Language and Thought

Prashant Patil
Manoj Kumar
Introducing the topic

• If think we can‟t think clearly without using

language?
then how about..
- deaf and mute people?
- children two-three years old? Their
language is certainly not adequate enough.
Views of some theorists
• Classical theorists like Plato and Aristotle argued
that the categories of thoughts determine the
categories of language.

• Plato: Thought and language were identical.

• Aristotle: Mankind could not have the same

languages (because all don‟t think the same).
• J. B. Watson: Thought is language; sub-vocal
speech.

“think aloud” = speech;

“speak covertly”= thinking.
Two opinions for the prior
discussion

The notion of language and thought and their

relation subsequently got divided into two groups
mainly:
1. Whether thoughts are formed in advance of the
words that we utter.
2. Or whether ideas are formed in terms of the
words themselves.
Language determines thought
• The Eskimo language for snow:
apun= “snow on the ground”,
qanikca= “hard snow on the ground”,
utak= “block of snow” etc.
• An Eskimo child -> more cognitive categories.
• English - camel, Chinese - luòtuo,
Arabic - more than 400 words for the animal.
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

The hypothesis in linguistics has two versions:

• The first is called linguistic determinism

(the strong version)
• The second part is called linguistic relativity
(the weak version)
Linguistic determinism:
• It is the idea that language and its structures
limit and determine human knowledge or
thought.
• Whorf states that language does not only voice
ideas but also shapes them.
• [The child‟s knowledge is socially constructed in
interaction with adults, so child logic develops
only with the growth of child‟s social speech.]
Linguistic relativity:
• Speakers of different languages
- perceive the world differently.
- resulting cognitive systems are different.
• Accordingly the mental universe of an English
speaker may be different from that of a Chinese
speaker because they happen to speak different
languages.
• Take „rainbow‟ as an example:
perception of colors come from color-naming
influence of the language. All languages do not
divide the colors into the same number of basic
categories. Hence a speaker of a language will
not describe the rainbow in the same way as
English speakers do.
B. Berlin and P. Kay’s experiment in
1969
• Concerned with how speakers of different
languages divide up the color spectrum.
• They used an array of 329 colors, presented to
speakers of 20 diverse languages.
• First, Berlin and Kay found basic color terms in
each language. They then presented to the
speaker of a language and asked to name the
colors and draw lines around distinguishable
ones.
• After that, all 20 were asked to mark with an “X”
the most typical example of each color in their
basic color vocabulary. This was called the focal
color.
Observations
• The basic color terms were restricted to a small
set of numbers.
• The focal colors are the same across all 20
languages. Like if A had 4 and B six, these 4
closely corresponded to 4 out of the 6 colors
chosen by B.
• Swedish
-many different names for colours (for example:
blue, red, white, light grey, purple, and cyan).
• Tiv (language of New Guinea)
-there are only two words for colour: light and
dark.

• Yet both language speakers could distinguish

colours in similar manner.
Contrary to Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• If there are no constraints on the variation in the
way people think, speakers of different
languages will never see the world in the same
way.

• If language determines thought, people speaking

diverse languages would never understand each
other.

• Control the language that people learn, control

their thoughts.
• We cant conclude strictly but little dependency
and similarities.
Another question to think
• Does the fact that a language does not have
separate terms for certain phenomena means
that the users of this language are unable to
distinguish these phenomena from others?
Counterclaims:

• There are bilinguals among the general

population who can express their ideas freely in
two or more languages.
• Languages borrow words from each other fairly
frequently.
• Also used in sentence thing, compare with the
two speakers.
Other ways for thinking..

• Pictures and feelings though hard sometimes to

express thoughts.

• Deaf people probably "see" more images in their

thoughts. Symbols have a more important role.

• The hypothesis has been largely abandoned due

to limited support all through at its best.
Thought determines language
• Those who believe this would say that cognitive
development comes earlier in the life of children.
• Cognitive categories they develop determine the
linguistic categories that they will acquire.
• An instance that shows that thoughts and
language are closely connected and thought
processes have influence on our language is the
course of a conversation.
Language of thought - Mentalese
• Thinking is done in the form of a silent monologue.
• According to LOTH, thought and thinking are done in a
mental language a kind of 'language' (not a verbal
language) that Pinker calls 'Mentalese', On this model,
the mind functions like a computer, manipulating simple
symbols to produce complex results.
• Mental computations in a symbolic system physically
realized in the brain.
THANK YOU!