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Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought (2024) [pdf]

138 points| netfortius | 3 months ago |gwern.net | reply

77 comments

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[+] NonHyloMorph|3 months ago|reply
I think the terminology here isn't sharp. One of the first headlines is: "Language is not necessary nor sufficient for thought" I disagree. Language is not necessary for cognitive processes in individuals/organisms. It is absolutely necessary for what we commonly refer to as thought (bit of a pretentious we: it involves you in the group of people who have some idea about philosophy (e.g. baseline-heidegger)/the humanities/psychoanalysis etc.) that which we refer to as thought. Thought can be a decentralised process that is happening "between" individuals ("Die Sprache spricht" - Language is speaking by heidegger points into that direction). Thought is also, imho, a symbolic process (which involves sign systems, mathematics, languages, images). Not everything going on as a cognitive process is therefor constituting thought. That's why one can act thoughtless- but not "cognitionless".
[+] trueismywork|3 months ago|reply
I disagree. There can be thought without any way to express it any langauge yet. Only with a lot of communication can we get to the an approximation of what it means and hence it can mean slightly different thing ti everyone. Koans can be a good example of this
[+] mpascale00|3 months ago|reply
I think you make a good point that much of what we call thinking is really discourse either with another ^[0], with media, or with one's own self. These are largely mediated by language, but still there are other forms of communicative _art_ which externalize thought.

The other thoughts here largely provide within-indivudal examples: others noted Hellen Keller and that some folks do not experience internal monologue. These tell us about the sort of thinking that does happen within a person, but I think that there are many forms of communication which are not linguistic, and therefore there is also external thinking which is non-linguistic.

The observation that not all thought utilizes linguistic representations (see particularly the annotated references in the bibliography) tells us something about the representations that may be useful for reasoning, thought, etc. That though language _can_ represent the world it is both not the only way and certainly not the only way used by biological beings.

^[0]: It Takes Two to Think https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02074-2

[+] Lionga|3 months ago|reply
Based on your definition a child that can not speak/understand language yet can not think? Hint: It clearly can.

There are a lot of things I can think about that I do not have words for. I can only communicate these things in a unclear way, as language is clearly a subset of thought, not a superset.

Only if your definition of thought is that is is language based, which is just typical philosophy circular logic.

[+] Peteragain|3 months ago|reply
Okay so rephrasing the question, how should we characterise the type of thinking we do without language? And the more interesting question IMO what thinking can an agent do without symbolic representation?

The original Vygotsky claim was that learning a language introduces the human mind to thinking in terms of symbols. Cats don't do it; infants don't either.

[+] habbekrats|3 months ago|reply
i think you are right, but its hard to explain as ppl can interpret your words in many ways depending on their context.

i think this: you dont need language for an idea, to have it, or be creative.

to think about it outside of that, like asking critical questions, inner dialogue _about_ the ideas and creativity, that is i think what is 'thought' and that requires language as its sort of inner communication....

[+] fsckboy|3 months ago|reply
>(e.g. baseline-heidegger)/the humanities/psychoanalysis etc.)

and pre-heidegger, pre-psychoanalysis, what then, how did somebody, e.g. heidegger, think of those thoughts without the vocabulary to do so? ahhh, apparently, they didn't need to. Turns out, language is not required for thought, thought can invent language.

[+] DrierCycle|3 months ago|reply
Language may ultimately be maladaptive as it is arbitrary and disconnected from thought. Who cares about the gibberish of logic/philosophy when survival is at stake in ecological balance? The key idea is, there are events. They are real. The words we use are false/inaccurate externalizations of those events. Words and symbols are bottlenecks that place the events out of analog reach but fool us by our own simulation processes into thinking they are accurate.

Words are essentially very poor forms of interoception or metacognition. They "explain" our thoughts to us by fooling us. Yet how much of the senses/perceptions are accessible in consciousness. Not very much. The computer serves to further the maladaption by both accelerating the symbols and sutomating them, which puts the initial real events even further from reach. The only game is how much we can fool the species through the lowres inputs the PFC demands. This appears to be a sizable value center for Silicon Valley, and it seems to require coders to ignore the whole of experience and rely solely on the bottleneck simulations centers of the PFC which themselves are disconnected from direct sensory access. Computers, 'social' media, AI, code, VR essentially "play" the PFC.

How these basic thought experiments that have been tested in cog neuroscience since the 90s in the overthrow of the cog sci models of the 40s-80s were not taught as primer classes in AI and comp sci is beyond me. It takes now third gen neurobiology crossed with linguistics to set the record straight.

These are not controversial ideas now.

[+] andai|3 months ago|reply
When I was a kid a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three languages. Which one do you think in?"

I was bemused, and thought... "people think in words?"

Apparently people with ADHD or Autism can develop the inner voice later in life.

In my 20s, language colonized my brain. Took me years of meditation to get some peace and quiet back...

[+] wobfan|3 months ago|reply
I have never not thought in words. How does it work? Like, how can I for example think about plans or something if not in words?

I do meditate here and now, but sooner or later the constant stream of words will 100% set in again, usually during or immediately after meditation. And these words for example tell me or discuss whether I should go shower, go to gym, do dishes, or whatever. And in the end I'll decide based on that discussion and do it. It's weird how defined I am by this inner voice.

[+] teunispeters|3 months ago|reply
I can summon up a voice if needed, but yeah normally not thinking in words. Aphantasia means I don't think in pictures either ;) What I think mostly is in patterns and connections, and flows.
[+] tarsinge|3 months ago|reply
Meditation is interesting because it made me able to not only separate thoughts from words, but also consciousness from thoughts.

It’s also consistent with our intuition that toddlers have consciousness and thoughts and other mammals at least consciousness (and emotions) without language.

[+] alfiedotwtf|3 months ago|reply
This feels like last year when I found out I have ADHD and aphantasia...

What do you mean "think in words"? Is it like a narrator, or a discussion like Herman's Head? Are you hearing these words all the time or only when making decisions?

[+] roncesvalles|3 months ago|reply
I still don't "buy" that some people don't have an inner voice. In my opinion it's either a misunderstanding of what it means to have an inner voice (it's not the schizophrenic "other person" voice), or people simply lying to appear quirky and special.

If people don't have an inner voice, it also must be the case the some people (these people?) don't have consciousness. It isn't obvious that consciousness is essential to fitness, especially of an inner voice isn't. Some people may be operating as automatons.

[+] grumbel|3 months ago|reply
Might be correct for reasonably narrow definitions of language and thought, but it falls a bit short in considering the extended mind thesis. A whole lot of our thinking happens with pen&paper, their digital successor or other items out there in the world. We don't solve complex problems in our head alone, we solve them by interacting iteratively with the real world, and that in turn often involves some kind of language, even if it's just us reading our own scribbles.

Another issue is that a lot of tasks in the modern world are rooted in language, law or philosophy is in large part just word games, you won't be able to get far thinking about them without language, as those concept don't have any direct correlate that you could experience by other means.

Overall I do agree that there are plenty of problems we can solve without language, but the type of problems that can and can't be solve without language would need some further delineation.

[+] necovek|3 months ago|reply
While I agree we do a lot of our problem solving with symbolic languages (streams of images), even if we define "thought" as symbolic language processing, I believe many great experts in philosophy and law do internalize the relationships between concepts and operate on it on a more subconscious level to get there faster, going back to the symbolic language to validate their reasoning processes.

I wouldn't call those underlying processes "thinking", but it is a matter of definition.

This is also why those who just use LLMs to write those court submissions we've read about fail: there was no non-thinking reasoning happening, but just a stream of words coming out, and then you need to validate everything, which is hard, time-consuming and... boring.

[+] James_K|3 months ago|reply
I think it depends what you mean by language. There is a kind of symbolic logic that happens in the brain, and as a programmer I might liken it to a programming language, but the biological term is defined differently. Language, as far as it is unique to humans, is the serialisation of those internal logical structures in the same way text file is the serialisation of the logical objects within a programming language. What throws most people here is that the internal structures can develop in response to language and mirror it in some ways. As a concrete example, there is certainly a part of my brain that has developed to process algebraic equations. I can clearly see this as distinct from the part that would serialise them and allow me to write out the equation stored internally. In that way, the language of mathematics has precipitated the creation of an internal pattern of thought which one could easily confuse for its serialisation. It seems reasonable to assume that natural language could have similar interactions with the logical parts of the mind. Constructs such as “if/then” and “before/after” may be acquired through language, but exist separate from it.

Language is, therefore, instrumental to human thought as distinct from animal thought because it allows us to more easily acquire and develop new patterns of thinking.

[+] iainctduncan|3 months ago|reply
Any improvising musician or athlete of a complex sport knows with absolute certainty that language is not necessary for thought. And in fact, we spend years learning to turn off all linguistic thought –it degrades performance.
[+] bolangi|3 months ago|reply
Not sure how well this dovetails with the research presented in the article, but Grinder and Bandler's work -- which they named Neuro Linguistic Programing (derived I understand from analyzing the brief therapy and hypnotherapy techniques of Milton Erickson) -- postulated that people have dominant modes of thought: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. They correlated these modes with eye movements they observed in subjects when asked to recall certain events.

In my personal experience, my mind became much less busy as a result of several steps. One being abandoning the theory of mind -- in contrast to spiritual practices such as Zen and forms of Hinduism, where controlling the mind, preventing its misbehavior, or getting rid of it somehow is frequently described as a goal, the mind's activity being to blame for a loss of a person's ability to be present in the here and now.

As a teenager, I can remember trying to plan in advance what I will say to a person when faced with a situation of conflict, or maybe desire toward the opposite sex, doubting that language will reliably sprout from my feelings when facing a person, whose facial reactions (and my dependence on their good will) pulls me out of my mental emotional kinesthetic grounding.

As humans we use language, however, it seems possible to live in our experience. Some people who are alienated from their experience, or overwhelmed by others, seek refuge in language.

There is obviously a gap between research such as this, and how someone can make sense of their agency in life, finding their way forward when confronted with conflict, uncertainty, etc.

[+] ineedasername|3 months ago|reply
There are a few things here.

First) This is correct in a trivial and incorrect in profound ways.

Trivial Correct: Clearly language is, at best, a lossy channel for thought. It isn't thought compressed, it is thought where the map would be too complex for language and so we draw a kindergarten scribble we all agree on, and that covers a lot of ground as a an imperfect pointer. This description is itself imperfect, but as a rough sketch not too controversial.

Profound Incorrect: As pointers, it facilitates thought in complex ways that would be incredible difficult otherwise. Abstractions you can build on like building blocks and, so long as your careful about understanding where the word ends and doesn't encompass the full thing, you reduce the risk of reifying the word overmuch. It's not thought, but is isn't thought in some-- not all-- of the ways in which a building's walls is not its interior spaces. Of course it isn't. The space would be there either way, but keeping it all arranged so nicely and easily to reference different elements of it, that is more than just convenience and it is inextricable from language, or at least some representational system for doing this sort of thing.

Second) It is so strange to see this sort of thing written about, in this way, as if it were a new conception, a new view of language. But then I look at the researchers involved: near always backgrounds outside the formal study of linguistics, language itself, and instead focused in other areas adjacent or related. Even computational linguistics-- perhaps especially computational linguistics. The educational pathway there is much more commonly coming from computational paths to applications to language, rather than vice versa. This is much less the case with Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, where traditional biology is much more often within a student's foundation. (This is not anecdotal, analysis of student pathways through academic studies is a past area of my own professional career)

Through the lens of the history of academia over the past few decades, this is not all that surprising. Chomsky's fault (my opinion) for trying to wall off the discipline from other areas of study or perspective other than his own.

[+] suddenlybananas|3 months ago|reply
I don't know how Federenko squares this view with her own work which directly contradicts it [1]. In this work, they find that the language network activated for "meaningful" non-linguistic stimuli such as the sounds of someone getting ready in the morning (e.g. yawning, brushing teeth, etc.). It seems entirely contrary to her arguments in this article and she doesn't even acknowledge it.

[1] https://direct.mit.edu/nol/article/5/2/385/119141

[+] krackers|3 months ago|reply
Doesn't hellen keller provide a counterexample? She seemed to imply pretty strongly that before acquisition of language she operated more on stimulus and bodily perception rather than higher-level thought.
[+] yyyk|3 months ago|reply
It's clear humans have several networks working together. Some Mathematicians report they 'see' the solution, these rely on a visual network *. Others report they prefer to do math symbolically (relying on the language network?).

Perhaps there are also multiple human paths to higher-level thought, with Keller (who lost her sight) using the language facility while others don't have to.

* Given Box 1 contents, the article authors seem unaware of the research on this? e.g.

https://www.youcubed.org/resource/visual-mathematics/

https://www.hilarispublisher.com/open-access/seeing-as-under...

[+] Grimblewald|3 months ago|reply
No, if i recall the section in her autobiography, specifically it was being taught the concept of "i" / "me" that did it.

Up until that point language was just an extension of what she already knew, it was the learning of being other that did the trick. Being blind and deaf would certainly make it hard to draw a distinction between the self and the world, and while languaged helped her get that concept under wraps, i dont think it's strictly speaking required. Just one of many avenues towards.

[+] BanditDefender|3 months ago|reply
Those aren't mutually exclusive, stimulus and bodily perception enable higher-level thoughts about the physical world. Once I was driving a big cheap pickup with a heavy load on an interstate, and a rear tire violently blew out, causing the truck to sway violently. I operated entirely by feel + my 3D mental model of a moving truck to discern what and where went wrong and how to safely pull over. It was too fast and too difficult for any stupid words to get in the way.

I am glad humans are meaningfully smarter than chimps, and not merely more vocal. Helen Keller herself seemed to think that learning language finally helped her understand what this weird language thing was:

  I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!
It is not like she was constantly dehydrated because she didn't understand what water was. She realized even a somewhat open-ended concept like "water" could be given a name by virtue of being recognizable via stimulus and bodily perception. That in and of itself is quite a high-level thought!
[+] brianush1|3 months ago|reply
One could make the argument that higher-level thought is not the same as awareness of higher-level thought; perhaps language only affords the latter.
[+] lunar-whitey|3 months ago|reply
Keller's early experience of the world differed from typical in dimensions beyond language recognition.
[+] uoaei|3 months ago|reply
She learned "language" later than most. The primary function for her was as communication with the outside world, not for cognition, which she was already doing from birth.
[+] DrierCycle|3 months ago|reply
The key is that there is no content to thought. It's all nested oscillations. It can't be extracted as symbols, so there is no connection between them. Words play the role of a sportscaster reading the minds of the players by observing their behavior. How accurate are they or are we about ourselves? Not very.
[+] heavymemory|3 months ago|reply
If thought needed words, you’d be unable to think of anything you can’t yet describe
[+] netfortius|3 months ago|reply
Excellent, comprehensive, extremely thorough work behind all this. Maturana would love it!
[+] Peteragain|3 months ago|reply
A beautifully written paper but I do feel it missed a major point. Vygotsky pointed out that "in ontogenesis one can discern a pre intellectual stage in the development of speech, and a pre linguistic stage in the development of thought"[Kozulin 1990 p153]. The pre intellectual nature of language can be interpreted as "performative" language (eg "ouch!" or "I pronounce you man and wife") but what does pre linguistic thinking look like? The contemporary answer I'd propose is that it looks like situated action/ radical enactivism / behaviour-based robotics.(see for example Gallagher's 2020 "Action and Interaction") In terms of LLMs, the idea is that rather than "distributed representations", LLMs are indeed using "glorified auto complete" to predict the future and hence look like they are thinking symbolically to us humans because that is how we (think we) think. Paper plug: see Https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08403
[+] heavymemory|3 months ago|reply
6th time in the last year that this was posted, apparently
[+] nivertech|3 months ago|reply
Thinking is communicating with yourself
[+] wobfan|3 months ago|reply
I have no clue, have not read the PDF, and am naive and dumb on this topic. But my naive thought recently was how important language must be for our thought, or even be our thoughts, based on how well LLMs work. Needless to say I'm no expert on either topic. But my naive impression was, given that LLMs work on nothing more than words and predictors, the evidence that they almost feel like a real human makes me think that our thoughts are heavily influenced or even purely based on language and massively defined by it.
[+] ACCount37|3 months ago|reply
Can you replicate an algorithm just by looking at its inputs and outputs? Yes, sometimes.

Will it be a full copy of the original algorithm - the same exact implementation? Often not.

Will it be close enough to be useful? Maybe.

LLMs use human language data as inputs and outputs, and they learn (mostly) from human language. But they have non-language internals. It's those internal algorithms, trained by relations seen in language data, that give LLMs their power.

[+] lll-o-lll|3 months ago|reply
Seeing as there are people with no internal monologue (no inner voice), language is clearly not required for thought.
[+] phforms|3 months ago|reply
Maybe the structure and operation in LLMs is a somewhat accurate model of the structure and operation of our brains and maybe the actual representation of “thought” is different between the human brain and LLMs. Then it might be the case that what makes the LLM “feel human” depends not so much on the actual thinking stuff but how that stuff is related and how this process of thought unfolds.

I personally believe that our thinking is fundamentally grounded/embodied in abstract/generalized representations of our actions and experiences. These representations are diagrammatic in nature, because only diagrams allow us to act on general objects in (almost) the same way to how we act on real-world objects. With “diagrams” I mean not necessarily visual or static artefacts, they can be much more elusive, kinaesthetic and dynamic. Sometimes I am conscious of them when I think, sometimes they are more “hidden” underneath a symbolic/language layer.

[+] wahnfrieden|3 months ago|reply
It mimics the outputs of our thought. Good and useful mimicry doesn’t mean the mechanism must be the same