Thought and Natural Language : Part I

Joe Lau HKU

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?

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

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

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.

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

Announcements

• Reading week next week

• No lectures / tutorials.

• Use BBS for questions.