[dragonwriter]

I don't think the example is a good rebuttal of "thinking and reasoning require language".

It may be a decent challenge, probably still not an actual rebuttal, of "language is sufficient for all thinking and reasoning", but "X is required for Y" and "X is sufficient for everything encompassed by Y" are very different claims.

[Folcon]

That's fair, it's not supposed to be a rebuttal of that :)...

Though now that you said it, I'm really thinking about the original statement.

Honest question, can you give me an example of thinking or reasoning that happens fully independently of reasoning via symbols or their manipulation?

I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but nothing is coming to mind right now :)...

Just thinking about the underlying statement and simplifying language down to symbolic expression. (I was originally going to say manipulation, but it doesn't feel like it quite fits...)

[dragonwriter]

> Honest question, can you give me an example of thinking or reasoning that happens fully independently of reasoning via symbols or their manipulation?

I don't think we have anything but subjective, indirect understanding of how thinking happens, but I think that, at a minimum, what we describe as "reasoning" specifically is tightly conceptually related to, if not a subset of, manipulation of abstract symbols to which concrete experiences may be approximately mapped.

I'm not sure I'd say this is the same thing as language, but there's at a minimum a shared common symbol-manipulation underlying both. Do the capacities always come together? I'm not sure how we would know that, I think our ability to recognize reasoning is tied to it being mapped to language, and are ability to distinguish something as language rather than nonlinguistic signaling or mimicry of something else that is using language is tied to independent expression of reasoning through it.