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Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

(www.scientificamerican.com)
549 points orcul | 2 comments | 17 Oct 24 12:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.465s | source
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fnordpiglet ◴[19 Oct 24 03:16 UTC] No.41885384[source]▶
For those who can’t and don’t think in words this is unsurprising.
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Razengan ◴[19 Oct 24 18:49 UTC] No.41889753[source]▶
Can you count without using a "language"?

Try it now: Tap your hand on the desk randomly. Can you recall how many times you did it without "saying" a sequence in your head like "1, 2, 3" or "A, B, C" etc?

If yes, how far can you count? With a language it's effectively infinite. You could theoretically go up to "1 million 5 hundred 43 thousand, 2 hundred and 10" and effortlessly know what comes next.

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1. jwarden ◴[19 Oct 24 19:12 UTC] No.41889923[source]▶
I can. But I do this by visualizing the taps as a group. I don't have to label them with a number. I can see them in my mind, thus recalling the taps. If I tap with any sort of rhythm I can see the rhythm in the way they are laid out in my mind and this helps with recollection.

If I want to translate this knowledge into a number, I need to count the taps I am seeing in my head. At that point I do need to think of the word for the number.

I could even do computations on these items in my mind, imagine dividing them into two groups for instance, without ever having to link them to words until I am ready to do something with the result, such as write down the number of items in each group.

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2. calf ◴[20 Oct 24 04:14 UTC] No.41892813[source]▶
But that's like how I memorize sheet music, visual groups and subgroups of notes, and yet sheet music is formally linguistic nevertheless. So in such debates I think a tricky pitfall to avoid is that all data structures are essentially linguistic as well.