definition of language but uhhhh i think many rulesets (games, cinematography, math) work like language and i’m just ‘speaking’ it, lol.
re: e: not really just ‘academically fluent’ in field specific writing
but that is very loose definition of language, if your fleeting thought (of say legality of move in chess or that putting this many holes in the chair is structurally unsound) requires 10 words to express it (this side of “fuck this” in chess language), i don’t think it’s real language first, it’s your idea you can translate into english in so many words, but it’s not like cluster of words arising in your brain (or is it?).
god isn’t this fun? it’s really wack since language =/= writing, so i’m uncomfortable designating ‘chess language’ as not language just cause you can’t write it down, right? we’re basically the comic of two people looking at the 6/9 on the ground lol
i simply don’t understand how you square this concept of ideas existing outside language when that’s inexpressable without language.
This is just question-begging. “Everything exists within language because you can’t express anything without language.” No, it’s because you’re putting something into the format of linguistic expression that language becomes a necessary element. That doesn’t mean that the actual internal experience depends on language, because it clearly does not and I’m struggling to figure out how to explain this to you because you’ve just talked yourself into it with poorly-constructed syllogisms.
Language is helpful for encoding ideas into long-term memory, but that doesn’t mean all ideas are fundamentally mediated by language, and even the communication of ideas is not fundamentally mediated by language (though most of it is for humans).
as an aside, social conformity can be transmitted by body language perfectly well
i hope i didn’t make it sound like verbal speech was the key here, the muscle and bone adaptions that make complex speech possible were accompanied by brain stuff. people with disabilities making some forms of language inaccessible still use language!
Body language is not literally language, and would be more accurately described, if we’re talking about conscious communication, as “body gestures”. Gestures are not the same thing as signs, as in sign languages used by people with certain disabilities. Body language furthermore is often unconscious or fully involuntary, which I think we can agree makes it not even a gesture.
You have argued yourself into a position where you are asserting that 12-month-olds do not have an idea of what their primary caretakers look like in the absence of something to gesture to, but earthworms do have ideas because they exhibit body “language”. Please just read even an introductory article on this topic before going around making assertions about it, because it’s silly to just go off of vibes, or if you can’t be bothered to, just have some epistemic humility.
You have argued yourself into a position where you are asserting that 12-month-olds do not have an idea of what their primary caretakers look like in the absence of something to gesture to, but earthworms do have ideas because they exhibit body “language”
who are you arguing with. this is absolute nonsense. could you try again without making wildly uncharitable interpretations and belittling me?
That’s the logical implication of the two main points I responded to. It suggests that a creature does not have ideas that it cannot plausibly attempt to communicate, and it equates body language with actual language. If you have a problem with this, you could tell me where I was wrong instead of merely communicating incredulity, as I found your assertions ridiculous as well, but I still made some attempt to offer a refutation.
Here, I’ll even start for you: Perhaps language is a necessary but not sufficient condition for having ideas, is that more like what you’re going for? But then what is an idea at all? How do we distinguish “language” that has ideas versus “language” that does not? What is the production of language without ideas? This would seem to suggest that language isn’t necessarily communicative, and by robbing language of both its formal structure (which you do when you conflate it with gesture) and intentionality (which is the implication of having language without ideas), language is reduced to being “information” in the broadest material sense, and now you’d need to establish why the pitter-patter of rain on a windowsill isn’t language, because that is still information. Maybe you agree with me that my new premise was false (“language is a necessary but not sufficient condition for having ideas”), but then that still puts you at the earthworms having ideas problem, which requires that you narrow your definition of “language” to something resembling how linguists actually define it (excluding gesture, for example).
However, I find all of this very ancillary to the point about the 12-month-old, which I don’t think the framework you’ve presented so far has any capacity to refute. Your overbroad definition of language makes this point muddier, but as in the previous comment I think that such a definition can still be humored and produce the outcome that your claim about ideas is false.
I said very early that I am not a linguist and I wasn’t going to perfectly communicate the ideas. Do you think I was attempting to write a dictionary definition of anything? Your hypothetical and logical conclusions from my premises fall short if you acknowledge I’m trying to have a productive conversation and refine my thinking rather than tell the rest of you ‘how it is’. I’d like a linguist to come and define the language-first school of thought wrt to human development in better terms than I did, even if I was misrepresenting it.
you’re not doing that though, you’re just concerned with breaking down what I said into gotchas: “narrow your definition of “language” to something resembling how linguists actually define it (excluding gesture, for example)” like what if you just outlined various ways linguists define language and how I was incongruous with them? this is still a mystery, who excludes gestures? why? this is not self-evident.
It’s difficult to believe you, because you ignored my explanations completely. Your first reply to me was just taking the conclusion and telling me you resented it while the explanations went unremarked upon. I also told you to literally just read any introductory article on the subject, because this is genuinely the sort of thing that you can google on your own to have a much stronger starting point.
A counter example is not a gotcha, it’s literally just an explanation that you are wrong, that your answer to this question of definitions and delineations is a failure. If you tell me that every number has a positive square root, it’s intuitive and there are a lot of cases that don’t falsify this, but there are plenty of numbers that don’t have positive square roots, e.g. (-1), so it’s just a false statement and non-trivially so.
Anyway, here’s a link on your question, since you asked:
The really important more general point is that language is not the same thing as communication. Communication is any way of intentionally signalling to a recipient to give them information, which includes gestures, and can be literally anything used for that purpose (e.g. a signal flare, a raised tail, musk). Languages, like the various sign languages as well as spoken languages, are systematized, having definable morphology, syntax, and so on, while gestures are basically vibing (and the two are usually both used in conjunction, as the article notes).
If we now understand that language is a complex system of communication, one that very few and arguably zero non-human animals exhibit, it becomes easier to understand why language definitely is not a necessary condition for having ideas, because plenty of intelligent animals very obviously have ideas, as we can determine from their patterns of behavior changing based on conditioning (etc.), and perceiving a person with a white beard specifically being a threat must surely be having an idea about that person, right? This also, incidentally, shows why rain does not communicate (no language, no intention) and why pre-verbal children can have ideas (language is not needed for ideas, only the articulation of ideas within language (because of course it does)).
you made the 12-month-old and earthworm up! I didn’t say that, and you did not present any evidence about 12-month-olds vs. earthworms! we can get past this. I have read most of (but fuck it’s like 100 pages) your link
this is an article with an argument that defines language in a certain way that other linguists don’t. you can argue this is heresy but i am demonstrably not alone. i’m not sure i find this paper’s arguments about symbols vs pictures compelling. i think it is strange that their arguments in (3.) are about ASL and not a broader study of sign languages. they clearly know about other sign languages, why are they not evidence? it genuinely feels like non-ASL is brought up when it is conveinient and not elsewhere, when they would provide a preponderence of evidence to support the arguments of the authors, were their rules shared across all the sign languages.
despite it all–i think it’s cool that we do debates that make people read actual literature on this site. thank you for it being something i could read for free.
look i’m not a linguist so i’m not going to make the proper argument here but the defining features of our type of human are the specific adaptations for language, how people behave is culturally defined and culture is understood and communicated through language.
frankly likening the experience of sensations to knowledge of them without language sounds very silly to me.
reducing ideas to sensations is some sensualist reductivism (sensations is what we get from outside world from our sensory organs, thoughts is your brain stuff doing something), i can do math or imagine things without inner voice vocalizing it, unless language comprehension area of a brain is lowkey involved in this. Of course higher order thinking, reflections/comparisons start to slow down and you can start to employ language inside to hold an idea for some time more. (i am language of thought simp i guess)
Language is a medium of transmission of ideas (to another implied person), not medium of ideas itself, you can have an idea without language, you cannot have language without ideas, as it would be just bunch of non-sense (as in - not carrying any sense). (as an aside, social conformity can be transmitted by body language perfectly well).
i’m not trying to do reductivism, -this is admittedly outside my expertise- i simply don’t understand how you square this concept of ideas existing outside language when that’s inexpressable without language.
i hope i didn’t make it sound like verbal speech was the key here, the muscle and bone adaptions that make complex speech possible were accompanied by brain stuff. people with disabilities making some forms of language inaccessible still use language!
I think the easiest way to conceptualise it is when you’re trying to explain something but struggling to find the right words - the idea is there fully formed in your mind, but you still have to search for the language to express it to someone else.
i mean that you have language of a brain (thoughts/shapes/associations/memories) that float inside brain in some patterns, like waves on a pond. You can decide to express them, to explain/translate them to another person or not. I’m saying what i believe, opinions of course differ, some people think language guides ideas.
(as an exercise, what is decision in language form, explicitly? while i can buy that thoughts and objects-symbols might be closely related, verbs and actions are very far removed, feely-wise, to me)
you might find this article at least interesting (it’s not strictly language of thought supportive) https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/
as aside if something is not expressible by language, it doesn’t mean it’s not real (nor is it real because i like to think it exists tbh), not something as private (and as of yet, due to mri restrictions, immeasurable) as thoughts. *(as an absurd example, is electromagnetic wave real for ancient egyptian? i don’t think a single word will match or concept of light fits with ancient egyptian ideas)
fascinating article. i definitely think more along ‘language-first’ lines but the case raises interesting questions. i’m unsure if the idea of languagelessness or thinking about language in a more inclusive way would be the way forward. it’s fascinating how Ildefonso was without language but also kind of enveloped in language-- like understanding/demonstrating ‘macho’ for instance. very cool.
i enjoy that you and the author can experience/perceive this non linguistic thought while having language, it must be a ymmv type of thing cause i really don’t, not only is my brain colonized with words i’m also all-in on cultural relativism lol
if i were to express how i think, like low level school problems or imaginative exercises (imagining physical objects , fantasizing/remembering sensations, gaming logic) occurs completely silently, more like vague shape-like or action-reaction-type thingies (?best words i can describe them), i don’t catch single words related to that. I do catch snippets of vocalized ideas if i start to focus more on something, and if i have to think from multiple sides or harder problem, i definitely start to symbolize/inner-vocalize ideas in some sense, cause if i don’t - they just flee from memory without trace, so for me inner-language is like freezing something intangible inside the mind to have time to “look” at it. (also multiple languages play funny stuff with inner monologue, so that’s why i’m sympathetic to idea i’m translating from some kind of inner thought language into real language, instead of real (first) language being primary)
*as a point of interest, do you speak 1 language or more? because i definitely don’t run word to word translations when i speak (fluently, shittily known languages definitely stall out in inner monologue of “fuck, que la worda for la chaise” mini-panic), it’s kinda self-obvious to me (not so much in written language, where i can sense reading/writing thoughts expressed explicitly in words)
this is super cool because i take the same thought to the opposite conclusion, some ideas just being more right in one language than another just indicates to me how language ‘captures’–for lack of a better word(lmao)–everything.
but like even very simple arithmetic or instantaneous reactions to me feels like responding to a language, purpleworm is coming at me for such a loose definition of language but uhhhh i think many rulesets (games, cinematography, math) work like language and i’m just ‘speaking’ it, lol.
re: e: not really just ‘academically fluent’ in field specific writing
but that is very loose definition of language, if your fleeting thought (of say legality of move in chess or that putting this many holes in the chair is structurally unsound) requires 10 words to express it (this side of “fuck this” in chess language), i don’t think it’s real language first, it’s your idea you can translate into english in so many words, but it’s not like cluster of words arising in your brain (or is it?).
god isn’t this fun? it’s really wack since language =/= writing, so i’m uncomfortable designating ‘chess language’ as not language just cause you can’t write it down, right? we’re basically the comic of two people looking at the 6/9 on the ground lol
This is just question-begging. “Everything exists within language because you can’t express anything without language.” No, it’s because you’re putting something into the format of linguistic expression that language becomes a necessary element. That doesn’t mean that the actual internal experience depends on language, because it clearly does not and I’m struggling to figure out how to explain this to you because you’ve just talked yourself into it with poorly-constructed syllogisms.
Language is helpful for encoding ideas into long-term memory, but that doesn’t mean all ideas are fundamentally mediated by language, and even the communication of ideas is not fundamentally mediated by language (though most of it is for humans).
Body language is not literally language, and would be more accurately described, if we’re talking about conscious communication, as “body gestures”. Gestures are not the same thing as signs, as in sign languages used by people with certain disabilities. Body language furthermore is often unconscious or fully involuntary, which I think we can agree makes it not even a gesture.
You have argued yourself into a position where you are asserting that 12-month-olds do not have an idea of what their primary caretakers look like in the absence of something to gesture to, but earthworms do have ideas because they exhibit body “language”. Please just read even an introductory article on this topic before going around making assertions about it, because it’s silly to just go off of vibes, or if you can’t be bothered to, just have some epistemic humility.
who are you arguing with. this is absolute nonsense. could you try again without making wildly uncharitable interpretations and belittling me?
That’s the logical implication of the two main points I responded to. It suggests that a creature does not have ideas that it cannot plausibly attempt to communicate, and it equates body language with actual language. If you have a problem with this, you could tell me where I was wrong instead of merely communicating incredulity, as I found your assertions ridiculous as well, but I still made some attempt to offer a refutation.
Here, I’ll even start for you: Perhaps language is a necessary but not sufficient condition for having ideas, is that more like what you’re going for? But then what is an idea at all? How do we distinguish “language” that has ideas versus “language” that does not? What is the production of language without ideas? This would seem to suggest that language isn’t necessarily communicative, and by robbing language of both its formal structure (which you do when you conflate it with gesture) and intentionality (which is the implication of having language without ideas), language is reduced to being “information” in the broadest material sense, and now you’d need to establish why the pitter-patter of rain on a windowsill isn’t language, because that is still information. Maybe you agree with me that my new premise was false (“language is a necessary but not sufficient condition for having ideas”), but then that still puts you at the earthworms having ideas problem, which requires that you narrow your definition of “language” to something resembling how linguists actually define it (excluding gesture, for example).
However, I find all of this very ancillary to the point about the 12-month-old, which I don’t think the framework you’ve presented so far has any capacity to refute. Your overbroad definition of language makes this point muddier, but as in the previous comment I think that such a definition can still be humored and produce the outcome that your claim about ideas is false.
I said very early that I am not a linguist and I wasn’t going to perfectly communicate the ideas. Do you think I was attempting to write a dictionary definition of anything? Your hypothetical and logical conclusions from my premises fall short if you acknowledge I’m trying to have a productive conversation and refine my thinking rather than tell the rest of you ‘how it is’. I’d like a linguist to come and define the language-first school of thought wrt to human development in better terms than I did, even if I was misrepresenting it.
you’re not doing that though, you’re just concerned with breaking down what I said into gotchas: “narrow your definition of “language” to something resembling how linguists actually define it (excluding gesture, for example)” like what if you just outlined various ways linguists define language and how I was incongruous with them? this is still a mystery, who excludes gestures? why? this is not self-evident.
It’s difficult to believe you, because you ignored my explanations completely. Your first reply to me was just taking the conclusion and telling me you resented it while the explanations went unremarked upon. I also told you to literally just read any introductory article on the subject, because this is genuinely the sort of thing that you can google on your own to have a much stronger starting point.
A counter example is not a gotcha, it’s literally just an explanation that you are wrong, that your answer to this question of definitions and delineations is a failure. If you tell me that every number has a positive square root, it’s intuitive and there are a lot of cases that don’t falsify this, but there are plenty of numbers that don’t have positive square roots, e.g. (-1), so it’s just a false statement and non-trivially so.
Anyway, here’s a link on your question, since you asked:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/gesture-sign-and-language-the-coming-of-age-of-sign-language-and-gesture-studies/40B9B8E3C35C7005D4D588EC39E34C80
The really important more general point is that language is not the same thing as communication. Communication is any way of intentionally signalling to a recipient to give them information, which includes gestures, and can be literally anything used for that purpose (e.g. a signal flare, a raised tail, musk). Languages, like the various sign languages as well as spoken languages, are systematized, having definable morphology, syntax, and so on, while gestures are basically vibing (and the two are usually both used in conjunction, as the article notes).
If we now understand that language is a complex system of communication, one that very few and arguably zero non-human animals exhibit, it becomes easier to understand why language definitely is not a necessary condition for having ideas, because plenty of intelligent animals very obviously have ideas, as we can determine from their patterns of behavior changing based on conditioning (etc.), and perceiving a person with a white beard specifically being a threat must surely be having an idea about that person, right? This also, incidentally, shows why rain does not communicate (no language, no intention) and why pre-verbal children can have ideas (language is not needed for ideas, only the articulation of ideas within language (because of course it does)).
you made the 12-month-old and earthworm up! I didn’t say that, and you did not present any evidence about 12-month-olds vs. earthworms! we can get past this. I have read most of (but fuck it’s like 100 pages) your link
this is an article with an argument that defines language in a certain way that other linguists don’t. you can argue this is heresy but i am demonstrably not alone. i’m not sure i find this paper’s arguments about symbols vs pictures compelling. i think it is strange that their arguments in (3.) are about ASL and not a broader study of sign languages. they clearly know about other sign languages, why are they not evidence? it genuinely feels like non-ASL is brought up when it is conveinient and not elsewhere, when they would provide a preponderence of evidence to support the arguments of the authors, were their rules shared across all the sign languages.
despite it all–i think it’s cool that we do debates that make people read actual literature on this site. thank you for it being something i could read for free.
I think Helen Keller has some writings on her experience learning language as an adult(?) that strengthen your point.