OUR WAY WITH WORDS - I speak therefore I am

Language and Thought

The sophistication of human thought is unique in the animal world. We are the only species truly aware of itself How did this happen? Descartes is known for a famous dictum; 'I think therefore I am', but made no suggestions concerning what has become known as the 'body-mind' problem - how do thoughts emerge from the brain. Today we are no nearer an answer. Perhaps we have not been asking the right questions. Similar to the uniqueness of human language, that of self-awareness and human emotion does prompt the question of there being some possible shared, or inter-dependent, origins for all these instincts. This site is devoted to the idea that our sense of self-awareness is entirely due to the fact that we use language, suggesting a corollary to Descartes' statement that: 'I speak therefore I am'. This has never been universally accepted, despite growing evidence in support of the idea. It is further suggested that no abstract and emotional thought whatsoever can even exist without language.

It is certainly true that not all of our thinking is actually couched in words, and this apparent paradox certainly merits further consideration. A possible 'solution' might be to consider the parallel between the development of new-born human infants and those of other adult higher animals. Many people seem particularly eager to attribute some language skills to animals; for example to chimpanzees, bees and dolphins, but whatever degree of language they may possess it in no way approaches our own. Yet they are still capable of certain behaviour that far outstrips that which we possess, such as that associated with survival and incredible migrational and homing instincts. But the one instinct that we uniquely possess is the ability to learn language, spoken or signed. Even if chimps, say, have inadequate vocal chords, they still cannot be taught to sign, so there seems to be something intrinsically unknown about the nature of language.

Building Consciousness

For a short early period after birth the human child possesses a number of survival instincts similar to those of all higher animals, but as language develops so does the ability to generate abstract thought, and thus self-awareness emerges. So we each begin to 'build' our own individual consciousness from the sensual data that we receive, as Alva Noë has discussed in some detail in his recent book Out of our Heads. It would seem that language enables the brain to generate consciousness - or self awareness - just as food arriving in the stomach initiates digestion.

Admittedly, this proposal is far from a 'functional' solution, for we have no idea how it happens, but perhaps it does offer a framework on which to develop a more structured approach to the great mystery of consciousness. It is more plausible than postulating, for example, some inner 'language' (such as the mentalese of Pinker) for which we have no tangible evidence whatsoever. All animals possess survival instincts of varying orders, but the human species supplements these with its supreme instinct of learning language, and hence of developing abstract ideas, but it still retains the primeval ability of 'wordless' thought that all higher animals also appear to possess.

So we apparently function mentally at two levels simultaneously; one we have 'inherited' in an evolutionary sense and share with some other species, and one we acquire in early childhood by having this instinctive ability to learn language. The first is the source of our instinctive 'survival' behaviour, which has been extended to include behaviour in an environment much more complex than animals have in the wild. It would include, for example, all those things we seem to do 'without thinking' such as driving a car, say. The second is what makes us distinctive as human beings in a deeper sense, providing the means for abstract and emotional thought, and all that flows from that, like making our environment itself more complex by our inventiveness. This, almost certainly, is also the source of so many psychological problems that we human beings have become heir to, unlike other animals. Maintaining and 'servicing' our self-awareness is often far from easy.

The Implications

If the primacy of language for self awareness is accepted the implications must be considerable, stretching our understanding of many other aspects of abstract thinking such as the art/science 'two culture' question, the evolution of human cultural values, the possibility of artificial intelligence, and even the general way we each see the world, and our own place in it. From what we have discussed so far we are faced with an interesting question: could ' human intelligence', as we generally understand it, be replicated either by machine or by another species? Our central assumption about the primacy of language would demand that any candidates , machine or animal, would have to acquire the ability to use language as we do ourselves. Some would say that this would, in all probability, rule out machine artificial intelligence, for complete language has not only grammatical content but semantic. However, if an animal, a new species, could appear with linguistic ability, then in 50-100,000 years, or so, it might begin to challenge human superiority, assuming that we had not ourselves advanced still further, or were unaware of the possible emerging challenge.

Rather than invoke classical philosophical ideas claiming to be relevant, but which are invariably couched in rather difficult language, (such as the heterophenomenologicalism of Dennett, for example), the reader is invited to search personal experience, and to consider some well-known examples of rather unusual behaviour and to reassess some of these questions. For we all have an undeniable claim to be experienced as human beings. This we shall explore in the following sections.