Public Words Considered as Vehicles of Thinking
Andrew Woodfield
Department of Philosophy
Genova draft 14 July 2006
University of Bristol, UK
Possessing a language is advantageous, not just for purposes of communication but also as an aid to thinking. People often manage to clarify their thoughts by trying out alternative verbal formulations ‘in their heads’ (e.g. when considering how best to respond to a question, when writing letters, and so on). However, many theorists say that there are certain kinds of thinking where words, phrases, sentences are not merely aids in the process. They claim that public language sometimes plays the role of a medium of thought.
The thesis that language-users sometimes think in words has been around for two millenia, ever since Plato suggested in Theaetetus that thinking is inner speech. The general idea is familiar and widely accepted. But it needs to be interpreted and made more precise before it can count as a serious scientific or philosophical hypothesis. In fact, within philosophy, it has been developed in various directions to yield a range of different hypotheses.
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The same idea, or a closely related one, is expressed by saying that public words are the vehicles of a person’s thoughts. Again, the claim stands in need of further interpretation. Suppose that a subject S, at a particular time t, consciously entertained proposition p. Suppose that some theorist, a philosopher or a psychologist perhaps, said of this episode, ‘S’s thought at t was carried by a vehicle’. What would they mean? This way of speaking is surely metaphorical. Saying that contentful states have a ‘medium’ is
1 Here is a small sample of relatively recent contributors to this Platonic ‘inner speech’ tradition: Gilbert
Ryle (1949) and 20 th century behaviourism in general, W. Sellars (1956) and his ‘myth of our Rylean ancestors’, Julian Jaynes (1976), Peter Carruthers (1996). The central point of this tradition is quite different from the idea that a person’s concepts and habitual ways of thinking are causally influenced by their native language during the language-learning process. Distinct traditions based around the latter idea exist in linguistics and anthropology (associated in the 20 th century with Sapir (1921) and Whorf (1956)) and in developmental psychology (associated with L. Vygotsky (1962)). For a survey of theories in psychology that link thinking to language, see K. Nelson (1996). For an evolutionary approach, see
Terrence Deacon (1997).
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probably metaphorical too. These modes of expression have become so pervasive in philosophy of mind that one tends to lose sight of the fact that they are figurative.
This short paper explores a particular version of the thesis that public language expressions can play the role of vehicles for thoughts and concepts. After making explicit the orthodox view that thoughts and concepts are mediated by internal representations and not by public words, I investigate an interestingly hybrid hypothesis that assigns a cognitive role to words. The hypothesis, proposed by Peter Carruthers (1996, 1998), is that images of spoken or written words are sometimes the vehicles of conscious thoughts.
Preliminary caveat: Because we are so familiar with the terms ‘word’ and ‘public word’ and because we can so readily give examples, we think we know what words are.
In reality, the ontological status, the nature, and the individuation-conditions of words are a little obscure. I guess the standard conception is that a word (in a public language) is a mixed package consisting of a speakable sound (with phonetic properties) and an inscribable shape (with orthographic properties) belonging to a system of discriminable sounds and shapes (a Saussurian ‘langue’), and possessing, within its home system, certain syntactic and semantic properties. All of these properties play some part in loosely determining which word it is. But people can easily get into puzzles about whether this utterance and that utterance are utterances of the same word, and there is a big, interesting field for further research here. (See, for example, Kaplan 1990, who distinguishes between the orthographic conception of a word and the common currency conception.) In this paper, however, I do not foray into the field; I rather rashly take for granted that we understand, well enough for present purposes, what public words are.
The Representational Theory of Mind
Orthodox cognitive scientists espouse some version or other of the
Representational Theory of Mind (see Sterelny 1990). According to RTM, contentful mental states are mediated by internal representations. These representations are the vehicles of thinking, the carriers of mental content.
Cognitive scientists who are physicalists also believe that mental structures and states are physically realized in the brain’s wetware, e.g. in configurations of neurons and in the physical states that such configurations occupy. Functionalism allows that a given
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mental representation may be realized by physically distinct vehicles in different organisms or on different occasions. Psychological Realism says that mental representations are real and their physical realizations are real.
According to physicalism, then, the psychological carriers of content (the internal representations) are themselves carried by underlying physical vehicles. So there exist two levels of entities that may be called ‘vehicles’ and two different jobs of ‘carrying’.
Mental representations are vehicles of (carry) content, neural states are vehicles of (carry) mental representations. If carrying is a transitive relation, it follows that neural states ultimately carry content too. It might be objected that this conclusion does not follow logically
, because there is an equivocation on the term ‘carry’. Mental states possess intentional content (as a property), whereas 1 st
order neural states physically realize 2 nd order mental states; and it does not strictly follow from these two premisses that 1 st
order neural states possess intentional content as a property. However, it is still arguable that there is a sense of ‘carry’ in which neural states do, in fact, carry content.
Connectionism and the ‘environmentally situated cognition’ approaches within cognitive science dislike positing internal symbols and downplay the role of internal representations. But they are likely to be as much in favour of physicalism as the orthodox RTM theorists. So there is a convergence of view as regards the ultimate carriers of content. The idea that brain-states are the vehicles of thoughts is embraced by all physicalists, even by those who deny that thinking is conducted in a symbolic medium.
Fodor’s influential orthodox version of RTM holds that the representations in which we think belong to a symbolic system that is like a language. He calls it
‘Mentalese’. Propositional thoughts are mediated by Mentalese sentences, concepts are mediated by Mentalese words.
Philosophers who believe in Mentalese mostly hold that an individual’s Mentalese is not identical with his or her public language. Various standard reasons are given in support of this view.
1) Concepts cannot be identical with public words, because public words have properties that concepts lack (such as phonetic properties, being spelled from letters of an alphabet, and so on), and concepts have properties that public words lack. Also they are
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individuated by different criteria: one concept can be expressed by two distinct words (if the words are synonyms). Arguments that appeal to Leibniz’s Law appear to rule out identifying concepts with words. (On the other hand, proponents of the identity hypothesis will accuse such arguments of begging the question.)
2) There are more concepts than there are words, because (a) people can create new concepts for which no words exist, (b) some non-human animals can think and reason to a limited extent even though they lack language, and probably their concepts do not correspond exactly to concepts expressible in a human language.
3) Ontogenetic priority. In order for a child to acquire its first public language, it needs to be able to entertain thoughts. It has to form hypotheses about the meanings of the speech-sounds to which it is exposed. The possession of at least some concepts must therefore precede the acquisition of a working vocabulary.
4) Evolutionary priority. Before our hunter-gatherer ancestors first began to communicate linguistically, they must have already possessed concepts, because (a) their socially coordinated non-verbal activities, their hunting, their intelligent problem-solving, required abilities to think and reason; (b) languages would not have evolved unless the early humans had been motivated to communicate messages to one another, that is, unless they already possessed thoughts they wanted to share.
These four considerations strongly indicate that not all thinking is mediated by public words. Yet they leave space for a more modest idea: that some thinking is mediated by words. Perhaps homo sapiens , having co-evolved with language, can engage in a new type of thinking that is intimately involved with language. Some cognition may now be, in Dennett’s phrase, ‘linguistically infected’ (Dennett 1982 , p89). It is conceded that primitive thoughts do not require language. But when a language is present in the social environment, perhaps human users expropriate it it as a medium in which to think.
It is not implausible that children develop a capacity for conducting some cognitive activities in their native language (cf. ‘thinking-for-speaking’, Slobin 1987). Our problem in this paper is always to try make the vague idea more precise.
Images of words as vehicles of thinking the contents of the words
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As already mentioned in footnote 1, the basic idea that we sometimes ‘think in words’ has sparked off a variety of more specific models of the relationship. Here is one of them, that of Carruthers (1996, 1998). If this model works, it shows, surprisingly, that one interpretation of the Platonic ‘inner speech’ idea is compatible with the orthodox
Representational Theory of Mind..
Carruthers hypothesizes that public words are sometimes the vehicles of conscious thoughts in virtue of the fact that images of spoken or written public words are sometimes the vehicles of conscious thoughts. External vehicles bearing linguistic contents in language L, when ‘internalized’ inside the subject S, become the carriers of
S’s mental contents. This hypothesis is set within the framework of a theory of consciousness that Carruthers calls the ‘reflexive thinking’ theory.
Carruthers starts from the indisputable fact that we often find ourselves mentally rehearsing sentences of our native language that express thoughts we are currently having. He calls this the introspective datum. To explain this datum, he offers a model of human cognitive architecture in which the central processor exploits the language module as a resource for providing computable representations. He writes: ‘The best explanation of the available introspective data is that we mostly think (when our thinking is conscious) by imaging sentences of natural language, and trains of thought consist of manipulations and sequences of such images. We have access to the forms of our thoughts because a record of each imaged sentence is briefly held in short-term memory, so that we can recall just what we have imaged’ (1996 p228).
An objection immediately arises, which Carruthers recognises. As Wittgenstein pointed out, every image stands in need of interpretation and for each image there can be more than one interpretation. Imagining the sound of a sentence is not necessarily to think the content of that sentence. For example, I hear a song sung in an African language that I do not understand. I remember the tune and the refrain. Later, I replay a fragment in my imagination: ‘Jambalaya cum baya’. I have a sound-image of an uttered sentence. The sentence may express some proposition. But I am not consciously entertaining the proposition. I do not know which proposition the sounds express.
A similar experience can occur when one imagines a heard utterance of a sentence in one’s native language. Although in this case I understand the meaning, my auditory
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image may present the sentence to me just as a sound-pattern. I may choose to disregard the meaning. I do not necessarily entertain the thought that the sentence expresses.
Clearly, some further condition must be imposed in order for an imaged sentence to qualify as the ‘vehicle’ of propositional thinking. It does not help much to posit a thought- vehicle that conventionally encodes a semantic content. The Subject needs to decode the vehicle in order to gain access to the content. But this then threatens the theory with a Rylean regress. The theory wanted to explain what goes on when S thinks that p. The explanation it gave was that S interprets a sentence running through his head as meaning that p. But S’s interpretation is a thought whose content includes p. But how is it possible for S to entertain p? That was the explanandum with which we started out.
Carruthers’ response to this difficulty is not entirely convincing. He says, ‘the object which occupies the causal role of a thought…is not only a phonological representation of a sentence. Rather, in the normal case that representation will carry with it its syntactic structure and associated semantics’ (1996 p229). He seems to be claiming that under certain conditions S’s internal representation of the sound of a sentence Z (say
‘Italia e bella’) is able to function simultaneously as a representation of the meaning of Z.
If so, there is no need to posit an additional representation of the meaning of Z; the occurrence of the phonological-syntactic-semantic representation inside S is sufficient to make it the case that S is thereby thinking about Italy, and thinking that Italy is beautiful.
So Carruthers says.
There is also a detail that remains a little unclear. Which entity has the best claim to be counted the vehicle of this thought? Is it the mental image, that is, S’s internal representation of the Italian sentence? Or is it the Italian sentence itself? Carruthers says the sentence is the vehicle. But he also says that when S imagines the sentence, S’s image is ‘immediately and non-inferentially imbued with content’ (i.e. the propositional content that Italy is beautiful), in the same way that S’s auditory perception would be imbued with that content if S heard the sentence uttered aloud.
A defender of Carruthers might reply that it does not matter which entity is said to carry the semantics. Both entities do so. The Italian sentence has a certain content in virtue of the semantic conventions of the Italian language, and the image also carries that
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content, as a part of its total content, because the image is a meta-representation that inherits the content of its object.
This defence seems to assume that S’s sound-image is an ‘iconic’ representation in the sense explained by Recanati, namely, a metarepresentation that contains the objectrepresentation not only syntactically but also semantically, such that S cannot entertain the content of the image without entertaining the content of the imagined sentence (see
Recanati 1999, p25). I think such an assumption is incorrect. The image is certainly a representation of a representation, but it is not an iconic metarepresentation. This status is reserved for metarepresentations whose nature necessitates that their content includes their object’s content. This is not the case here. For it is psychologically possible for someone, even a native speaker of Italian, to imagine the sound of the utterance without entertaining its content. Also the sound-image, which is an analogue representation of an object that has a syntactic structure, cannot be said to incorporate that structure into its own syntactic structure. Images do not have syntax, or at least, they do not conform to the same rules of syntax as linguistic symbol-strings.
I concede that it is somewhat Scholastic to dispute hotly about whether the mental image is a vehicle, or the imaged sentence is a vehicle, or both are. It is better to be permissive. To call something a vehicle of content is a metaphor that may admit of more than one interpretation.
Yet several worrying aspects remain to haunt Carruthers’ theory.
First, there is a distinction between things (like mental states) that have (‘carry’) original intentionality and things (like linguistic expressions) that have (‘carry’) derived intentionality.
Secondly, with public words and other symbols that are endowed with meanings by human beings, we operate a type-token distinction that we know more or less how to handle. A word-type can be tokened in written form, in spoken form, and in the form of a gesture if it is a word in sign-language. Can a public symbol-type can have both publicly observable tokens and purely mental tokens ? Some philosophers (Carruthers may be one) hold that when a subject S simply imagines an observable token, S brings into existence
(inside the head) an actual mental token. But it is doubtful whether a word-token in mental form has the same objective reality as a written or spoken token. My imagining
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an instance of a new type of helicopter does not actually bring a token of that type into existence, so why should my imagining an utterance of ‘Beelzebub’ (that forbidden word that must never be spoken) bring a token of the word into existence? Of course, when I silently imagine an utterance, my mental act does not bring into existence a spoken token.
No one disputes that. The question is , does my mental act create any token at all? If so, does the mental token have real existence or merely intentional inexistence? And if the latter, is it robust enough to be the carrier of S’s thought-content?
Carruthers says, ‘Sentences in a language one understands are always heard under a particular interpretation, in such a way that we seem to hear the meaning… The same is true of the images which constitute our thoughts – the content of the thought is heard in its form’ (1996 p229). While there may be some phenomenological truth in this claim, it is compatible with a 3 rd
person account that discerns two steps in the cognitive process. If S is a skilled interpreter of Italian, the passage from actually hearing the sound of the utterance to retrieving the meaning is rapid and automatic, like a reflex, whenever
S is in an interpreting mode. Yet it must be true that these are psychologically distinct states, because it is possible for S to imagine just the sound and not think of Italy’s being beautiful. To me this suggests that the image and the thought are causally related but ontologically independent; neither partly constitutes the other, and neither is the vehicle of the other.
Let me make one last remark about the hypothesis that imagined utterances are vehicles of conscious thoughts. Carruthers’ central project is to develop a theory of consciousness. Within the wider theory it is important that the images be of sentences as heard (or seen, or more generally, as perceived). The images must be retained in shortterm memory in such a way that they can become objects of reflexive thinking. The fact that they are available to higher-order reflection is what makes them conscious. Being conscious is not an intrinsic property of an image or a thought but is a forward-looking relational property.
I have not attempted to evaluate the wider theory. Carruthers does offer a theory- independent justification of the particular hypothesis, however. He says it is the best explanation of certain introspective data. The fact that we often have experiences as of
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spoken sentences running through our minds when we think is, for him, evidence in favour of the hypothesis.
Yet there is an alternative explanation available. It can explain the same evidence in a way that is common-sensical and plausible. The reason why we often have sentences in mind is that often, when we have thoughts, we wish to communicate them or we anticipate that we may be called upon to do so. Consequently we get into the habit of preparing suitable sentences in case they are required. That is, we generate in our imagination sentences that we can produce promptly, if the need arises. Which sentence gets to appear in consciousness at time t? Why, a sentence that captures the content of a currently existing thought. The thought comes first. The choice of sentence is constrained by the desideratum that it should carry the content of that thought, and not some other.
It is not surprising that we imagine the sound of the chosen sentence. We rehearse our possible future uttering of it. The system that controls speech-output continuously guides the movements of the tongue and larynx by matching the sounds they produce against a normative template. The reason why we often construct internal representations of how our potential utterances are supposed to sound is that sound- imagery helps us to make the right sounds.
This hypothesis gives a better explanation of the totality of introspective data.
Why is it that people often imagine sentences when they consciously think, but not always? This ought to be a puzzling phenomenon for Carruthers, who makes the property of being conscious depend upon the presence of an image. In his theory, every conscious propositional thought needs an image-vehicle that carries the propositional content. On the other hand, the commonsense rival hypothesis has a ready explanation: economy of effort. There is no need to frame a sentence that expresses your thought on occasions when you do not foresee any prospect of expressing it. That is why, during periods when no communication demands are being made, a lot of thinking is not accompanied by sentence-imagery.
In this brief paper I have made a few comments about one way of developing the idea that words may function as vehicles of thinking. Although the comments were critical, this does not mean that I am completely sceptical of the idea. On the contrary, I believe that there are psychological phenomena where public words help to determine
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mental content. Conceptual deference is a case in point (see Woodfield 2000). However, I am sure that conceptual deference is a very unusual phenomenon. My tentative conclusion is (i) that it is not the case that basic thinking requires or even admits of being mediated by public language; (ii) there are sophisticated types of thoughts whose contents are parasitic upon the semantic contents of words, and it may be illuminating to say that words function as the ‘vehicles’ of such thoughts; (iii) but all ‘vehicle’ talk is non-literal, so the relation always needs to be spelled out.
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