[emp17344]

There’s linguistic evidence that, while language influences thought, it does not determine thought - see the failure of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is one of the most widely studied and robust linguistic results - we actually know for a fact that language does not determine or define thought.

[CamperBob2]

How's the replication rate in that field? Last I heard it was below 50%.

How can you think without tokens of some sort? That's half of the question that has to be answered by the linguists. The other half is that if language isn't necessary for reasoning, what is?

We now know that a conceptually-simple machine absolutely can reason with nothing but language as inputs for pretraining and subsequent reinforcement. We didn't know that before. The linguists (and the fMRI soothsayers) predicted none of this.

[emp17344]

Read about linguistic history and make up your own mind, I guess. Or don’t, I don’t care. You’re dismissing a series of highly robust scientific results because they fail to validate your beliefs, which is highly irrational. I'm no longer interested in engaging with you.

[CamperBob2]

I've read plenty of linguistics work on a lay basis. It explains little and predicts even less, so it hasn't exactly encouraged me to delve further into the field. That said, linguistics really has nothing to do with arguments with the Moon-landing deniers in this thread, who are the people you should really be targeting with your advocacy of rationality.

In other words, when I (seem to) dismiss an entire field of study, it's because it doesn't work, not because it does work and I just don't like the results.