Is language necessary to think?

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Robert Fox

30 April 2007

Theory of knowledge

Is language necessary to think?

If to think or in the  process of thought  is doing logic problems, or if thinking is a habitual response to actions for example, flinching when a baseball comes too close, or eating with a knife and fork, then one can think without language. But, on the other hand, if by thinking you mean an action by the active intelligence to a purpose, then the problem becomes more of “to what extent language defines or causes to come into being, reality”. Heidegger, among others, would say that a meaningful world is "always-already" there and by learning language we learn the meaning of the world. Wittgenstein would probably add that "thinking" really describes many activities, all of whom share a family resemblance, but all these descriptions might not have one single characteristic in common. Think of all the ways one commonly talks about thinking, and the varying situations in which the individual uses "thinking." We tend to hold real thinking to one specific model or logical standard, but this seems to be just one special case.

One such special case would be a hypothesis introduced by Benjamin Whorf which is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic determination). He believed that our thoughts are completely limited by our language, an example of this would be an event probably most people experience, it occurs when you are having a conversation and you suddenly find that you get caught up on a word and say something else but not expressing yourself clearly in the way you wanted. This shows that to an extent people’s thought can be limited to their language. This hypothesis however leaves room for misinterpretation and thus people are not entirely convinced as critics say that the Inuit have many different words for snow and in the long run this shows that language does not determine reality but reality determines language, however this is not a valid conclusion and regarding the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis there is fact evidence to suggest that thought is possible without language. Before the fact evidence we must first determine what language is before we can what it is to think.

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Language is rule-governed, intended, creative and open-ended. We as humans use it to interpret ideas we are faced with and put meaning behind it. The most important use of it probably is that it is used to understand the world around us and to communicate ideas with each other.

“There are1020 grammatically correct sentences in English up to 20 words in length”

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