Language, Thought and Consciousness
By Peter Carruthers
Cambridge University Press. 1996. xv + 291pp. $49.95 cloth
Carruthers aims to establish the possibility that we often think in the same language
that we speak. Not a difficult task, you may think. Doesn’t introspection reveal an
inner soliloquy, a stream of sentences formed in the acoustic imagination? But
according to a venerable tradition - Carruthers calls it the communicative conception
of language - natural language is something akin to a code. We do not think in natural
language, we translate our thought into natural language when we want to make it
publicly available, or in the case of conscious inner verbalizations, when we want to
make a note to ourselves for future reference. A currently influential version of the
communicative conception is due in large part to Fodor: cognition consists primarily
in the manipulation of sentences of Mentalese, an innate, universal symbol system.
Carruthers thinks this is wrong: we do a good deal of our thinking in natural language
itself. He calls this the cognitive conception of natural language.
The case for Mentalese has a number of strands. Some of these are
observations of the commonplace. Natural language sentences can be ambiguous “That stool is horrid” - yet since we know what we mean when we utter them, this
suggests our thinking is not being conducted in natural language. Then there is the tipof-the-tongue phenomenon: we sometimes have a thought we want to express, but
cannot find the words in natural language to express the thought. There are more
theoretical grounds. Sentences in different natural languages can express the same
propositions, the same thoughts or beliefs. A natural explanation: they express the
same Mentalese propositions. Chomsky has shown that natural languages have a
common form, at a certain level of abstraction - this fits neatly with the Mentalese
hypothesis. Fodor argues that holism about meaning is incompatible with realism
about folk psychology; to be realists we need to have an atomistic semantics, i.e. in
specifying the meaning of a given mental state we will not mention any other mental
state. The only language for which an atomistic semantics can be given is Mentalese Fodor’s own causal co-variance theory fits the bill. Perhaps most telling of all, it
seems obvious that natural language isn’t needed for thought: look at the way animals
and human infants behave. They clearly engage in a good deal of thinking and
reasoning; we can explain their behaviour in terms of beliefs and desires.
In the first half of the book Carruthers sets out these issues with exemplary
clarity. I know of no finer introduction to them. He does not set out to furnish
decisive refutations of every part of Fodor’s position, indeed, he believes Fodor to be
right on many counts. Carruthers accepts the computational model of cognition, he
believes there are innate mental modules, and that the thinking of some creatures is
carried out in Mentalese, or something like it. What he seeks to do, and to my mind
successfully, is to show that Fodor’s arguments against the cognitive conception are
not decisive: the common-sense view that we do some of our thinking in natural
language remains a live option. Which parts of our conscious thinking? He initially
seeks to establish that our conscious thinking - that part of it which could be called
propositional as opposed to pictorial - is conducted in natural language. This result is
then extended. A good deal of our non-conscious thinking is conducted in the
medium of natural language (e.g. solving problems while asleep and dreaming of
something else). Conscious propositional thought can only be conducted in natural
language. Although we may do some of our thinking in Mentalese, the thoughts
whose constituent concepts are acquired via natural language can only be entertained
in thoughts formulated in natural language. These claims all apply to us humans, in
virtue of the laws of nature and the structure of our minds. Perhaps some creatures
conduct sophisticated propositional thinking in Mentalese, but if Carruthers is right,
we cannot.
These results emerge in chapter 8, at the end of the book, after a detour into a
comprehensive theory of consciousness, which occupies chapters 5-7. Carruthers
accepts that infants and animals engage in genuinely propositional thought. To forge
the link between natural language and conscious thought that he wants to establish, he
has to establish that creatures lacking natural language are not conscious. Carruthers
arguments here lead to the intriguing (astonishing?) conclusion that natural language
is naturally necessary for consciousness (for beings whose minds are structured like
ours). He is aware of the broader philosophical significance of this: vindication with a
vengeance for the Linguistic Turn. In making language the object of their study,
philosophers will not merely be investigating the structure of thought, they will also
be probing the necessary conditions for consciousness. As he further notes, “If true,
this conclusion may have profound implications for our moral attitudes towards
animals and animal suffering” (p.221).
Carruthers’ theory of consciousness has two elements: a functionalist account
of mental concepts, and a version of the higher-order thought theory of consciousness
- he calls it “the reflexive thinking theory”. According to the latter, what makes a
thought, perception or occurrent belief conscious is the availability of the state to a
conscious higher-order thought, (or in the case of beliefs and desires, they are
conscious if they are apt to cause the emergence of a conscious thought with the same
content as themselves). These higher-order states, should they occur, will be
conscious because they too are available to further higher-order states, and so on. His
elaboration of this theory is ingenious, and he may be right that his version of the
higher-order thought theory is more plausible than the alternatives on offer. But
whether any version of the higher-order thought theory is believable is another matter.
If the reflexive thinking theory is true, no state is conscious solely in virtue of its
intrinsic characteristics. Needless to say, this is highly counterintuitive. The
doctrine’s implications are dramatic. Most people believe that infants and animals
incapable of reflexive thinking nonetheless have conscious experiences, states which
possess phenomenal characteristics. Does a creature need to be able to think about its
own experiences in order to feel pain, or see colour? Carruthers’ position would be
innocuous if it amounted to a terminological point concerning the use of the adjective
“conscious”. But it amounts to more than this: he believes that only conscious states in his sense - can possess phenomenal characteristics. So if he is right, infants and
animals - with the possible exception of apes - do not have any experiences. (He
wavers at this and suggests that perhaps human infants do have conscious experiences
(p.222) but his argument is brief and not very convincing, given his own framework.)
Why believe that phenomenal properties are confined to states which can be
thought about? Functionalism enters the picture here: “the property of being the
subjective feel of an experience ... is a functional one, identical with the possession of
a distinctive causal role” (p.214). To have experiences, a creature must be able to
think about its experiences as such, i.e. as information-bearing states of itself which
may or may not represent the world accurately. I think many will be inclined to draw
the line here. Even functionalists need not regard this aspect of the functional role of
concepts such as “pain” and “red” to be essential. Those of us who are not
functionalists will take a stronger stance. Yes, for a creature to be able to think of its
conscious mental states as possessing subjective features, it needs the concept
“experience” and all this presupposes. But the properties of an experience we call
“subjective” are its intrinsic features; it is these intrinsic properties that are the
phenomenal properties, and for a state to have these properties, it is not necessary for
its owner to be able to think of them in any particular way.
In any event, Carruthers’ views about the relationship between language and
thought are to a considerable degree independent of his idiosyncratic position on
phenomenal consciousness. Those who will find his views on the latter topic
unappealing will find a good deal to engage their interest in the rest of the book. The
idea that we think and speak in the same language is an appealing one. Carruthers’
defence of it is novel and refreshing, and his arguments concerning which parts of our
thinking is done in natural language are interesting in their own right. Even if
Carruthers is wrong about what it takes to be conscious, he may be right about much
else.
The University of Liverpool
Barry Dainton