Thought Versus Communication
02-26-24
Thought Vs Communication
In one of his YouTube videos linguist Noam Chomsky gives a talk in which he disputes the common belief language is mainly for communication. He rejects this belief as a misconception. Instead, he says language is mainly for thought.
I find his argument interesting because it spotlights the question of the relationship between thought and communication.
Perception – experiencing the world directly through the senses; the intake of information
Thought – the propositional perspective on perception; it’s higher-order perception> perception + the self who maintains a belief about a component of perception
Language – the translation of thought into a portable system of representation via signs
Communication – the conveyance of information via signs
When the self has a thought, the content of the thought gets conveyed to the self having the thought. This is a complex structure of experience because thought isnÂ’t just content, itÂ’s content that communicates content.
This structure of thought as being inherently self-referential raises an important question: can thought occur without communication?
Moreover, can the self having the thought and also having the thought conveyed to itself have this complex experience without language?
Are we at a network interweaving perception, thought, language and communication?
Does this network suggest there is no unitary self? Are there instead multiple selves loosely gathered together into an array fictitiously collectivized as self?
Does our thinking destabilize our location in space?
Are thoughts and selves better characterized as inter-communicative clouds of probability?
Are thoughts to brain as mass to matter? So, our thoughts are not entirely themselves because to exist, they must haunt the interstices of here and there?
Thought Vs Communication
In one of his YouTube videos linguist Noam Chomsky gives a talk in which he disputes the common belief language is mainly for communication. He rejects this belief as a misconception. Instead, he says language is mainly for thought.
I find his argument interesting because it spotlights the question of the relationship between thought and communication.
Perception – experiencing the world directly through the senses; the intake of information
Thought – the propositional perspective on perception; it’s higher-order perception> perception + the self who maintains a belief about a component of perception
Language – the translation of thought into a portable system of representation via signs
Communication – the conveyance of information via signs
When the self has a thought, the content of the thought gets conveyed to the self having the thought. This is a complex structure of experience because thought isnÂ’t just content, itÂ’s content that communicates content.
This structure of thought as being inherently self-referential raises an important question: can thought occur without communication?
Moreover, can the self having the thought and also having the thought conveyed to itself have this complex experience without language?
Are we at a network interweaving perception, thought, language and communication?
Does this network suggest there is no unitary self? Are there instead multiple selves loosely gathered together into an array fictitiously collectivized as self?
Does our thinking destabilize our location in space?
Are thoughts and selves better characterized as inter-communicative clouds of probability?
Are thoughts to brain as mass to matter? So, our thoughts are not entirely themselves because to exist, they must haunt the interstices of here and there?
Comments (44)
I, for one, don't think in language but in images. I can't imagine what it is like to think in language, if someone tells me to imagine a golden mountain, I picture a mountain coloured over in bright yellow.
[hide="Reveal"]
There is an advantage however. Someone who, let's say, is commonly agreed to have less spatial intelligence than me solved this puzzle "From the beginning of eternity to the end of time and space, to the beginning of every end and the end of every place. What am I?" very quickly, while I was trying to abstract the end of an archetypal object and see how it is in every place and etc etc, that the answer is the letter "e". Likely because she thought out the words and saw that they all had 'e', while I was trying to think of physical objects and didn't pay attention to the words themselves.
The guy in the tweet is a writer after all.[/hide]
On a more related note, Chomsky says that language is "a mode of creating and interpreting thought, it is a system of thought basically, it can be used to communicate". What thoughts are we interpreting? Our own thoughts? Do we need to do that? Perhaps language can be an effective way to connect our image of "cat" with all the real world examples of "cat" we have in our memory.
He goes on to say that the communicative efficiency is sacrificed in favour of the "efficient biological design of language", no clue what the latter would mean.
On an unrelated note, the sound is so goddamn low, I put the sound on a speaker and blasted it at 100% and I still could barely hear him.
Language is no doubt extremely useful for both interpersonal communication and thought, so it seems hard to differentiate which would be more important in the development of humans' linguistic capabilities. It's like asking what made us develop cars, the fact that they go fast or the fact that we can put ourselves and stuff in them. Well, both clearly.
Phenomenological explanations of language tend to emphasize that the intersubjective, communicative facets of language and those which are intra subjective, "thought-focused" are probably best thought of as mutually reinforcing, rather than one reducing to the other, and I think this is a wise assessment.
I always assumed everyone did both. To imagine is, after all, to form a mental image. I suppose people who canÂ’t do this just somehow think of the concept, by putting a word to it.
So, sometimes images, sometimes words—and sometimes concepts. There are pure concepts in mind when a jazz musician is improvising (I know; I’ve done it), such as tension and release, growth and decay, entropy, yearning, etc. They may be in some sense linguistic, but they’re not mentally articulated in (mental) words (which was what I meant by “pure”). I think in these cases one only properly identifies them later, using mental words.
But as you say, this is somewhat off the topic.
I mean, what exactly are "thoughts"? where is the supposed interface between perception, thought and communication?
I can also do "both", but for me thinking in language is also literally picturing the written word/sentence in the mind's eye, I typically do that when I need to plan a sentence between uttering or writing it, as opposed to just speaking naturally and going with the flow. I suspect that what people with "aphantasia" do is in fact subvocalise.
Quoting Pantagruel
If you're referencing Chomsky's preference of language for thought over language for communication, I agree with your assessment. If there's anything essentially inter-personal and essentially communicative, its language, isn't it? Also, I'm guessing the infant learns to hear words and repeat them (or see visual patterns and connect them with ends) before forming intentional thoughts within a linguistic medium, whether verbal or visual.
:100:
If anything, I'm more inclined to view thought as fundamentally social-collective than to view language as fundamentally idiomatic.
Thoughts are mental images. They may or may not contain words (language) in visual or audio form. You can "see" them and "hear" them in your mind. They are similations or reproductions of percepts. Memory and rememberibg is a good example.
This is not theory. It's reality. Anyone can realize and experience that, if one just pays attention to one's thougths.
Too much theory and/or conceptualization, not matched with sufficient experiencing --or even with lack of it, as it often happens-- may make one miss or deviate a lot from simple reality or truth. And the irony of it is that conceptualization itself is made of thoughts and it is the product of thinking. So, one can miss what one is actually doing! :smile:
I find the terminology on this sort of thing incredibly inconsistent and frustrating lol. :rofl:
Are there a good parallel words for "visualizing" that apply to taste, sound, touch, etc?
Imagining seems like it should involve images, that's the root of the word right? But then I've seen phenomenologists call mere visualization "picturing" where as "imagining" involves the displacement of us as an agent into some sort of imagined setting.
The problem is that then you can talk about both "picturing" or "imagining" sounds, smells, touch, etc.
Same problem with the idea of "mental images." Wouldn't an imagined sound be more a "mental recording?"
But then "images" and "recordings" are themselves records of some object. Yet as Husserl says, "my centaur is my centaur," my imagined centar isn't an "image" of some real centaur, but my own creation. It's a funny area.
Though the title isn't really what he talks about.
Quoting alan1000
The center of my focus looks at a concept of the structure of thought as a complex of multiple parts. The essential parts are content, language and meaning. Content lies within the noumenal realm of things-just-are. Language is the transport for the meaning of noumenal content. Meaning is the interpretive narrative that hovers about the things-just-are noumenal content. When meaning comes into the picture, we're looking at narratives about narratives.
The complex of thought includes the noumenal content perceived through the senses plus what we think about our perceptions, the interpretive meaning supplied by the work done by thinking.
If narratives about narratives is an essentially correct characterization of thought, then it's clear thought and communication are inseparable. This is the gist of my argument against complete acceptance of Chomsky's argument rooted in the separation of the two.
Another important part of my focus is the characterization of the self as an irreducible complex that perplexes unitary characterizations of selfhood. So, self as emergent property of material physicality leads to a characterization of self as a distributed complex of interwoven fields.
Consciousness is the spinner thrown into the mix of interwoven energy fields. With the advent of consciousness within a material physicality based universe, the logic_science matrix of not-now-but-forthcomingness introduces absential materialism. The principle agent of absential materialism is abstractionism.
Mr. Abstraction -- A principle agent of thought who takes perceived patterns of material_physical phenomena and cognizes them into linguistic generalizations amenable to logical representation and scientific examination. The complex dynamical evolution of self-organizing systems gives an appearance of parallel realities, one extended and one unextended, but it's actually a distributed complex of interwoven fields.
How do you think when it comes to writing and re-writing?
Quoting Lionino
Fascinating.
What is it about those concepts which you could not state? (hashtag @Banno)
Good points. ItÂ’s a minefield.
Maybe theyÂ’re like beliefs, only determined post-hoc. Does it make sense to say that in the moment I was enacting the concepts, such that they were not at that stage concepts at all? But IÂ’d still want to maintain that I was thinking, for no more reason than it really felt like cognitive work.
Yeah I think it makes sense. I was being tongue in cheek. I have the impression that rendering the phenomenology into statements is post hoc, and if words are in the phenomenology they arise as summaries and condensations of affects, without any natural language grammar. It's more appropriate to talk about such things as concepts and affects than as those concepts or affects' symbolising words! The emerging landscape of experience isn't all wordy is it, the words are rivers and troughs, signposts, swamps and rafts. Coordinative rather than principally determinative. Producing words like brow sweat.
I just wanted to add another question (if you would allow it) regarding the so-called “content” of thought. Can the content only ever describe the thinker more-so than what it is intended to describe?
Ah, I get it now. A @Banno impersonation. Still, good question.
I appreciate the compliment, though it does make me feel autistic.
Quoting LioninoSurely, you are thinking when you are just speaking naturally and going with the flow. Are you not thinking in language?
Quoting LioninoI have a vague memory from decades ago that a study was done that said people could not think easily when their vocal chords were numbed. Wish I could find that study.
Quoting NOS4A2
Yes. Language and meaning are always distillations of content. For this reason, language and its circumambient meaning are well done when heavy laden with concrete imagery that shows more than tells.
There is a growing body of evidence that this is the case.
Suppose that despite this there were common habits that we all learned, allowing us to do things together.
So how we think is not important, but getting on with doing things is.
Beetles in boxes, in a slightly different context.
Language is not about sharing information so much as coordinating behaviour. It's use that counts, not information.
Quoting Jamal& , should I feel flattered or flattened?
The obvious objection is that we coordinate behaviour by communicating.
But "I promise to fetch water for you if you give me some of that haunch" does much more than just communicate; it changes the way things are. It does something new by setting up a contract that did not previously exist and which would stand scant chance of happening outside of language.
That's very interesting! I'm more of an audio type of person I guess. So I constantly "hear" the words when I'm thinking or writing. Well I don't really hear them, but they more or less just pop out of somewhere and if I really pay attention, I guess they are kinda the same as in trying to remember or reproduce music. So "mind's ear", I suppose. Sometimes I also see some text, but I suppose it has more to do with me making some intense notes to some page of a book, and then remembering that situation.
Lately I've been thinking that maybe human thought really is some kind of language model. We expose ourselves to massive amount of text and discussion, and then just "continue the prompt". Well I'm not saying this very seriously, but for sure I'm going to prepare myself to that scenario by reading and writing as much as I can. It will be good for me in any case.
:up:
Sure. I was just giving a thumb's up to the recognition of value in considering one's 'training set' shown by @Olento's post.
To be honest, I don't think I am when I am just talking naturally, which is how, I think, that I end up saying dumb s**t in public. But if I am thinking, it is at a very low level.
Quoting Patterner
I don't doubt that study exists. Not only that, but I recall reading a few years ago that most people read by subvocalising, and by managing to stop the subvocalisation you can read much faster.
Lady Killer on the make.
ConveyedÂ….from where?
Given that there is no such thing as an empty thought, it follows necessarily that when a self has a thought, it must be that the content does not get conveyed to the self, but arises from the self in conjunction with the thought the self has.
The assertion, then, reduces to either the conveyance, not of the content, but of the thought itself, to the self that has the thought, a contradiction, or, there is nothing whatsoever conveyed to the self regarding thought and its content, that doesnÂ’t already reside therein, such that, ipso facto, thought is possible.
Not to say there isnÂ’t something conveyed to the self, as something must be in order to justify his experience. It just isnÂ’t thought or its content.
Quoting Mww
Is there any differential in space and time separating the self and its thoughts? I ask this question for two reasons: a) a thought is about the judgment of the self in reaction to a perception of the world; judgement implies a separation of judge from judged; b) a judging self is self-aware in its acts of judgment and self-awareness requires a separation of self not only from world but also from self; if there is no separation of self from self, then there is no self-awareness and thus absent self-awareness absent self.
Quoting ucarr
Are you denying a supposed self-referentiality of thought? This question is central to the gist of my thesis because it focuses upon the structure of thought as an interconnectivity with communication throughout the interconnectivity an essential attribute.
Since you say: Quoting Mww
I say:
As to the structure of a thought as a judgment arisen from its content as the existential ground of the judgment, this inter-communitive relationship I posit as the central module of perception, thought, communication and language.
:100:
There isnÂ’t any space in a thought, and if the self just is that which has thoughts, one is temporally inseparable from the other.
————-
Quoting ucarr
I donÂ’t think of judgement like that. The self judges, so it canÂ’t be that the self is judged. Using your terms, IÂ’d only admit to judgement as being the selfÂ’s manifest reaction to a perception.
Quoting ucarr
Tautologically true, but congruent with every other aspect of what the subject doesÂ….
Quoting ucarr
I personally donÂ’t agree with that; I find it a mischaracterization of self, in its irreducible sense. Self-awareness is redundant. Awareness presupposes self, and, self is necessarily that which is aware.
Quoting ucarr
I wonder how that can even happen. By what mechanism can a singular identity become detached? If self separates from self, what then becomes of self-awareness?
————-
Quoting ucarr
Thought and judgement, because they are related to each otherÂ….communicate? Why canÂ’t they just be specific components integrated into a particular process? ItÂ’s like saying the water communicates with the soil in which the plant grows.
Anyway, itÂ’s become too psychological for my interests, so, thanks for the alternative perspective.
Quoting Mww
You've let me know you won't dialogue with me further. Okay. I'm posting the following responses for the record; I try to always respond to counter-narratives.
Quoting Mww
I think brain activity occurs in spacetime. Also, when someone thinks, they know they're thinking. The knowing person is not identical to his/her thoughts being examined, otherwise the knowing person couldn't do the evaluation.
Quoting Mww
Guilt is an everyday example of the self judging its own actions and finding fault with itself.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Mww
When a person drives a car, he/she monitors his/her judgments about time and distance in order to begin breaking in order to avoid hitting the car in front. Knowing you're stopping the car in time to avoid a collision is not circular reasoning.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Mww
The gist of my thesis is that the self is not reducible to a unitary person.
Quoting Mww
You seem to be implying self cannot be objectively aware of self. Have you never primped in front of a mirror before making a public address?
Quoting Mww
Consider an imaginary experience of internal conflict: both of your divorced parents invite you to Christmas dinner and you're torn between visiting one or the other household.
Quoting Mww
You're trying to persuade your significant other to join you at the resort lodge for skiing. At one point during your pitch, the other person frowns. In your mind's eye you think: "I pressed too hard on my point about them owing me for favors done on their behalf. I'd better back off a bit."
Of course, but we werenÂ’t discussing brain activity. If you wish to go there, youÂ’re obligated to connect the self and its activities, a predominantly metaphysical paradigm, to the brain and its activities, a predominately scientific paradigm, with apodeitic specificity. That the self is impossible without the brain is given, but is at the same time far to general a proposition to be of any explanatory help.
————
Quoting ucarr
Such is the superficial appearance, but I disagree that the self is finding fault with itself. It is actually the self finding fault with an act a posteriori, as effect, but not necessarily with its antecedent judgement by which the act is determined a priori, as cause.
—————
Quoting ucarr
I, on the other hand, hold the self is reducible to a unitary, or singular, rational identity.
—————
Quoting ucarr
IÂ’m familiar with arguments in which the self is both subject and object. This happens only in expositions of it, wherein what the self is in itself as object, is confounded with the manifestations of the selfÂ’s doings as subject. In other words, the self is necessarily reified when attempting to explain itself. Which gives rise to the inevitable absurdity of the self reifying itself. Still, conceptions, intuitions, morals, thoughts, subjects and objects and whatnot, are all required pursuant to expressions of the human kind of intelligence, but the self doesnÂ’t use any of them to do what it does, except to manifest itself as subject.
So, yes, I submit the self not only isnÂ’t aware of itself objectively, but is absurd to suppose it needs to be. In fact, I reject the notion that the self is aware of itself subjectively, hence the redundancy, while merely granting the availability of some mechanism by which it seems to be the case.
i.e. communicating (Ă la synchronizing), no?
I didn't get that from your post. In any case socially "coordinating behavior" (i.e. communication^^) – such as observed in other primate groupings as well as described in, for instance, Wittys proposal of socially acquired language-gaming – seems more reasonable than not to assume is the why of language use and not only, or reductively, the what-for of it.
^^e.g.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_pragmatics
Quoting Mww
You think thought and communication are divorced from brain activity?
Quoting Mww
Have you read the book linked below?
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter
Quoting Mww
How do you reconcile your above with your below?
Quoting Mww
Quoting Mww
So at twenty years a memory-bearing person is just the same as that memory-bearing person at five years?
Quoting Mww
How is your propositional content within your above paragraph possible -- especially through the noumenal section -- without your intentional and thoroughly functional reification?
Quoting Mww
Reflexivity and redundancy are not synonymous.
Since you're a brain in a vat -- self-cognitively speaking -- spending the rest of your days in solitary confinement within a white room would be for you a matter of indifference.
Did I not say that brain activity, relative to the self, is given?
Quoting ucarr
TheÂ…what????
Quoting ucarr
Your reflexivity is my reciprocity, and no, they are not synonymous with redundancy.
Quoting ucarr
Yep. Why not? Euphemistic escape: the white room is of my own design, laying in the dark, where the shadows run, not from themselves, but from me, because they are mine. You, being just as human as I, inhabit your own white room, in which you will be confined for the rest of your days.
Riddles, cleverly disguised as clandestine aphorisms, donÂ’t interest me, although their construction is kinda fun. I mean, reallyÂ…how can there be shadows, running or not, in a dark room. And if youÂ’re laying in the dark, what does it matter if the room is white? Peter Brown needed his head examined. Or maybe just laid off the windowpane.