Thought and Natural Language : Part I Joe Lau HKU

Issues Relationships between natural language and thoughts. –What are natural languages? –What is thinking? –Do we think in a natural language? –Can we think without language?

What is thinking? Some features of thoughts –Thoughts are intentional / have content. –Having thoughts require having concepts. –Can deploy old concepts to think new thoughts. Chains of thought –Associative thinking –Inferential thinking / reasoning

What is natural language? Examples –Italian, Spanish, Cantonese, Japanese … Some features –A spoken language used to communicate –Displacement, open-ended, stimulus-free Contrasted with –programming languages –artificial languages

Do we think in natural languages? Two questions : –Do we ever think in a natural language? –Do we only think in a natural language? Argument from introspection –Introspection = looking into one’s own minds –Conscious thinking often seems to be a form of internal speech. –We can think aloud if we want to. Thesis : LOT exists. LOT = NL.

Pinker’s criticisms Cases of thinking without language. –Adults without language –Young babies –Monkeys Introspective reports of mental imagery Features of NL : –Ambiguity, Lack of logical structure –Deixis, synonymy

Announcements Reading week next week No lectures / tutorials. Use BBS for questions.