The Essential Connection Between Language and Thought
Initial philosophical investigations into the nature of thought, like that of John Locke, explored the fundamental structure and constituent elements of our thoughts without mention of language. Such conceptualizations see the elements of thought as arriving to us via the things we encounter and thus see language as entirely separate from this process. Other theories of the composition of thought, like that of Gottlob Frege, assign a crucial importance to the shareability of thoughts and point to the structure of language through which we share these thoughts as an indicator of the complex structure of thoughts and thinking. Donald Davidson goes even further than Frege, asserting that language is what makes rational thought even possible. Lastly, Noam Chomsky develops a theory which suggests language is itself an aspect of cognition beholden to the structural constraints of an innate cognitive structure. While I do not propose to explicate the true nature of the relationship between language and thought in this paper, I propose that an examination of the virtues and limitations of the conceptualizations of Locke, Frege, Davidson, and Chomsky reveal that there is an essential connection between the two that will in some sense require that we fully understand one in order to fully understand the other.
One initially compelling approach to understanding thought is the building block approach: break down mental activity into its simplest elements, then explain how the activity is built up by the elements. In the context of Marr’s three level approach, this means identifying the fundamental units at the mind’s computational level (Marr, 18). While the building block approach at the brain hardware level would be developing a proper understanding of atoms, molecules, and biochemical relationships that build up into the larger constituent anatomical structures of the brain, the simplest elements of thinking are not so obvious. We might therefore ask what are the atoms[1] of thought? John Locke believed these simplest elements of thinking were ideas in a conceptualization of thinking often termed “The Idea Idea.” This is the thought of thoughts as atoms that can come and go. He believed the basic kind of idea is a particular thing, not a simple idea of a thing, but a simple idea of each of the examples of that thing that I have encountered. A general idea would be something like the quality of being a mug and a simple idea is something like a specific mug (Locke, 18).
If the Idea Idea is correct, it would appear that understanding language is not crucial to understanding Thought, as Thought is essentially made of the combination of many simple ideas that we gain through features of objects we encounter in sensory experience. The problem with the Idea Idea, however, stems from the fact that it is possible for the idea of something to exist without the thing itself actually existing. I can have the idea of a gold mountain without believing that a gold mountain exists. Thinking of things but not believing that they are so presents us with a special kind of unity and it becomes extremely difficult to explain this unity as a combination of simple ideas because belief is not a feature of an object. Belief does not connect to the thing in the same way that existence does. Belief’s unity to its object takes the form of the unity of a proposition: putting forward something as though it is true. In The Idea Idea’s failure to account for complex ideas that take on a propositional structure like the idea of a gold mountain, it reveals itself to be a non-viable or at the very minimum incomplete approach to understanding the mind.
Gottlob Frege took Locke’s conception of the idea to be absurd and proposed an alternative approach to understanding thought which, unlike Locke’s, accounts for complexes. While the building block approach searches immediately for simples, the Holistic approach, alternatively, suggests we identify complex wholes that go into mental activity then explain the constituent elements in terms of the elements’ contribution to the wholes. In Thoughts, Gottlob Frege develops his own holistic approach wherein he suggests we treat a thought, understood as that for which the question of truth can arise, as an explanatorily fundamental component of mental activity. For Frege, to understand the mind, you must begin with the whole thought (Frege, 354).
Frege points out that a thought can be true or false, but physical things do not have truth conditions. A prominent issue with the Idea Idea is that it does not recognize or account for this difference. In Locke’s conception, all we know about our relationship to an idea is that it is in our mind. Locke claims an idea is before the mind such that ideas are presented to us which implies a viewer and idea, with the idea being something we do not come up with but find. Frege takes issue with the fact that the Idea Idea implies the only thing we really know is our minds. Frege’s suggestion to look at a thought instead of an idea as the fundamental unit helps avoid this confused picture of a thinker as occupied only with a private sphere of mental things, as opposed to with the shared world thinkers inhabit. Frege points out that despite a thought being a personal thing, it can be shared. This is a crucial point as the communicability of thoughts suggests that the form of communication reveals something intrinsic about the nature of thought itself. Frege says “a word only has meaning in the context of a sentence,” to get across that an idea could only make sense in the context of something with a propositional structure, a thought, but never on its own. This is what makes thoughts fundamental: while they are not simple, they are the smallest meaningful unit of thoughts and it is this complex articulate structure that allows for this meaning. For Frege, this communicability also highlights how thoughts are not fixed by my idiosyncratic experience of a kind of object but are instead fixed by what they take to be true. For Frege, then, I can have the exact same thought as someone else (Frege, 353).
In Rational Animals, Donald Davidson builds upon the developments made by Frege to argue that a creature cannot have thought unless it has language. It is important to note that Davidson is not arguing that each thought depends on the existence of a corresponding linguistic sentence which expresses the thought, but that “in order to be a thinking, rational creature, the creature must be able to express many thoughts, and above all, be able to interpret the speech and thoughts of others” (Davidson, 323). Davidson uses “proposition” to mean what Frege means by “thought,” that for which the question of truth can arise, to go from Frege’s “a word only has meaning in the context of a sentence” to an argument for “a sentence has meaning only in the context of a whole language.” Davidson’s holistic approach begins first with an argument for the idea that in order to have belief, it is necessary to have the concept of belief. Davidson observes that rationality is characterized by having propositional attitudes like belief. Davidson argues that if a creature has one belief, it must have a huge body of other beliefs which provide identity and content to the belief and this is true for all propositional attitudes. Because each thought has a place in a logical network of other thoughts, having one propositional attitude means having a pattern of beliefs which logically cohere. While there is not a fixed set of beliefs required for any one thought, we must have many (often true) beliefs and the concept of belief itself in order to have any propositional attitude.
To elaborate on this, Davidson discusses the nature of surprise: “Suppose I believe there is a coin in my pocket. I empty my pocket and find no coin. I am surprised. Clearly enough, I could not be surprised…if I did not have beliefs in the first place. And perhaps it is equally clear that having a belief…entails the possibility of surprise” (Davidson, 326). However, there is an additional step as Davidson points out that in surprise not only have my beliefs changed, but I am now aware of a contrast between an old belief and a new belief. This awareness, says Davidson, “is a belief about a belief: if I am surprised, then among other things I come to believe my original belief was false” (Davidson, 326). Davidson’s argument is thus that one cannot have the general set of beliefs of the kind necessary for having any belief at all without experiencing this kind of surprise and this kind of surprise necessarily involves belief about the truth value of one’s own beliefs. Therefore, surprise, says Davidson, is “a necessary and sufficient condition of thought in general” (Davidson, 326).
Davidson argues that in order to have the concept of belief, we must have language. Davidson begins this argument by pointing out that belief “is the concept of a state of an organism which can be true or false” (Davidson, 326). When I am surprised by there being no coin in my pocket, I come to believe that my past belief does not “correspond with the state of my finances. I have the idea of an objective reality which is independent of my belief” (Davidson, 326). Therefore, the concept of belief requires the concept of objective truth. Davidson points out that linguistic communication is sufficient to show command of the subjective-objective contrast. Davidson goes on to argue that in order to understand another’s language, I must share a world with that other. Even if we do not agree on all matters, in order to disagree, we still need to be able to “entertain the same proposition, with the same subject matter, and the same standard of truth” (Davidson, 327). Communication thus requires that the two communicators have the concept of a shared inter-subjective reality which is just the concept of an objective world about which each can have beliefs. Davidson goes even further and theorizes that the only way one could come to have the subjective-objective contrast is through having the concept of intersubjective truth on which communication depends. He describes our sense of objectivity as resulting from a kind of triangulation of two creatures and an object:
Each interacts with the object, but what gives each the concept of the way things are objectively is the base line formed between the creatures by language. The fact that they share a concept of truth alone makes sense of the claim that they have beliefs, that they are able to assign objects a place in the public world. The conclusion of these considerations is that rationality is a social trait. Only communicators have it. (Davidson, 327)
If Davidson’s theory is correct, we must understand language, at least to the extent that it constitutes a basis for our conceptual ability to grasp objective truth, in order to have a complete understanding of thought itself.
Noam Chomsky is another thinker who theorizes an inextricable link between language and thought that requires a thorough understanding of one in order to understand the other. Chomsky’s independent theory considers language to be one aspect of cognition. Chomsky’s theory of Generative Grammar takes linguistics to be the study of a hypothesized innate cognitive grammatical structure that serves as a discrete combinatorial system capable of deriving “frillions of new ideas” using finite sets of building blocks and meaningful elements as well as systems for composing these into complexes (Aspects, 9). This cognitive structure allows us to compose mental objects and assign them content and thus establish a relation between meanings and articulations (Aspects, 9). Such a relation is for Chomsky, what language is. Chomsky’s theory states that this cognitive structure is a part of an innate syntactic structure called Universal Grammar. If his theories are correct, our linguistic ability is explicitly beholden to functional constraints imposed by a universally innate cognitive structure. Thus, we must understand the fundamental rules which determine our ability to assign content to mental objects if we are to fully understand the nature of our mentalistic representations. The most fundamental understanding of the grammar of human language, in Chomsky’s view, has the potential to reveal to us the absolute limits of human conceptual understanding, categories, and the ways in which we are able to relate these in our mind.
It is clear then that Locke’s conceptualization of thought is unable to properly account for propositional attitudes and therefore, as Frege shows us, a conceptualization of thought that does explain the ability for our thoughts, like propositions, to have truth values is fundamentally faulty. While Frege, Davidson, and Chomsky do not all agree on the exact nature of the essential connection between language and thought, a synthesis of their theories reveals that they all agree that an essential connection does exist and that a proper understanding of thinking and cognition must involve an understanding of the means through which we communicate thoughts with one another linguistically. It is thus obvious that such an essential connection, whether it be language as the parallel structure of our thoughts, language as a prerequisite for rational thought, or language as an aspect of cognition and innate cognitive structure must exist and we must understand it in order to understand thought.
[1] Where by atoms we mean the smallest, most fundamental, indivisible units. This is not to say that physical atoms are truly the most fundamental unit of matter or that they are, strictly speaking, indivisible. This is only to help contextualize the nature of the thing we are looking for in Thought.
Works Cited
Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Chomsky, Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior
Davidson, Rational Animals
Frege, Thoughts
Locke, Essay
Marr, Vision, Ch.1, pp.8-31
