Some (most? all?) people have the capacity to think highly complex thoughts without using language. It's a common misconception that human thought "has a language", and I see many people ask the bilingual "what language do you think in".
They never seem to understand that you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else, rehearsing a conversation or whatever. They're prone to a cognitive illusion... when they think about this, they try to "listen" to their thoughts, which invokes that conversation-rehearsal faculty. And lo and behold, they "hear" a language.
But they don't think in this manner. Not all the time, not even most.
So if you're not thinking in language, why would your thoughts be limited to your vocabulary?
you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else
Dealing with other people is probably the biggest part of most people's cognitive burden, though. And it's likely that the ability to make complex inferences when on one's own (solving a mathematical problem, writing a novel, or whatever) derives from the experience of communicating complex ideas through language.
I have a pretty close relationship with my dog and he has a fairly elaborate mental world, but his capacity for abstraction is limited. I taught him to find a ball that I had hidden or that he had dropped and forgotten about, and he has particular toys (including particular balls) that he knows are 'his' and which he doesn't like other dogs to play with, or that they are only allowed to play with within certain strictures (eg not taking it out of my dog's sight). I normally bring two identical balls for him to play with, and it turned out to be a lot harder to get him to go find the ball if he already had one on the ground - he would keep trying to give me the ball he had, and seemed unable to conceptualize that he could have a ball and not have a ball at the same time. Eventually he got the hang of this, but I have doubts about his ability to consider more than 2 states at a time, ie if I take him out to play with 3 balls and I don't see him having a ternary model of their location, but rather something along the lines of 'ball(s) I already have' and 'ball(s) I need to find'. Likewise he has a notion of pack hierarchy involving myself, himself, and several neighbors' dogs who he plays with regularly, but I think that's a fairly one-dimensional affair. Right now he knows it's raining when I open the front door and doesn't feel like walking around in it, but he'll still want to investigate the back door in the hope that the weather there might be different. He knows the diference between inside and outside (verbally as well as physically) but I'm not sure he has an abstract representation of a unitary outside.
EDIT: turns out playing with balls >> getting wet for the third time in 3 hours. Bang goes that theory.
> Dealing with other people is probably the biggest part of most people's cognitive burden, though.
That's a scary thought. I haven't tried to measure my own cognition, but I doubt that modeling other human's behavior amounts to even 10% of my waking, thoughtful time.
When I read this part of your comment, it struck me that this might be very different for a typical person. What if they're spending 99% of their time doing this? How could they have any intelligent thought at all?
Perhaps they use this to substitute for intelligent thought... it would explain how pervasive groupthink is in all areas of life.
I will have to study this.
> nd it's likely that the ability to make complex inferences when on one's own (solving a mathematical problem, writing a novel, or whatever) derives from the experience of communicating complex ideas through language.
This isn't true for me. I will not dismiss that it's true for others. But it also implies that they would have very limited minds... not only can they not contemplate ideas for which there is no useful language yet, they'd also be limited by whether they can imagine explaining it to others well enough that those people could understand it too.
They'd be virtually as stupid as they imagine everyone else to be.
Thank you. You've given me much to think about, and few do that.
you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else...
This is certainly not my experience. I generally feel that I haven't fully grasped a complex thought until I've articulat4ed it in words. How can you be so certain what's going on in my head?
I think we can only articulate thoughts for which words exist. But we can invent new words, or look for roundabout ways to describe novel phenomena.
Sometimes we learn the necessity of doing this the hard way. One day when I was a kid (maybe 10 or 11) I was watching the Saturday morning kid's variety show on TV (I say 'the show' because there was only one TV channel in my country at that time), when I saw something new - the producers went into a new segment by doing a shaped wipe from one image to the other (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipe_%28transition%29). I had never seen such a thing on TV before; the shape of the wipe reminded me of flames, which I think was meant to be evocative of the new subject matter, and I was deeply impressed by this novel aesthetic experience. So I ran into the kitchen and informed my parents that 'they were showing XYZ on the TV and they made flames come up from the bottom of the screen'; I had no language to express the abstract nature of the video effect so I just described it in terms of the idea it evoked.
Being the 1970s, my parents just head the bit about flames coming from the TV screen and ran into the other room thinking the TV had caught fire, and then gave me a hard time in proportion to their sudden anxiety. Now of course I was well aware of the difference between the real and the virtual by that age, but it was a striking example of how much anxiety can result when the boundary between the two is called into question. I think something similar is at the root of the common instruction to children of 'don't tell stories' and in the Christian aphorism warning people not to 'speak of the devil, and he shall appear' - an underlying anxiety that narrative is capable of bringing reality into being. Many cultures delegated the role of storyteller or oral historian to a particular individual, usually an elder - perhaps to limit the chaos that might result from multiple competing and incongruous narratives than because the delegate was necessarily the best or most interesting storyteller.
They never seem to understand that you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else, rehearsing a conversation or whatever. They're prone to a cognitive illusion... when they think about this, they try to "listen" to their thoughts, which invokes that conversation-rehearsal faculty. And lo and behold, they "hear" a language.
But they don't think in this manner. Not all the time, not even most.
So if you're not thinking in language, why would your thoughts be limited to your vocabulary?