Language and Parole

Which comes first: thought or language? Can we think without language? Is it possible that we think in images?

Talking about this topic is complicated. We are used to think in words and hear our own voice while we think but, how do deaf-mute think if they have never heard a word or sound? Do they think with a voice? If so, how do they know what sound does each combination have?

In my personal opinion, and based on my previous knowledge, thought was first than language. As Plato explains in his world of ideas, we come to the world with knowledge of what everything is, ideas are immutable and innate, so we always have the “concept” of the objects, when we grow up, we learn a specific combination of sounds for that concept and so language comes to our life. For example: We know what a chair is, it doesn’t matter if it’s blue or brown, it’s still a chair. We know that since we are born and when we grow up, our parents or tutor teaches us that the combination of sounds and letters of “C-H-A-I-R” means that thing that we use to sit down.

Do we learn to think before we speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first. Do we learn to think before we speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first “Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects,” says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard “These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later “. It seems to me that the opinion that thought is independent of language has been adopted of late by many linguists only as a theoretical axiom, by those who wish it to be so, without any proof, and that the writers who present this idea as if it were a scientific finding are themselves guilty of a fallacy, because they are treating a presumptive axiom of a school as if it were a conclusion. (http://www.kingcountydirectory.com/king-county-business-directory-resources/which-comes-first-language-or-thought/)

With the information above, we can deduce that we can think without language, no one knows how but theories say that images are another option. Picture thinking, visual thinking, visual/spatial learning or right brained learning is the common phenomenon of thinking through visual processing using the part of the brain that is emotional and creative to organize information in an intuitive and simultaneous way. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking) Another options is that we can think in something that we can’t define, not images nor words.