There is something strange about me. When I was a little kid, I went to French immersion school. That whole thing was new at that time, and at the Y other boys asked me questions about what it was like. The most common question was, “Do you think in French?”
I didn’t know what they were talking about.
It took me years to understand and accept that this was not some sort of figure of speech. They meant this literally. They actually did use language to think with, not only when they were trying to work on something complicated, but from day to day, doing ordinary things. And eventually it emerged that my own family were the same as the boys at the Y that way.
I can’t imagine what this is like.
When I went to graduate school, I studied literary theory, and found that Derrida and many others premised their thought on the notion that we all think exclusively through language. In fact, Derrida’s thought doesn’t exist if anyone thinks without language. At that time, his adherents were many, and when I brought up my experience, they assured me that I was mistaken, that I do in fact think in words without realizing it.
Surely this is insane.
Though Derrida’s influence has shrunk to a shadow of its former self, there are still theories out there that depend on the idea that all thought and perception occurs through language. But in my world, this is not true, and when I talk to people who are invested in these theories, they do not choose to take me seriously. I guess that’s understandable, unless they are so ambitious that they want to overturn the standard theories, and I’ve never met anyone like that.
Margaret Trudeau wrote in her autobiography that she once asked her husband, the prime minister of Canada, “Do you think in French or in English?” He replied, “I don’t think in either. I think in the abstract.” She seemed to think that this was a clever or pretentious thing to say, but I wondered if he was simply like me, struggling to find words to express an experience of the world that the larger society can’t see or take seriously.
Is there anyone else out there who is the same?
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I think it's purely possible. People are not always wired just so.
I believe this has to do with having an introspective personality? I've read their brains are wired differently. I mean, altogether differently.
I always chuckle at the current scientific interest in 'synaesthesia'. Synaesthesia doesn't begin to cover the way my senses seem to work to produce my experience. I experience atmosphere, seemingly interconnected images, which overlap and shift to form patterns, moods, which I will then, finally, feel an urge to string together into rational threads: words, sentences, stories.
I'm pleased to come across this and have added you as a friend.
Me, I think in language, as far as I can tell. Of course, introspection is no more likely to be right (or wrong) in my case as it is in yours.
I have heard of thinking in pictures such as Temple Grandin who has written books on the similarity with how the other species think. Alternative perceptions are ss interesting and you express this well.
In High School, I had trouble learning Spanish. I can go from thoughts to words in one language but translating between the two languages was nearly impossible for me.
language -> pictures ->language 2 = garbled mess.
Indeed, communicating in English is already like trying to describe a movie to someone else. I always miss some detail, and have to go back... computers. Longhand writing (or typewriters) is a mess, but computers with editing abilities are great.
My sister, while reading a book to help try and understand her Autistic child, found that the author (Who has Ausperger's[sp?]) claimed that autistic people, including himself, thought in visuals rather than language.
I haven't had a chance to follow up on that yet.
Most people I know claim to thin in language though.
I dislike the computer model of thinking and prefer a more organic rhisomal theory for myself. My mind will grab onto an idea and go off in several different directions. I once happily joined a thread here and was told I was "off topic". I met only one other person who thought like this and we were able to maintain several threads of conversation at the same time. It was intoxicating.
Some time after I understood that people talk to themselves, I started trying it. Now I absolutely do think in language. It was like learning to ride a bike - once I learned, I just did it.
One interesting thing I noticed while reading your post is that before I started talking to myself, I was much slower with language in conversation. I wondered how people articulated ideas so quickly and had so much to say (although I have always been considered a reasonably intelligent person by others, I was always seen as very quiet).
Now I can talk a blue streak to a stranger about nothing. Very big difference. It's just a strange phenomenon. In response to a comment above, I have always been introverted and contemplative. Perhaps there is a relationship there, whether or not this is causal I do not know.
Thanks for a post about something I was aware of but could not articulate!
One of my favorite writers, Temple Grandin, wrote a book called "Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism." I haven't read that one, but she talks a lot about thinking purely in images, and the sort distance she has between the words she writes or says. She gave a great interview recently here.
For Plato ( implicit in the theory of forms (eidos) and explicated in the Meno, the Phaedrus among others) thought/concept and knowledge/ truth, precedes language. Aristotle, less of an anti-Platonist than is supposed, in effect formalized an entire system of mnemonics based on this in Ars Memoriae ,
known (and practiced) even today as "Memory Palaces". And this view of language, that it naturally emanates from and is preceded by a truth that is already present in the "logos," held sway till very recent times.
So, Matthew, you are in the very good company of Plato and the Platonic tradition. Derrida, as you rightly point out, derided such "natural" meaning and posited all linguistic signs as "conventional" (he spoke mainly of writing, but then, for him, any distinction between the lingustic and graphic signs was forbidden). But the anti-Platonist tradition in how language is viewed goes back far earlier than dear Jacques, at least as far back as David Hume.
Hume in his "Treatise" treats abstract ideas simply as an acquired capacity to apply general terms (i.e. language) to resembling things.
But contrary to Derrida, in whom I detect a shallow rhetoric and a real lack of humanity, Hume is a genuine humanist, concerned with developing an account of rationality which will enable one to conform to the injunction of the oracle to "Know thyself." For more on this, I refer you, of course, to my own short homonymous monograph ;-).
WOOF
I think I think in words, but I think that is because I translate the thoughts into language. The truth is before that, before the translation; and I believe once upon a time (no fairy tale, this) all creatures held an unspoken wordless language in common, and could communicate one to another, hominid to animals and birds and plants and even the ancient rocks of the Earth; all in common, one Creation, once upon a time (again, from the narrow Christian perspective) when we were 'in the garden.'
Perhaps you are blessed with the innate ability to sense this connection.
I think that what people (who know what they're talking about) mean when they say that people think in language is that they think in terms of discrete tokens that are representative of ideas and connections between ideas. That is, they employ symbolic reasoning at least some of the time.
However, there's strong evidence that they also employ tons of recognizers for varied spectra of fluid notions like color and others. Almost surely these are made discrete at various points in the system in the same way that they are on a computer screen, and yet at some level of perception it doesn't matter, just as there are audio and video sampling degrees that are indistinguishable by most people from fluidity. (When LP's first went away in favor of CD's, many people claimed they could tell the difference and that LP's were better, but most people now recognize that CD's are actually superior and that the main way you can tell the difference is that LP's just don't quite have it. The same now with camera images now that we finally have resolutions at such a high degree of quality that you get more out of discrete small dots than out of non-discrete big dots.)
And there's evidence the so-called Right Brain and so-called Left Brain (these aren't exact terms but useful metaphors for disparate forms of processing done by the brain) do things very differently, one favoring symbolic processing and one favoring intuitional, mechanical, statistical, and other mechanisms ...
The real problem is the I/O when people talk to one another. Even when we agree we are talking about words, we would never agree on precise meanings of words. Dictionaries spend lots of time writing down definitions of words and even after all that are only crude approximations to meaning, and are only defined in terms of other words that are themselves such crude approximations. So it's all a collective illusion that mostly works.
But at the end of the day, words like “language” and “think” are too unrefined to have a non-technical talk about. There is no single thing which is always the same kind of thing and which is language, and the same for thought. So talking about how that is or is not done as if it were a definite reference will confuse you.
In fact, part of the notion of how we perceive definitions relates to personal memory experiences that are unique to each of us, such that reaching common ground on many things is quite tricky. It's astonishing we do as well as we do given our differences in experience.
I think under an appropriately robust set of meanings, most of what everyone has said in this thread amounts to agreement, just spoken differently, even where there is alleged disagreement (which I don't think is much disagreement and is mostly just variation). It just tells you that the scope of the experience of either thinking or talking is quite vast, and it's like talking about whether landscape is interesting or not interesting ... it can both be true that it's one and the other... if you can even decide what the words landscape or interesting mean.
"...words like “language” and “think” are too unrefined to have a non-technical talk about?" From Plato and Aristotle through Descartes, Kant, Locke and Hume to Chomsky and Derrida: "unrefined" is not the term that comes readily to mind.
"...most of what everyone has said in this thread amounts to agreement..." Not so, Plato and Derrida are diametrically opposed. And depending on what you believe, or which view you think is right, ultimately informs your whole conception of humanity, humanism and human existence, not to put too fine a point on it.
WOOF
My thought process (and memory) is so visual, it is easier for me to think if I close my eyes or look as an empty wall (single color). Trying to think while looking at someone is like trying to watch a movie projected on a person. it makes me come off as shy a lot of times, but I'm jsut trying to remember something, or answer the question I was asked. I don't have a photographic memory, or have perfect recall.
But, if you ask me for a number from a meeting, I will have to remember the meeting to hear Steve say it in context to tell you what it was. I cannot disconnect that number from Steve's red striped tie, or the fact he was drinking a Fresca (I can't explain the Fresca.. he's zany like that) or the humming of the air conditioning.
I try to put things back in the same place, because when I look for the hammer, I can remember in a hundred places, all of them feel as recent as long as there isn't a dead giveaway (curtains were changed). I feel more comfortable if the hammer is always in the same place . Finding my truck in parking lots can give me a headache.
I cannot remember abstract concepts without the anchor of where I learned of them. Some Physics stuff I learned from sci-fi books are linked to beanbag chairs and what was on the TV when I read them.
Hell, to do simple math, I have to visualize dice (only 6 sides you nerds) and move them around with marching army like formations in my head.
You are all te weird ones. It seems perfectly normal to me.
You could, of course, take the opposite tack and say that we react to the smell of putrid meat without thinking. I think it is a semantic definition whether or not we classify our more autonomous actions as thinking. My dictionary defines thinking as exercising the mind; is the mind involved in rejecting the meat? Once I have learned a fugue, do I play it without thinking?
So Traigus: you talk of seeing in pictures and needing to close your eyes to visualize something. The visual cortex in the brain is mainly responsible for processing info. from the retinas in the eyes. When our eyes close, the visual cortex is then recruited in the task of 'picturing', so visualizations can be as powerful and immediate as experience. At that moment you will not know, somatically speaking, if what you visualize is real or imagined.
Also, our right brain hemisphere does not process or store language-- it senses energy and movement. It sees in pictures. I think that some people seem to have more right brain orientation, or perhaps more active neural networks there.
Why am I suddenly feeling full of shit?
Anyhoo, I'm with Dylan Thomas on this one:
"When I experience anything I experience it as a thing and a word at the same time, both equally amazing"
In Kantian terms, it does not fall under a priori knowledge, but its truth could be established by a posteriori knowledge based on experience or empirical evidence.
In more modern Wittgensteinian terms, it is clearly not an analytic statement (i.e. a proposition being true by virtue of its constituent expressions: "home" "safe" "place" even "is", pace Bill Clinton) but a synthetic one (thus provable or not by virtue of empirical facts).
In between and parallel and beyond are variations on the theme by a whole host of language philosophers including Tarski, Frege, Russell, Quine, Davidson, Austin, our own Hilary Putnam and, of course, Chomsky.
There is no question of "meeting of minds", which is tantamount to closing the question. If there were, it wouldn't be philosophy or it would be the end of philosophy. Even my beloved Wittgenstein, who thought that his Tractatus had, in fact, brought philosophy to a close and went off and became a rural schoolmaster, came back to Cambridge after discovering it was not so.
Philosophy asks the questions, it provides consolation, true (see Boethius), but rarely provides the answers.
WOOF
WOOF
Not quite. I need to close my eyes or look at a blank wall to keep from visualizing over existing objects... and causing overlap that may make it hard "to see" either thing clearly (real or memory).
I don't have sudden flashbacks or anything that would keep me from driving safely, but most processing is pretty quick and doesn't intrude much. Deep thought or trying very hard to remember something does get a bit "daydreamy." People always say I look "far away" a lot, even if I am listening talking directly to them.
I don't know anything about brains at all.
As to your second comment, well, "knowing what one is talking about" is not always a goood thing (thank you, Martha) around some of these here parts ;-).
WOOF
And CCC, yer right. Who are we to suppose we know sumpthin'...?
Kent seems to be thinking in terms of developing a unified model of language and cognition, which would account for the whole range of perceived ways of thinking. That's why he's distinguishing between deep structures and surface structures (query: is this Chomsky?). If that's the goal, then he's right, we need technical terminology or we'll never understand each other accurately enough. Caveat seems to be more interested in the way different extant philosophies construe things, and he doesn't really need Derrida and Plato to speak in commensurable terms, as he's not trying to bring together the advantages of the two positions.
In this discussion, nobody seems to be taking Derrida's view. Some people report that they themselves think in language, but nobody's interested in saying that other people might not. Those who think nonverbally might or might not accept Kent's idea that nonverbal thinking is really "deep structure of language." It would seem that his conception of deep structure would have to include visual and other sensory images. That's not language in the usual sense, even though it involves meaning. In Derrida's view (or Saussure's, I suppose) those sensory images would have to be interpreted through language, but that is exactly what Jimenace and I, and others on this thread, deny.
Rob: You say that you or I might equally be "wrong" about the nature of our thought. That implies a reality apart from what is perceived. It might be said, though, that with thinking, what is perceived is all there is. If I don't perceive that there are words in my thinking, there just aren't any, because there is no other way to view my thinking than through my perceptions. Of course, a neurologist could talk about what part of my brain is activated in response to what kind of stimulus. The neurologist could even ask me whether I am thinking in words at a given moment, and perhaps show that I use different parts of my brain when I say I am thinking in words. We would then know that there is a distinction that I am not imagining, but we still wouldn't know whether it is reasonable to talk about "deep structure of language" as Kent says.
It does not seem possible to me that anyone thinks altogether in language. A question: When you see a friend on the street, how do you recognize the person? When you know people well, you can generally recognize them with 100% accuracy from anyone. But can you describe that person to someone else, so well that he or she can make the same recognition, with the same accuracy? If recognition occurred through language, this would be easy, because you would only have to access the verbal description you already have stored away. The third person might have to work to study it, since it might be quite long, but in the end, would achieve the same level of recognition as you have yourself, without ever seeing any visual representation of the person. Perhaps this is possible with very special training, but it is certainly not basic or obvious to any of us.
Yes, my off-the-cuff remark was less thoughtful than it should have been. I was thinking that psychology started out depending heavily on introspection, with William James's work, and a lot of that turned out to be wrong. Also, as you mention, the difference between levels of detail in description. I think you're right in the rest of your comment, too; I've forgotten most of what I know about brain structure, though, which would let me talk about it in any detail.
But let me ask you this: You can think in language, true? Any time you rehearse what you'd like to say, I mean, before you say it. How would you describe the difference between that and non-language thinking?
But for anyone who has read Derrida's ethical writings like Force of Law or Racism's Last Word, the idea that he lacks humanity is a silly and uninformed misrepresentation.
On the other hand, I suspect the statement of Neils Bohr has at least some bearing on the matter:
"We are all suspended in language."
I take that to mean that our language influences our thinking. The classic example that's offered is the Navajo who has no word for snow and the eskimo who has more than twenty are bound to think differently about snow.
Again, I may be confusing the question, but I'm told many Native American languages, such as Lakota, are far more metaphorical than English - and thus utilize a different way of processing information. My bilingual Lakota friends tell me it is simply impossible to think like a Lakota in English.
Yes, I certainly can think in language, and it does have to do with rehearsing what I will say on a future occasion, or what I would say if a certain situation came up. I think it is because of this theatrical / oratorical aspect that I sometimes talk to myself out loud. What is it like? It is slower and more difficult, for a start. Unless I really have a reason to use words, I feel like I'm taking a lot of extra trouble for nothing. If something requires a lot of precision with categories or logic, I do work it out with words, generally by writing. I don't think I can achieve a high degree of precision, of the kind that goes into academic writing, without words. Unlike justastudent, I never found that my nonverbal way of thinking interfered with my ability to make conversation.
I have not read Derrida's later writings. It does strike me that the whole notion of deconstruction fails as soon as there is thought without language. Who cares if Rousseau or Plato contradicts himself if that is only the result of imperfect expression? It is only if language is thought that there is, as he claims, a fissure running through Western thought.
As for me, I have some "gift" coupled with years of discipline, in that I easily remember song lyrics from fifty years ago -- but don't ask me to remember your name.
But to take matters one step further, I contend that Derrida does hold that we think in "language," understood as a structured encoding, just not in words per se, and that this structured encoding bears the ineradicable potential for slippage or misfire. Even an early essay like "The Mystic Writing Pad" in Writing and Difference makes the case for thought as as pattern of differential relationships without identifying those relationships with strictly verbal distinctions.
I actually heard Derrida make this case live and in person in 1984, at the James Joyce International Symposium in Frankfurt. Derrida gave the keynote at the conference, since published under the name Ulysse Gramophone. It was kind of bizare because he read in French and then was interrupted every five paragraphs or so by someone offering a brief summary of his words in English. In any event, there was a roundtable later that day and someone asked Derrida about the view attributed to him that we think in language, understood verbally. The question was posed apropos of the stream of consciousness method that Joyce employs in the first half of Ulysses. Derrida pointed out that did we think in language so understood that stream of consciousness would amount to a mimetic depiction of psychic interiority, which would be absurd. It is rather he said a literary distillation of mental processes that do not themselves unfold in words.
Derrida's interest throughout his career was in countering the logics of presence and identity privileged in much of the philosophical tradition (but not all; there is no Derridean deconstruction of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations for example) with a logics of primary difference and articulation. This argument, and the deconstructive method that attends it, can be applied to questions of verbal language, as Derrida does in his argument with John Searle and speech act theory ("Signature-Event-Context," "Limited Inc") but it has been applied to identitarian or monological models of conception as well without relying upon a profound linguisticism. Conceptual coding can be understood as profoundly differential (in the mode for example of computer coding) without being differential on the same lines as any given verbal system (see "The Mystic Writing Pad," The Truth of Painting, or my very favorite essay "From a Restricted to a General Economy" in Writing and Difference.)
It's funny you bring up Joyce's stream of consciousness, because I've always found it very insufficient, even as an abstraction of thought processes. When I look around for a literary representation of the way my own thought processes are, I think of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." Stream of consciousness seems to falsely claim a certain naturalness it doesn't really have. Arnold's poem, by frankly using artificial form, creates a flow of language that is much more like what my own thought is. I have no access to other people's thought, so perhaps Joyce's creation is more adequate to them.
On self-contradiction, perhaps you are right that it is a question of academic culture. Pierre Bourdieu writes that academic fields have "entry fees," things you have to believe if you are going to be in that field. Perhaps it is true that if you are going to be in philosophy, you have to care about self-contradiction, not only as a practical thing, but also as a principle. I am in literature and drama, and self-contradiction doesn't bother me unless it gets in the way of interpretation.
On the overall nature of Derrida's thought, I bow to your expertise. Your interpretation of him is one I have never heard before, but I stopped paying attention to Derrida after reading several of his early books 20 years ago when I was doing my master's. It does seem to me that you are presenting him as essentially agreeing with the eminent Kent Pitman (above) in claiming that there are "deep structures" and "surface structures" in language. Derrida calls the notion that anything can be present to us "logocentrism," which he dismisses as illusion, because only distinctions are perceptible to us, not the things as present. If we do not understand the nature of the deep structures, then we cannot know that this is so. It is only if the relation between the two is clearly defined on a solid basis that his ideas gain significance. Does he do this? To my way of thinking, the only way to define this relation would be through linguistics, cognitive science and neurology. He needs very, very strong proof, because he is asking us to dismiss common sense and daily experience in favour of an abstract reasoned philosophy. Does he have it?
Swthammr
To wit: "... the idea that he (Derrida) lacks humanity is a silly and uninformed misrepresentation."
Now, I've been called silly many times but "uninformed", nevairr. So it's time to teach this twit shaped like a silhouette of a toilet plunger a lesson, if you permit (without hijacking your blog).
I was referring to the implications of Derrida's, shall we say pseudo-philosophical works on language. Allow me to doubt the deep-rootedness of his so-called later ethical works from an unstinting champion of the Nazis Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger (Derrida being a Sephardic Jew). And one who months before his death threatened to rescind the donation of his archives to UCI (University of California, Irvine) unless they halted their investigation of one Dragan Kujundzic (1), a Russian studies professor accused of sexually harassing a female grad student. Kuzundzic was subsequently found to have violated the University's policies, but by then he had moved on, Derrida was dead. I do not know what happened to the bequest.
I too heard dear Derrida, it so happens also in 1984, at the University of Urbino. He must have been doing the "Ulysses Gram(m)ophone: hear say Yes in Joyce" tour. That particular afternoon (he may have been drunk) he spoke at length about a yoghurt named Yes (laugh line: how can you say No to Yes), misconstrued J.L. Austin, and palmed off such pronunciamentos as (if I remember correctly): "Laughter is not metaphysical." Right.
As far as I can tell, Derrida is, rightly, a dead letter now. Judith Butler, she of the equally turgid and unintelligible prose and views is apparently still an acolyte. Maybe the aforementioned Russian studies guy. Even Gayatri Spivak (who inflicted the English translation of Of Grammatology upon the world) has gone off of him for a while now.
As to the charge of "silly", I am in good company: Foucault famously called Derrida an obscurantisme terroriste . Searle, Quine, Chomsky et al had similarly pithily dismissive characterizations. And then, of course, the never unproven charge that he basically bowdlerized Borges.
OTOH, he was probably quite a boon to our shadowy friend, who claims to be some sort of academic btw, who can criticize texts without actually reading them, let alone understanding them.
WOOF
(1) Our Russian friend Dragan had found a home at the University of Florida. After the UCI findings, he was stripped of his assignments. He had been teaching such seminal (and Derridan) courses as: “Vampire Studies” (I kid you not) and “Screening Literature: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Kurosawa.” I do not know his current whereabouts.
Moana-Kavita, I do wonder how it is possible to think in a language, but not know which one--yet that kind of self-contradictory formulation is just what you come up with when you're reaching to say something new.
This morning a flower opened in the garden that I've been waiting for for several days. I woke up, in my mind was the flower out there in full bloom and the realization that it would be open when I went out. AFTER that, or "on top of" that, could be the sentence, "Ah, it must be open!" but it could just as easily be "ah, herhalde açmış!" or if I'd been hanging out with Greeks for a couple days, "ah, tha'hei anixi!" But the actual thought would be the same.
Now the question, "What language do you dream in" might get them an answwer closer to what they're looking for.
Re Lakotas - I think this is a very valid point, but to me it's not so much an indication that people "think in language" (even if they can sometimes - obviously we sometimes think about conversations); it's more an indication that there's a feedback loop between culture/thought and language. If you have a shared cultural concept, you will have a word to express that concept. And children will
(sorry, accidentally sent) - ...children will learn will hear the word, and learn the concept in a variety of ways. To explain that concept to an outsider to the point where he will truly understand it, you will practically have to explain your entire life and culture. Only once that understanding is in place, will the word have any real function. Perhaps all the concepts behind a culturally-loaded Lakota word may have occurred to all of us (or maybe not), but never in a form or combination (with the various qualifications/exclusions/restrictions of meaning) that is expressed by that word or expression. Underlying it is a whole world of thought that simply cannot be thought of in language, becuase we don't have the time. The word is a summary of it, which gathers together the aspects of the common experience that are important at the moment, but also leave a lot out.
I'm 28 now and really only realized in the last few years that I may be unique in this. I was watching a movie or TV show or something where a character could read minds. Of course, he heard only complete sentences in language. I remarked to my companion that "... it wouldn't really work because people don't actually think like that." A long conversation ensued and I learned that maybe they do. Although I still thought that we must be just miscommunicating. It took a long time for me to really understand that others think in this way.
One thing I do, though is to imagine conversations I have had or may have in the future. In this regard, I do sometimes think in language. But only if it's imagining someone talking. Otherwise, silent ... I wouldn't say I think in colors, or pictures or anything else either. I guess I think that I just don't think.
I'm 28 now and really only realized in the last few years that I may be unique in this. I was watching a movie or TV show or something where a character could read minds. Of course, he heard only complete sentences in language. I remarked to my companion that "... it wouldn't really work because people don't actually think like that." A long conversation ensued and I learned that maybe they do. Although I still thought that we must be just miscommunicating. It took a long time for me to really understand that others think in this way.
One thing I do, though is to imagine conversations I have had or may have in the future. In this regard, I do sometimes think in language. But only if it's imagining someone talking. Otherwise, silent ... I wouldn't say I think in colors, or pictures or anything else either. I guess I think that I just don't think.