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Comment by JamisonM | Hacker News Reader

"Individual expectations needn’t be stored in linguistic form: you can have a feeling about which horse will win the race, without thinking up a sentence about it."

Are we sure about this? This sounds made up, I don't know. Does the idea of a race even exist in one's mind in a non-linguistic form?

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I rarely think about things in words and sentences. Only when I have to really nail something down logically or communicate it to someone else does it get expressed that way.

Concepts and ideas are more like some kind of abstract space, with relationships between things, but not visual. It's a model. Hard to describe really.

I was amazed to learn that many other people apparently have some kind of continuous monologue going on in their heads.

Using a term like concept instead of "linguistic" to denote a mental representation (which could be "auditory", "visual", "kinesthetic", "feeling", etc). Then you are absolutely correct.

What goes on in the minds of people who never learned a language? Like a deaf and blind child who still hasn't been taught communication methods yet. Surely their mind can still form concepts.

You can think without language, for sure, but the idea of a race - can you construct that without it? You almost certainly possess the idea from it being communicated to you via language and it is a social construct.

> Does the idea of a race even exist in one's mind in a non linguistic form ?

Yes, especially in visual form.

Language is often a big handicap - it is linear, inefficient and usually biased towards some worldview (imo)

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