What is the place of language in human cognition? Do we sometimes think in natural language? Or is language for purposes of interpersonal communication only? Although these questions have been much debated in the past, they have almost dropped from sight in recent decades amongst those interested in the cognitive sciences. Language and Thought is intended to persuade such people to think again. It brings together essays by a distinguished interdisciplinary team of philosophers and psychologists, (...) who discuss various ways in which language may be implicated in human cognition. The editors have provided an introduction which lays out the basic terms and history of the debate, and a consolidated bibliography which will provide a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great interest to all researchers and students interested in language and its place in cognition. (shrink)

A fascinating analysis of human language and its influence on other disciplines by one of the nation's most respected linguists. Chomsky is also the author of What Uncle Sam Really Wants and The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (15,000 copies sold).

"Shell offers admirably close readings [which are] often brilliant... Summary could do little more than hint at the riches laid open."-- The Eighteenth Century "A remarkable piece of work. Valuable for a wide range of readers from the expert to the inquiring generalist."-- Religious Studies Review In Money, Language, and Thought , Marc Shell explores the interactions between linguistic and economic production as they inform discourse from Chretien de Troyes to Heidegger.

This issue brings together papers by Australasian philosophers on language, thought, and their relationship. Contributors were given complete freedom to treat these topics in any way they saw fit. The results reflect the diverse interests of Australasian philosophers, and, perhaps even more strikingly, the diversity of philosophical methods they employ to pursue these interests.

Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them. In Figurative Language and (...) class='Hi'>Thought, internationally recognized experts in the field of figurative language, Albert Katz, Mark Turner, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Cristina Cacciari, provide a coherent and focused debate on the subject. The book's authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, including: What can figures of speech tell us about the structure of the conceptual system? If and how should we distinguish the literal from the nonliteral in our theories of language and thought? Are we primarily figurative thinkers and consequently figurative language users or the other way around? Why do we prefer to speak metaphorically in everyday conversation, when literal options may be available for use? Is metaphor the only vehicle through which we can understand abstract concepts? What role do cultural and social factors play in our comprehension of figurative language? These and related questions are raised and argued in an integrative look at the role of nonliteral language in cognition. This volume, a part of Counterpoints series, will be thought-provoking reading for a wide range of cognitive psychologists, linguists, and philosophers. (shrink)

Paul H Hirst; Language and Thought, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 1, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 63–75, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1967.tb.

Princeton University Press, 1982. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).

This chapter set outs the variety of eighteenth-century approaches to the relations between language and thought, beginning with post-Lockean debates focused on the status of abstract general ideas, and ending with anti-empiricist Scottish philosophy at the end of the century. The empiricist theory of signs, notably in George Berkeley, is one important dimension of the discussions: ‘Ideas’ are centre stage, although they do not exhaust the empiricist furniture of the mind. There is also a different philosophical trend illustrated (...) by neglected figures, which may be termed Platonic, and which affects eighteenth-century philosophical conceptions of language. The project of conjectural histories of language and views about the connections between linguistic skills and the social nature of human beings are also covered. (shrink)

No words in English are shorter than "I" and few, if any, play a more fundamental role in language and thought. In Understanding "I": Thought and Language Jose Luis Bermudez continues his longstanding work on the self and self-consciousness. Bermudez develops a model of how language-users understand sentences involving the first person pronoun "I." This model illuminates the unique psychological role that self-conscious thoughts play in action and thought - a unique role often summarized (...) by describing "I" as an essential indexical. The book opens with an argument directly supporting the indispensability of "I"-thoughts in explaining action. After motivating a broadly Fregean approach linguistic understanding it critically examines Frege's own remarks on "I" as well as the Fregean account offered by Gareth Evans. The main part of the book develops an account of the sense of "I" that explains a cluster of related phenomena, including essential indexicality, immunity to error through misidentification, the shareability of "I"-thoughts, the relation between "I" and "you," and the role of autobiographical memory in self-consciousness. (shrink)

Donald Davidson holds that thought and talk emerge together. His view is an alternative to the views that language precedes thought and that thought precedes language. His basic argument is that in order to understand a language, an interpreter has to simultaneously assign beliefs, not to mention desires and intentions, to the speaker. So bits of language can be interpreted only if thoughts are attributed to the speakers of those bits. Davidson is arguably (...) mistaken because interpretation of nonlinguistic utterances occurs before the interpretation of linguistic ones. (shrink)

A psychological study of thought and language which takes an exposition of scientific linquistics as a point of departure.

Hauser defends the proposition that our languages of thought are public languages. One group of arguments points to the coincidence of clearly productive (novel, unbounded) cognitive competence with overt possession of recursive symbol systems. Another group relies on phenomenological experience. A third group cites practical and methodological considerations: Occam's razor and the "streetlight principle" (other things being equal, look under the lamp) that motivate looking for instantiations of outer languages in thought first.

Abbott replies to each of Hauser's arguments. Problem solving by chimpanzees and evidence of recursion in the thought of a feral human being suggest that natural language is not necessary for productive thought. Communication would be trivial if the inner language were the outer language, but it is not. The decryption analogy Hauser uses is flawed, and it is not clear which way Occam's razor cuts.

The central idea of the Semantic Descent account, namely qualification, can be used in a substantial way to clarify the debates about the relationship between thought and language, both within philosophy and psychology. Some remarks by Henle on how this notion has been just below the surface in writings about metaphor are highlighted. Brief suggestions are made about how it bears on debates about thought and language.

The paper explores the relationship of language and thought with respect to their mutual determination or influence. Two questions are considered crucial: how do we learn the meanings of conventional linguistic signs, including those for abstract concepts, and how do we express our original insights, thoughts and feelings through not-yet-conventional linguistic means. These are followed by succinct answers and extensive elaborations referring to opposite views and linguistic examples from the history of philosophy and cognitive linguistics. It is argued (...) that linguistic expressions, including metaphors, mostly incorporate how people represent (or once represented) the world to themselves through imagination and present (or once presented) the world to others through language. Hence language neither directly shows how we conceive and understand the world nor how we construct it in our thoughts. On the other hand, symbolization through metaphor and metonymy, as well as innovative verbalization, enable our cognition to communicate novel as well as abstract and philosoph­ically demanding meanings. (shrink)

[Written in 1999. Still relevant, but references are not up-to-date.] If one asks about the relation between thought and language, people expect the issue to concern such matters as whether we think in language, whether creatures without language can "think", and the way language shapes our concepts. In my opinion, there is a much deeper question, which concerns the nature of linguistic communication. Philosophers and linguists standardly conceive of language as basically a means by (...) which speakers convey the content of their thoughts to others. The question is whether that is a correct picture of linguistic communication. This is a question about the relation between thought and language because this standard picture of communication gives propositional thought a certain priority over language. If, as I intend to show, there are reasons to doubt the standard picture, then we cannot expect to make much progress with the more superficial questions without thinking about the nature of linguistic communication. (shrink)

In a series of studies the assumption of a lack of colour concepts in indigenous societies, as proposed by Berlin & Kay (1969) and others, was examined. The research took place in the form of minimally invasive field encounters with indigenous subjects in South East Asia and in India, as well as in West, Central, and South Africa. Subjects were screened for colour blindness with Ishihara- and Pflüger-Trident-Test. Standardised colour tablets had to be designated in the indigenous languages; these terms (...) were later translated by native speakers of the indigenous languages into a European language. The indigenous subjects were able to name the colours presented. Indigenous vs. globalised cultural factors were reflected in the use of reference objects for naming colours. Both metonymical and non-metonymical indigenous colour names did not follow a stage pattern as Berlin & Kay (1969) and others have proposed. The high precision of indigenous colour names corresponds both to the precision of experts’ colour names in the industrial culture, and to the highly precise grammar that characterises indigenous languages. It is concluded that cognitive categorisation of visual perception takes place regardless of the cultural context, and that former misunderstandings resulted from inappropriate methodological designs. (shrink)

Recently philosophers interested in bridging the gap between continental and analytic philosophy have looked to connecting Hans‐Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics with Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language. Both seem to share a number of positions, and each was familiar with the other’s writings. In this essay, I look at Davidson’s criticisms of Gadamer’s hermeneutics—in particular Gadamer’s view that dialogue always depends on a shared language and, when successful, produces a new common language to understand a topic. I argue (...) that Davidson’s objections miss the way Gadamer is using conversation as a technical term. Working out the difference between what Davidson and Gadamer mean reveals a deeper divide between their views about the relation between language and thought. (shrink)