Do you think in any language or do you think it’s all just Mentalese?

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leosmith
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Re: Do you think in any language or do you think it’s all just Mentalese?

Postby leosmith » Sun Jun 20, 2021 11:46 pm

both
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Re: Do you think in any language or do you think it’s all just Mentalese?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Jun 21, 2021 8:59 am

Le Baron wrote:I think Wittgenstein pretty much confirmed for me that (simplified as compared to Cainntear's fuller explanation) we think in 'images' or impressions and not language. The formulation of that idea is as old as David Hume for our modern era. When people say 'I dreamed in X-language' they really mean they recreated an image/sensory reception of the sense impressions associated with 'speaking X-language'.
...
The 'voice' in your mind in a dream doesn't have any vocal or auditory apparatus though. And it is not a reaction to actual sound waves or physical interaction. Therefore it is by definition the result of an internal sense impression recreated from memory.

No.

Witgenstein was just a philosophist, not a scientist, and he also lived and worked quite a long time ago. Don't get me wrong, I respect philosophers, but their thoughts are just opinions, not science or facts, so using verbs like "confirmed" while talking about a philosopher is funny and misplaced. Psychology and medicine have progressed a lot in this area during in the last century, I guess even Witgenstein would find the newer discoveries interesting and inspiring to reconsider.

So, thanks to everyone in this thread for a nice stimulus to find some articles about this (I've even found some great stuff with fMRI during the inner monologues! cool!), as they are sort of pertinent to stuff I am doing and studying. It's not an empty phrase, this really opens for me a new way to look at a rather important question for me.

It has been quite well proven, that the inner monologue exists (and really as thoughts, not as just some recreation of sense impressions secondary to images), but not everybody has it (some people really think prevalently or only in images and non verbal ideas), and people also vary in how much inner monologue they have. The question raised in this thread is about the language of the inner monologue we do have, not about the source of the inner monologue (in which case, we're still not that close to the answer, as it has a lot to do with many other questions).

My inner monologues happen in any of my languages, but usually the one I am the most surrounded by, or I was the most recently exposed to. So, it's the langauge I've just been watching a tv series in, reading a book in, writing in, the language people around me are speaking (even if I am not part of the conversation). When there is no such a stimulus, for example during a walk alone, or when I have not been doing anything language heavy at home, it varies. The native language is still the majority I suppose, but the others are regularly present, even including Spanish that I am not that exposed to these days. And of course, when my inner monologue requires better language skills, the language is picked accordingly.

I also tend to have some languages coded to some stuff that I've been doing in them, and to some emotions. So, I am not most likely to think about medicine in French due to habit, but anxiously ruminate in Czech :-D
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Re: Do you think in any language or do you think it’s all just Mentalese?

Postby lysi » Mon Jun 21, 2021 10:26 am

leosmith wrote:both

neither
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Re: Do you think in any language or do you think it’s all just Mentalese?

Postby Le Baron » Mon Jun 21, 2021 11:55 am

Cavesa wrote:It has been quite well proven, that the inner monologue exists (and really as thoughts, not as just some recreation of sense impressions secondary to images), but not everybody has it (some people really think prevalently or only in images and non verbal ideas), and people also vary in how much inner monologue they have. The question raised in this thread is about the language of the inner monologue we do have, not about the source of the inner monologue (in which case, we're still not that close to the answer, as it has a lot to do with many other questions).


Oh? What does that proven inner monologue look like or 'sound' like? Is there a description of the mechanism showing it is 'language' rather than images? A pretty fMRI image indicating 'activity'? Is it present in people with no functioning language skills? The question is whether thoughts are the same as language and I don't think psychology and medicine has done anything to clarify that issue by pointing to brain activity.

I'm in no way anti-science, but I'm afraid what you are suggesting is no further along the road than Bertrand Russell's view of the matter in 'On Denoting' (or his Enquiry into Meaning and Truth) and that's over 100 years old!

The fact that after we've learned languages we associate objects and ideas (and further new perceptions classifying them according to existing knowledge) only demonstrates that we have a tool/mechanism for naming and ordering thoughts. It says nothing about the nature of the thought.
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Re: Do you think in any language or do you think it’s all just Mentalese?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Jun 21, 2021 1:21 pm

Le Baron wrote:Oh? What does that proven inner monologue look like or 'sound' like? Is there a description of the mechanism showing it is 'language' rather than images? A pretty fMRI image indicating 'activity'? Is it present in people with no functioning language skills? The question is whether thoughts are the same as language and I don't think psychology and medicine has done anything to clarify that issue by pointing to brain activity.

I'm in no way anti-science, but I'm afraid what you are suggesting is no further along the road than Bertrand Russell's view of the matter in 'On Denoting' (or his Enquiry into Meaning and Truth) and that's over 100 years old!

The fact that after we've learned languages we associate objects and ideas (and further new perceptions classifying them according to existing knowledge) only demonstrates that we have a tool/mechanism for naming and ordering thoughts. It says nothing about the nature of the thought.


It's like either monologues or conversations, of course it doesn't make a sound. It's really thinking in words. Yes, the nice fMRI images are all about activity. The psychological studies are about the descriptions of what it is like, in both typical and atypical populations. My argument was not about medicine researching too much in which language we speak, but it was just to counter the wrong notion that inner speech doesn't really exist.

Perhaps you don't have inner speech, wich makes you part of the rarer group (which doesn't mean either superior or inferior). The people thinking without it often have a hard time imagining it (and it seems like one of the common reactions is immediately suspecting the person with inner monologue of schizophrenia, just a side note). But on the common folk understanding level, everybody with inner speech knows what it is like. And that's what this question is about. About how we, as normal people speaking more than one langauge, experience our inner monologues.

It may be even true that the nature of the thought is something totally different and both verbal and non verbal thoughts are just secondary (actually it is probable, and it mostly depends on the electric impulses and activity), but that is irrelevant to the question. The thoughts are in most people expressed as inner speech, even though it may not be all the time, so the question about the language is a much better one than discussing philosophy. Or rather, why destroy a potentially very interesting thread by dragging in an unrelated discussion with devalvation of the thread as the only purpose?
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Re: Do you think in any language or do you think it’s all just Mentalese?

Postby Le Baron » Mon Jun 21, 2021 4:24 pm

I'm not trying to devalue the thread, I'm merely saying that 'inner monologues' are just the internal representation of ordinary oral expression. The thread title reads: 'Do you think in any language...' And I don't believe people 'think' in language, but that we describe thoughts with language. In that respect it is surely relevant.

I think the majority of people, mono- and polyglots alike, have internal monologues. That people think (or describe thoughts to themselves) first and foremost in their mother tongue and at some point along the road they 'think' in the language they are using at any given time; according to how much they have worked in/used that language as a means to effect communication. Which means (to me at least) that someone who is a beginner in e.g. German does not 'think' in German, but thinks more 'about' German. The ideas that are described don't significantly alter according to a language (there are different ways of looking at things in different cultures, yes) and that in general even a person living and working in a different language perceives through the filter of their mother tongue with 'interference' from any other working language.
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