Once upon a time, my girlfriend, who studied Czech language and literature, told me what they learned in school that day. She said that thinking is only possible through language. To me that was most ridiculous but it gave me the idea that some people might believe that. What I found since that day years ago is that apparently there are many of such people, majority in fact. And I always knew they were wrong. The first piece of evidence is what I replied to my girlfriend with. “If a person is raised by wolves, not ever learning any language, they will still be intelligent and able to perform complicated tasks, to imagine things or to plan etc. Do you claim that the person does not think?”
This question is not new and has been, in various ways, answered by others. A direction similar to my wolf question has been investigated by neurologists. They examine people with damage in brain centers connected to language and their subsequent ability to solve tasks that require thinking. A nice example is the composer Vissarion Shebalin who was still able to compose music after completely losing the ability to produce or understand language. Another branch of research examines societies with different language structures and the correlation to their abilities. In short, the results are that some thinking is possible, and language does affect it.
The approach I will take here is different and has two components. One part is a description of my own thinking processes which appears to be unusually transparent. A single, subjective case of course does not prove anything. But a big part of it is reproducible, or at least serves as an inspiration and navigation for the second part, which, drawing its language from epistemology, is describing a specific view on thinking and its relationship to language and the real world. As a first step I will start with a more systematic description of the problem.
A more exact formulation of the issue revolves around concepts. Concepts are the building blocks of our thinking. They represent entities and ideas around us, both concrete and abstract. A concept of a chair is what, in our heads, represents all the chairs in the world. Abstract concepts then represent ideas without a physical representation, such as heroism. The problematic of concepts is a part of epistemology, a branch of philosophy, which looks at how we attain, process and use knowledge. In short – how we know. Concepts are the core part of it because they are the building blocks of our knowledge. Typical questions that revolve around them are – what are the limits of one concept? Is it still a chair if it does not have the back and misses two legs? How do we create a concept (one thing people do agree on is that we are not born with them)? How are the concepts structured and relate to one another? All these questions are important, and at this point solved to a pretty good degree. A controversial one is “Are they real?”. Clearly they are not, they are just an ability of our minds created by evolution for dealing with reality. But many people relate them to “essence” (mainly introduced by Greeks and popular to this day), which also is not real, but has strong religious charge, and therefore a strong foothold in mysticism and among its many irrational proponents.
The last question, which is the subject of this essay, is ”can concepts exist without language?”. As I see it, this question is not important – for the same reasons as why my answer is “yes”. It is just too trivial. But while the question is not important, answering it apparently is, because so many people think it is impossible. For me that is even more striking because it is not only the historical philosophers and some prominent modern ones like Wittgenstein or Russel. But even the objectivist philosophy is on boat with what is, to my knowledge, the majority – and I find objectivists to be right about more things than any other philosophies that I know of (but still is far from being right about everything)
The basic idea behind the generally accepted view is this. People, when born, start with no concepts. But as they learn, they distinguish new separate objects and ideas and formulate concepts for them in their head. A new concept first goes through a creation phase. It starts as some hazy idea that is gradually refined (in some way, the model of which differs by philosophical school) into a “final” form by giving it properties that specify it and distinguishing it from other concepts. At some point during the process the new concept is given a name drawn from the language (e.g. a “chair”). That name becomes its unique handle which is necessary to use the concept – to store it as its own thing, to recover it, identify, to be clear that it is this concept and not another. And also to communicate it – which is irrelevant for the question in question, but in fact (I mean in my view) that is the only reason why language is needed in regard to concepts. Without a language label, they say, the new concept could not be stored in the mind and used. Language is, therefore, necessary for concepts and in consequence for any thinking, since it works over them.
The reason I disagree comes primarily from my own experience – but anyone can see it if they look in the right places, as I will show.
I was quite young when I started practicing meditation, the core of which was calming the mind down. The most “noisy” part was the thinking in words – thinking as if leading a conversation with myself. I was learning to suppress it, while still thinking and progressing through the meditation. With some effort, the thought processes were there, but the words were not. Another piece of the puzzle came in high school when a friend of mine was surprised that I think in such an inefficient way – using words – at which moment I found I am only scratching the surface. My “loud” thinking remained to this day. But not much later I came up with another idea. To perform (simple) arithmetics in my head without words, but rather using intuition. Start with the assignment, say 12×7. But to not go through the calculation explicitly as usual (“saying“ out the calculation steps, or imagining them written), but relax, turn off the head (as in the meditation), and let the result come. It worked rather well. I have never extended it to practical use but it was a nice proof of concept. Neither of these proves my point that thinking can be done without words, but they were my stepping stones.
A more tangible progress came with higher and more abstract mathematics. The common way to deal with it is using formulas, but that did not work well for my brain. Instead I imagined the mathematical bodies (usually some weird sets) and their interactions as some fuzzy objects in space. They did not possess any conventional names or concepts, they were new temporary entities I have created to deal with them.
Over time I have adopted these thinking frameworks into my everyday life. I still usually think in words, but a lot of the time, or rather with non-trivial problems, I use something else. I call it raw concepts. Remember how I described the creation of concepts – the intermediary fuzzy object that gets a name assigned when it is finished? The traditional view makes it look like after giving it the name, it ceases to exist. But It never went anywhere. Not the label, but that fuzzy thing is what a concept is. In very exact terms it is a specific pattern of neural excitation, which is different for every different concept. Subjectively for us, it is something in our head that probably everyone would describe differently. It is a “feeling”, a “flavor”, maybe a differently shaped object in our imagination (some people even see colors). And by shaped I don’t mean chair-shaped, but a fuzzy cloud that has this “feeling” or whatever which carries the concepts properties and makes us recognize it for what it is. It is likely that you are not used to perceiving it this way. I am assuming that because if most people did, there would be no question about whether words are necessary in order to think. But the reason people do not see it this way is not that it is not there. It is. But it is covered up by the word labels and images that we have attached to the concepts. When we want to realize a chair, the word “chair” and various chair images shine so bright that it seems that is all that is there. But it is just a shiny wrapping of the feeling pattern, that cloud of neural excitations that really define what the concept is. I can tell because in my mind, I can turn the words off and observe these concept “feelings” in their naked, raw form.
Now that we have the concept of a raw concept, it should seem more obvious how the concepts are formed to begin with. Either a blank raw concept “stem cell” is created, or one is split off an existing concept, inheriting its properties and is shaped through the concept formulation process (which I have not described, see “How we know” by Harry Binswanger for a good theory) into its new form. That gets labeled (although we might start with the label already – “Mom, what is a “chair”?”) and stored. The label, the word of language, is just that, a label. The label is not the concept and the label is by no means necessary for the concept to be created or to exist.
Are you still not convinced? Let me give you a more familiar example. Remember those times you wanted to recall some word and you could not? When you have the word on your tongue, when the “feeling” of that word is there in your head, bright and clear, but the word itself doesn’t want to come out? There it is. Your raw concept without a label. You knew it all along.
Another piece of evidence, and I would say even more serious, comes from the way the thinking itself works. Or perhaps with how it doesn’t. I am not sure if anyone thinks this – but in order to clearly dispel this idea – the core of thinking is not performed by language. Language and sentences can be used, yes. But that only works for simple, well defined problems, and is highly inefficient and limited by the speed we can formulate those sentences. A good use case is going over a shopping list in our head – it is simple, linear, and needs to be precise. But it can hardly work for anything complicated if it does not work even for simple, well structured problems like chess, or unintelligent physical activities. Imagine a chess player running through hundreds of moves per minute, thinking out loud “Ok this piece moves to this position, and then that piece over there to that position” where “this” and “that” should actually also have specific descriptions… Or trying to catch a ball, calculating its trajectory, movements of the body needed in order to catch it, while considering how heavy the ball is and if it could hurt you – and doing all that using sentences that precisely describe every bit of it? Well, clearly that is not how thinking really works. Again, these sentences are only labels put on the thinking in case we want to keep a very clear track of it or to communicate it. The way thinking really works is again through these raw concepts – and their brain excitation patterns. They are there, they change forms on the go as needed, they mix, interact, merge, split… They form new excitation patterns, often intermediary ones that have no label and never will, until a state is reached where the configuration of the patterns contain an answer we were looking for. So for instance, we conjure the raw concepts of a ball (most relevantly its physical properties that we know), laws of physics, a model of our body and its physics, we let those models interact in a simulation and plan the best way to move in order to catch the ball. This comes as quite intuitive. Is this anyhow different from pondering the development of ethics in the life of a novel character? In principle, no. It is still a manipulation of some models consisting of concepts and their relations and interactions. The reason it seems different is that catching a ball is really automatic and intuitive for us, while ethical considerations are an unknown territory that requires a clear, conscious focus. But the inner mindworks are the same.
As for me, I can observe this concept interaction in my mind directly. I can see the fuzzy raw concepts in the 3d space, moving, interacting and mixing in many ways and points, simultaneously creating new flavors. Sometimes those flavors “click” into something that seems to make sense and to be useful, which I can then lock as a next step in the thinking and move on.
To be clear, this whole thing is not trying to say that language is not useful for thinking. I am only saying that it is not necessary – in theory, and some, but not all, practical applications. Language is very helpful for its labeling function as well as putting thoughts and thought processes into clear boxes, which make the thinking process clear, well organized, and manageable even for complex problems. Another aspect that plays a practical role is that the hardware of our brains is already developed by evolution with the expectation of using a language. Now this is my speculation. Because of this wiring, thinking without language is more difficult for us than if we did not have the language ability to begin with. Some brain pathways are so optimized and dependent on language that it makes not using it more difficult, and for some people impossible.
On the other hand – and this is just a side note for perspective – there are people whose beliefs point in an entirely opposite direction. Not only do they see the usage of language as problematic, but they view even the very foundations that we have laid out here – concepts – as the enemy of true “thinking”. It is the Zen Buddhists. Let me present their idea with a famous koan.
Shuzan held out his short staff and said:
“If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact.
Now what do you wish to call this?”
The second part of the master’s statement is already trivial for us. The “fact” he mentions is that the language label “short staff” does indeed belong to the item he is holding. But what does the “opposing reality” in the first part mean? The Zen Budhists teach that the world is not words, or concepts, or even objects. The world just is as it is. Boxing it up into categories and labeling it prevents us from seeing it for what it really is. Assigning even “identical” items, like two same looking chairs, a common concept means forgetting their individuality. The short staff Shuzan holds is simple, and yet very complex. It is an object (here he does not go as far as to deny even the “object” property in order to not confuse the students too much), with its material, shape, temperature, the way light reflects on it, its trajectory through history and into the future and much more. Saying that the object is a “short staff” (assigning it the label or the short staff concept under it) would leave out all of these critical individual properties, and deny its true reality.
As we know from physics, they are technically right. The world is a continuous space that is filled with different kinds of particles. There is no “water” or a “rock”. A rock is just particles of one kind that are dense in the area that in some region happen to change to another kind of particles, perhaps of water. While they look different to us, on the fundamental level the difference is unimportant. It is only in our brains that we cut this continuous space into pieces and give those pieces names and categories. These categories (or concepts, or essences) are not a fundamental part of the universe. As I wrote earlier – they are only a virtual tool imagined in our brains and created by evolution to deal with the world and to survive. The lesson given to us by Zen is that when we start on the path of discovering the core of our minds, dropping the language to reach pure concepts is only a first step and we can go much further.
To summarize my idea – the question whether language is necessary in order to think seems ridiculous to me and I hope I have presented enough evidence for why I see it that way. Now it is up to your introspection and imagination. But even if you cannot at all directly observe it as I do (which I think is the normal way and my brain is just broken), the model I have described should still make more sense than the clumsy language one and present a foundation for further research.
