What Came First: Language or Thought?
Do words precede thought?
For as long as I’ve had an interest in language, I’ve wondered if thought precedes language. Or if the contrary is the case.
Is our thought process conditioned by our language? Or is language a direct consequence of our ability to produce thought?
Piaget and Vygotsky
This has been a discussed question. Piaget, for instance, argued that development in our cognitive abilities occurs before linguistic development.
He stated that we first have to develop a sense of self. And, having done that, we can start interacting with the world around us and with the people that are in it.
First, we need to understand where we are and what we’re capable of doing, in order to explore more possibilities through words.
Piaget’s theory reveals that the type of monologue that children have is a consequence of that operation. He thought that the ability to develop egocentrism is prior to that of sharing our inner world.
On the other hand, Vigotsky suggested that both language and thought are interdependent processes. They are occuring at the same time. And they feed from one another.
He declared that the meaning we create for words is dynamic and not static. Thus, it can be said that both elements of development (language & thought) are naturally evolving, not just from cultural associations between words and objects, but also from the connection between cognitive abilities and language.
The role of language
There have also been some theories that relate one’s cognitive capacity to our native language. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states, for instance, that some linguistic categories are the determiners of our relation to the world.
The perception of time, ethics and our own capacity to feel certain emotions is, therefore, a consequence of the words we use to interact with the components of reality, according to this theory.
With this hypothesis, we could go back to say that thought is a mere sequel of the linguistic context we’re born in.
But is that the whole story?
Maybe not thought, but cognitive development
Apparently not. Some other theories suggest otherwise. Steven Pinker, for instance, avows for a different understanding of the problem.
Along with Chomsksy’s early theory of a universal grammar, Pinker argues that language is an innate faculty. While the structures may vary, the mechanisms for language acquisition are universal.
Therefore, language can influence thought, but it does not completely determine it.
Furthermore, this theory also suggests that color perception, spatial reasoning and numerical cognition are also underlying processes that transcend the differences and variations in language.
Is thought represented by neurons?
But what about neurological research?
These types of studies have suggested that some neurons fire up seconds before we utter any word.
So, in some certain sense, we are all thinking before we speak.
There is definitely brain activity, even when we are not thoroughly thinking about what our next words will be.
If we can identify which specific cues and neurons or patterns of emotion we are showing, we can apparently predict what we are going to say before we do so.
So where does all of this leave us?
It is hard to imagine, at least for me, that we can have any type of interaction with the world without language.
Some people argue that they have thoughts in the form of visual imagery, not necessarily with words. And, fair enough. We can have different ways to conceive our inner worlds.
But even without wanting it, we are all part of a bigger space. We create society. And, thanks to language, we have been able to coexist, communicating about things in different spaces.
We are thinking and communicating all the time.
Even with ourselves, we weigh out options as better or worse with a conversation. We make decisions by having dialogues.
This means that complex or high-order thought does require the use of language. Maybe that’s not the case with the inner understanding of ourselves, though.
But the biggest ideas we have ever conceived as human beings have been the result of using language as a tool for thought.
Poetry, for example, is a complex process that uses the cue of a thought and arranges beauty with the use of grammatical structures and word-play.
They are both feeding constantly from one another. They are clearly intertwined and trying to separate both of them might not be the right call for future discussions.
Maybe thought helps language. And language is shared thought.
