Thought and Natural Language : Part I

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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 ones 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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Pinkers 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.