"Tosh" is my British English, thought-out answer to a clickbaity piece at 3 Quarks Daily that leaves me with not so high regard for its author and the seemingly impoverished view of what human thought is.
David J. Lobina does claim, in his title that "You don't think in any language."
First, it's clickbaity in two ways. One, that clickbait header does get caveated in the third paragraph, but that doesn't make it less clickbaity.
The point I want to make in this post is that no-one thinks in any natural language; not in English, or Italian, or whatever, but in a language of thought, an abstract, unconscious and moreover inaccessible, conceptual representational system of the mind.
Nope. Last I checked, a "language of thought" is still a language.
The study the author mentions? he limitations of one person's native language vs another I don't think is strong proof of his idea; at best, it's proof that a strong version of Sapir-Whorf is no more true for inner speech than talking to others.
Beyond that, doesn't he later engage in petard hoisting with:
And this, I have claimed, necessitates a mental language of a special kind, the language of thought I introduced last month and which I have elaborated upon a little bit here.
So, again we DO speak in a language! Not just any of the external languages. Author Lobina, or whoever wrote the headline, is then wrong. And, doing this more than once? I'm not inclined any longer to be charitable about "caveating." He's either written an egregious clickbait header or else he's blithely engaged in petard hoisting.
And, per above, I still say he's wrong otherwise on the broader issue.
Also, because thought for humans doesn't end with inner speech or cogitation, but goes on to include conscious dialogue with others, then ruminating on the ideas they provide, that also undercuts the idea that we don't think in any language.
This isn't quite a category mistake. It is a mistake, though; it's an impoverished definition of the word "thinking," even as I silently talk to myself while typing here. a lot of theories of mind and consciousness postulate that a lot of human cogitation, development of not just second order, but third order theories of mind, etc., depend on internal self dialogue .... which is based on language.
But, they also depend on dialogue with others. Whether Aristotle's "Man is an animal of civilization," or Donne's "No man is an island," while we occasionally cogitate alone, ultimately, our thinking is fashioned within social discourse.
So, no, Mr. Lobina, I shan't stick around for Part 4 or whatever of your essay serious.
And, with all of that, with the references to Aristotle and Donne, and per discussion about this in a private Facebook group? Maybe it IS a category mistake after all, and, speaking of language and thinking, I'm not sure yet how to describe the miscategorization.
I do know one other thing, to trot out another philosopher. That's Dan Dennett and private mental states. It's arguable that Lobina has no basis for his analogizing from natural language to mental language — with the addendum that he gets funnier yet by interjecting the language of formal logic into all of this.
In this case, it's not petard hoisting, but trying to have ones cake and eat it too, on talking about private mental states via analogy to public ones.
Or, to trot out a better analogy? A digital camera may use a CMOS or other sensor instead of film, but both it and the film camera are making photographs with photons of light. Thought may ultimately be done at an unconscious level in something like a language, without us being able to analogize better than that, but that something like a language bases its thinking on natural language and the product of natural language
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