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Thought and Natural Language : Part I
Joe Lau HKU
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Issues
• Relationships between natural language and thoughts.– What are natural languages?– What is thinking?– Do we think in a natural language?– Can we think without language?
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What is thinking?
• Some features of thoughts– Thoughts are intentional / have content.– Having thoughts require having concepts.– Can deploy old concepts to think new thoughts.
• Chains of thought– Associative thinking– Inferential thinking / reasoning
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What is natural language?
• Examples– Italian, Spanish, Cantonese, Japanese …
• Some features– A spoken language used to communicate– Displacement, open-ended, stimulus-free
• Contrasted with– programming languages– artificial languages
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Do we think in natural languages?
• Two questions :– Do we ever think in a natural language?– Do we only think in a natural language?
• Argument from introspection– Introspection = looking into one’s own minds– Conscious thinking often seems to be a form of
internal speech.– We can think aloud if we want to.
• Thesis : LOT exists. LOT = NL.
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Pinker’s criticisms
• Cases of thinking without language.– Adults without language– Young babies– Monkeys
• Introspective reports of mental imagery
• Features of NL :– Ambiguity, Lack of logical structure– Deixis, synonymy
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Announcements
• Reading week next week
• No lectures / tutorials.
• Use BBS for questions.