Thinking and language

Is thinking possible without language?

Bertrand Russell said yes, within limits. ”Language serves not only to express thoughts, but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it,” the British philosopher declared. “It is sometimes maintained that there can be no thought without language, but to this view I cannot assent: I hold that there can be thought, and even true and false belief, without language. But however that may be, it cannot be denied that all fairly elaborate thoughts require words.”

Russell gave an example from mathematics. “I can know, in a sense, that I have five fingers, without knowing the word ‘five,’ but I cannot know that the population of London is about eight millions unless I have acquired the language of arithmetic, nor can I have any thought at all closely corresponding to what is asserted in the sentence: ‘The ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter is approximately 3.14159.’”

This seems reasonable enough. Except that his circle example begs the question—in the old Aristotelian sense of assuming the conclusion. Geometers realized that the ratio of circumference to diameter was the same for all circles long before anyone calculated the decimal value of that ratio. In fact the decimal representation is inferior to the geometric one in that it is always only approximate.

This is like asking whether a person can think of blue without having a word for blue. And the answer here is similarly equivocal. Many languages have multiple words for blue, signifying different shades. Speakers of those languages have an easier time thinking of variants of blue than speakers of languages with a single word for the color.

Which begs another question—in today’s colloquial sense of presenting for consideration. Do people who are facile in language think more effectively than people whose language skills are restricted? Bertrand Russell was an excellent writer. He was also an excellent thinker. Was there a connection? 

Quite probably, if only because philosophy, the kind of thinking Russell specialized in, is rooted in language. Philosophy isn't just thinking, it’s thinking about thinking, and talking about that. Philosophy is a kind of word game, so naturally people good with words have an edge.

In other specialized fields, the connection between thinking and language appears less important. Chess masters tend to think visually, imagining the board one or two or more moves ahead. Divers, gymnasts and snowboarders planning new moves think spatially and kinetically.

What got me thinking about this right now is the approach of the autumn semester. I’m wrestling with how much writing to require of my students, and how artificial intelligence is changing the writing enterprise. Ten years ago I was fairly confident of a close correlation between a student’s ability to think about history and that student’s ability to produce an essay on a historical question or topic. Well-crafted essays betokened clear thinking. 

I’ve lost a lot of that confidence. Students, with the help of AI, can produce pretty good essays without acquiring a comparable deftness in historical thinking.  Sometimes I can spot the AI contribution, but not always.

I have to ask myself: What’s the learning objective here? In an ideal world—you know, the world that existed when we were young—my students would become both insightful thinkers and persuasive writers. But the real world of large classes in public universities requires making tradeoffs. I also have to allow for the fact that for many of my students, English is their second or third language.

There’s something else. I want my students not simply to think about history analytically but to imagine it emotionally. Empathy is an indispensable item in the historian’s toolkit. In fall semesters I have students read about Josie Mansfield, a Gilded Age femme fatale—literally: one of her lovers murdered another. I ask students to imagine what Josie was thinking in all this but also what she was feeling.

The students convey their conclusions in an essay. This is the part of the assignment on which they are graded, and consequently they think it’s the most important part. 

But it’s not the part most important to me. If there were other ways for students to demonstrate that they had put themselves in Josie’s place and done so seriously, I’d be happy to use those as metrics. If I had fifteen students instead of five hundred, I’d have a chat with each one individually. 

The semester doesn’t begin until late August. I’ve got time to decide.