Public Language or Mentalese?

 

            The nature of human thought is truly a mystery.  It is impossible to properly evaluate thought (which does not include emotions), and especially to determine whether or not thought exists in a language-like form; and, if it does, whether or not it is in a public language or an intrinsic "language of thought".  To think about thought requires the use of that which we are examining, and to communicate our thoughts about thought we must eventually express them in some form of public language.  If we are to accept that thoughts are indeed language like, I would be far more inclined to believe that we think in a public language rather than some form of universal "mentalese".

            Devitt and Sterelny are skeptical of the idea of a universal mentalese language of thought, but they do discuss several arguments in favour of it.  They mention times when a person seems to have a thought in their head, but are unable to express it in words.  This seems to suggest that we are able to think in a different language which is sometimes untranslatable into our own public language.  However, this argument does not suggest the existence of a mental language at all, but rather suggests that our thoughts occur in a way that is beyond the capacity of language.  Moreover, it seems highly likely that people who agree with this argument are including emotions in the same category as thought; I believe a differentiation instead is called for.  Emotions are sensations, often with physiologically symptomatic  roots, which sometimes become blended with thoughts about those emotions.  Take, for example, the occurrence of love.  Love seems nearly impossible to define in a concrete way, for sometimes it has physiological feelings, sometimes can be partially explained rationally, and often simply defies explanation or quantification.  A person who is "in love" with someone else may start of with a physiological response to the other person.  This may take the form of increased heartbeat, sweating, sexual arousal, or any other range of physical changes.  Further, there may also be a seemingly overwhelming sense of something beyond the identifiable physical changes; an almost surreal sense of consciousness, which cannot be put into words.  Or, a person may be able to identify specific traits which they see in someone else which creates attraction for them to that other person.  In the first case, the physical symptoms are surely not thoughts, even if we can have thoughts about them, and express them in words ("butterflies in the stomach", etc.).  The third case obviously exists on the same level as thought, since there is an identification in the mind of things the person likes about the one they are in love with.  The second case is what causes the problems of confusion between emotion and thought, for though the sense of that love seems to be beyond words exists, the feeling still seems to be understood somewhere in the mind, and to be accepted as love.  This middle category would suggest the existence of a mentalese, but it really takes no language-like form at all.  There is no verbal explanation for it, no way to describe it, and in fact it is closer to non-cognitive religious experiences or even altered states of consciousness in that it is known without knowledge of how it is known.  This middle ground of emotion is actually an extension of the physiological events, for it is caused by chemical reactions in the brain which do not tie into the memory storage centers of the brain, which would lend the ability of thoughtful understanding to the simple sense of emotion.  Still, with our human desire to understand and classify everything, our mind labels this feeling "love", or whatever particular emotion one might ascribe, based on the situation.  Thus, we confuse emotion, which is non-cognitive, with thought, which is cognitive.

            It is also argued that our thoughts are not ambiguous, as a public language often is.  Their example of the statement "Visiting relatives can be boring" illustrates the ambiguity of a public language (English), even though the speaker of the sentence would know in their mind which way they intended the sentence to mean.  Yet, this does not either necessitate a mental language, but rather suggests that we have in our mind concepts which a public language sometimes expresses in a confusing way.  Further, even though the statement may be ambiguous in speech but not in our minds, this is only because in the our minds we know exactly what objects the words in the sentence are meant to refer to.  If "visiting" is meant as an adjective, then when a person makes the statement they have in their mind images of "relatives which are visiting"; if the speaker means the act of "going to visit relatives", then they have in their mind an image or occasion when they went to visit relatives, to which the words in the public language refer.

            Noam Chomsky argues that human language is very complex, and is based on rules of structure and form.  He argues that humans must have some form of mentalese in which these rules of language are known.  Chomsky uses an analogy to explain his example.  If we did not understand any Japanese at all, then a Japanese dictionary would be of no use to us.  In the same way, if our thoughts existed in the same public language which we speak, then to understand a language we must first know the rules of that language, but we would need to understand the language before we could know the rules.  Thus, he would argue, we must have an underlying mentalese in which we can mentally explain and understand the rules of the public language.  Yet again, though, the theory is based on several presuppositions which we do not necessarily have to agree with.  One is that we must understand the rules before we can know or use the language.  I would counter that presupposition with the idea that young children may go to school to learn the rules of grammar, but before that they have no comprehension that any rules even exist.  They speak in ways that permit communication, but are frequently grammatically incorrect.  What they are essentially doing is copying patterns of speech which they have heard other people use, and then replacing words with ones they know to get the message across.  Thus, we are likely to hear a child say "I was going to do it yesterday" or "They was going to do it yesterday"; grammatical rules do not exist for the child in any form until they are specifically taught, and then they are taught in a public language.

            Though it seems to me that thoughts are not language-like at all, I would rather argue that we think in our public language than in a universal mental language.  Universal thought seems highly unlikely in a species that has so many various cultural situations, with so many different ways to view the world.  Further, the recognition of thoughts themselves seems really to be linked with our naming of our thoughts, in the same way we name our emotions.  When very young children experience the emotions of excitement and anxiety, the physiological symptoms are the same; however, their exposure to those around them who have mastered the language label the emotion for them as either "excitement" or "nervousness".  Once the emotion is labeled, the child will consider the feeling to be positive or negative (depending on the labeling of it) each subsequent time the physiological symptoms arise.  Similarly, we label our thoughts as good or bad etc., but whatevere we label them, we do so with terms from our public language.

            Moreover, when we think of a color in our mind, it is impossible to separate that color from some object on which we saw it.  We can only think of a color because we know it from an object in the outside world; we can only label a thought or discuss it in a coherent way because we have the outside public language to describe it.  This seems to be a defining characteristic of thought, and really the most prevalent  form of it; memory.  Memories are stored occurrences of things which occurred in the outside world, and which we have brought into our minds.  The storage itself, and indeed the retrieval as well, is not done in a mentalese, but rather a public language.  When we were younger, and had information to remember, we were taught mnemonic devices to facilitate the remembering (the FOIL method of multiplying simple parenthetical mathematical functions, or ROY G BIV for remembering the colours of a rainbow).  These devices were always in our public language, and took the form of what is called "chunking".  If we are given a long string of numbers, 1979200119971314, and then asked to remember them, it is nearly impossible to remember each individual number.  However, if we break it down into sections which we can more easily handle (1979, 2001, 1997, 1314), we can remember more.  With many mnemonic devices, that chunking takes the form of converting long pieces of information in the public language into shorter strings, but the information remains in the public language in our memories.   

            Because memory is really the foundation for thought and language usage, it seems that memory really holds the key when deciding whether thoughts are in mentalese or a public language.  When emotions are discounted and it becomes clear that memories are stored in a public language, there seems to be little to no place left for mentalese.  Thus, I would argue in favor of a public language over mentalese.