Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

As always, barely anyone reads the actual claims in the article and we're left with people opining on the title.

The claims here are exceptionally limited. You don't need spoken language to do well on cognitive tests, but that has never been a subject of debate. Obviously the deaf get on fine without spoken language. People suffering from aphasia, but still capable of communication via other mechanisms, still do well on cognitive tests. Brain scans show you can do sudoku without increasing bloodflow to language regions.

This kind of stuff has never really been in debate. You can teach plenty of animals to do fine on all sorts of cognitive tasks. There's never been a claim that language holds dominion over all forms of cognition in totality.

But if you want to discuss the themes present in Proust, you're going to be hard pressed to do so without something resembling language. This is self-evident. You cannot ask questions or give answers for subjects you lack the facilities to describe.

tl;dr: Language's purpose is thought, not all thoughts require language

This. Also the question is what the possible complexity of the question is that you want to convey. As long as it is rather simple it might seem realistic to argue that there is no language involved (i would argue this is wrong). But as soon as the problems get more complex, the system you need to use to communicate this question becomes more and more undeniably a form of language (i think about complexity here as things like self-referentiality which need sufficiently complex formal systems to be expressed – think what gödel is about). So this part seems more complicated than it is understood. The same goes for the brain-imaging argument. As a philosopher I have unfortunately seen even accomplished scientists in this field follow a surprisingly naive empiricist approach a lot of times – which seems to me to be the case here also.

A much more interesting hypothesis is that abstract thought (thought about things not within the present sensorium) , or perhaps all thought, requires the use of symbols or tokens to represent the things that are to be considered.

I think this may have been partially substantiated through experiments in decoding thoughts with machine sensors.

If this turns out to-not- to be true it would have huge implications for AI research.

Great point. They even did a bad job of reading the title. The title wasn't "Language is not essential for thought", the title was "Language is not essential for the cognitive processes *underlying* thought."

We'd better hope that is true, because if we didn't have non-linguistic mastery of the cognitive processes underlying thought it's hard to see how we could even acquire language in the first place.

> As always, barely anyone reads the actual claims in the article and we're left with people opining on the title

One must ask why this is such a common occurrence on this (and almost all other) social media, and conclude that it is because the structure of social media itself is rotten and imposes selective pressures that only allow certain kinds of content to thrive.

The actual paper itself is not readily accessible, and properly understanding its claims and conclusions would take substantial time and effort - by which point the article has already slid off the front page, and all the low-effort single-sentence karma grabbers who profit off of simplistic takes that appeal to majority groupthink have already occupied all the comment space "above the fold."

> Language's purpose is thought

Language's purpose - why it arose - is more likely communication, primarily external communication. The benefit of using language to communicate with yourself via "inner voice" - think in terms of words - seems a secondary benefit, especially considering that less than 50% of people report doing this.

But certainly language, especially when using a large vocabulary of abstract and specialist concepts, does boost cognitive abilities - maybe essentially through "chunking", using words as "thought macros", and boosting what we're able to do with our limited 7+/- item working memory.

> Obviously the deaf get on fine without spoken language.

Why the introduction of "spoken?" Sign languages are just as expressive as spoken language, and could easily be written. Writing is a sign.

> But if you want to discuss the themes present in Proust, you're going to be hard pressed to do so without something resembling language. This is self-evident.

And it's also a bad example. Of course you can't discuss the use of language without the use of language. You can't discuss the backstroke without any awareness of water or swimming, either. You can certainly do it without language though, just by waving your arms and jumping around.

> Language's purpose is thought

Is it, though? Did you make that case in the preceding paragraphs? I'm not going to go out on a limb here and alternatively suggest that language's purpose is communication, just like the purpose of laughing, crying, hugging, or smiling. This is why we normally do it loudly, or write it down where other people can see it.

Whether language's purpose was communication or thought is not easily answered.

For one, how would you know? It left no fossils, nor do we have any other kind of record from that time.

For another, the very question implies a teleological view of evolution, which is arguably wrong.

As for what 50% of people report (where did that number come from?), we have virtually zero intuitive insight into the inner workings of our minds in general, or of the way we process language. All the knowledge that has been obtained about how language works--linguistics--has been obtained by external observation of a black box. (FMRIs and the like provide a little insight inside that black box, but only at the most general level--and again, that's not intuition.)

No, language's purpose is to communicate. Isn't this obvious?

hot take: language's original purpose must have been to lie.

It doesn't take words to understand implication of a club in your hand and a body of dead ape. From there it takes either violence or words to defend yourself(rightfully or not). Here, using language to explain the situation is more efficient.

You can look at modern animals: they use language for communication.

If people had no idea if they think with words or not, presumably they would say so.

You mean communication should happen through language?

Surely it's obvious that language production and perception evolved out of more primitive animal vocalizations, used for communicative purposes. How could it not have ?!

Note that human speech ability required more than brain support - it also required changes to the vocal apparatus for pronunciation (which other apes don't have), indicating that communication (vocalization) was either driving the development of language, or remained a very important part of it.