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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Strong Sapir-Whorf (linguistic determinism - language constrains thought) became pretty much seen as a joke by the 1980s. Linguistic relativism (weak Sapir-Whorf - language shapes thought) is still respectable (because, I mean, of course it does).

Actually, this research might just as well be evidence for linguistic universalism (Chomsky - language enables thought).

In general linguistic philosophers have been coming out with either laughably obvious or utterly untestable hypotheses for a century and it’s amusing to see how these AI studies shake up the hornets.

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Oftentimes I find myself understanding complex concepts before I can describe them, even internally. I am sure everyone has this, as I often read comments praising others' submissions for formulating their thoughts efficiently. So thoughts occur independent of language, but need it to be expressed and shared, even if through pictures and sounds.

Expression is not language. What you're having trouble doing is expressing what you understand.

But that would be an impossibility if understanding requires expressing it in language.

The thinking language doesn't have to be the same thing as the expression language.

It can still have a language form (manipulation of groups of symbolic structures, terms, and associations), but doesn't have to be English, or even at the conscious "internal monologue" level.

How can you know that it's symbolic if you have no conscious access to it? Processes happen in the brain, some results in explicit symbolic representation, others not so much. Bringing "language" into this does not achieve much besides the fact that language we use to communicate plays some role in internal monologue.

>How can you know that it's symbolic if you have no conscious access to it?

Well, it has to be able refer to things (it can't include the actual objects), not to mention handle abstractions and concepts.

An animal can do that with direct response/manipulation/pointing etc, humans must do it at a symbolic level to handle the world at the level we do.

Thoughts occur independent of language is same as saying sentient beings think. The question is does the thought you have depend on the language?

I speak tamil and english and can distinctly see how the language drives some of my understanding. If you have a language that has evolved to describe 3D space, would be understand spatial ideas better/faster?

If we are pattern matching creatures, then the patterns are built over a period of time and our earliest scaffolding for the patterns come from our mother tongue (or the languages learnt in early childhood). Subsequent understanding depends on building and expanding on those patterns.

I grew up trilingual, and have noticed that I understand mechanical concepts better in one language, industrial concepts in another… but have mostly defaulted to English nowadays. I find learning new concepts easier by playing translation games; Which language is the root for this word, and how does it mechanically relate to the concept?

Sounds like a description of understanding a concept in some latent space while not having fully verbalized it yet. (:

>So thoughts occur independent of language

Independent of language as the conscious surface level mechanism, maybe - as in, they don't have to be in English, say. But independent of language altogether, including symbolic language encoded into brain structures, I wouldn't be so sure.

Language doesn't have to mean conscious internal monologue.

> Language doesn't have to mean conscious internal monologue.

Agreed, but boy do I wish we had better words (ha!) for this.

Calling everything "language" even if someone internally has a more visual or tactile or some other kind of "internal grammar" really gives an unfortunate tilt to casual conversation.

For most people, in everyday discussion, "language" means words/text. I wish we had some term for "structured knowledge" that did not rely on the words/text analogy, since it can leave different-minded people feeling a bit sidelined.

I a programmer I have to make a sharp distinction between "feeling of understanding" and understanding. The former can easily dissolve when you try to operationalize it, that is to make something that works based on the feeling that you understand it as opposed to producing a string of words based on that feeling.

>Strong Sapir-Whorf (linguistic determinism - language constrains thought) became pretty much seen as a joke by the 1980s

Was there any substantial empirical reason it was "seen as a joke", or just changing philosophical fashion?

In general, as I understand it, there was only ever evidence for a weak version, and many of the cited anthropological examples that make the case turn out to have dubious factual basis - the old ‘Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow’ and ‘there’s a tribe in Africa who have no word for numbers greater than three’ stuff, all filtered through layers of academic anecdote and institutional racism.

> institutional racism

are you absolutely certain that your thoughts are not being constrained by your language?

The distinction between language and "thought" to me is odd. Language and "thought" are the same thing. The mouth sounds or hand scribbles aren't the language, but expressions of it.

You don't need language to catch a ball, but clearly thinking is required to intercept its trajectory correctly.

Language is about communication.

There’s an argument that communication which is internal is still communication, and that a language of trajectories required for coordination is still linguistic in a meaningful sense. Most of the ways to differentiate thought from language are probably going to end up splitting hairs. It all comes back to Wittgenstein, and it’s arguable whether the POV is useful, but it’s certainly coherent and defensible.

I think this entire thread of discussion would benefit from remembering multimodal models exist. In other words, pictures are worth a thousand words and have their own place in thought. The existence of a way to translate between modalities doesn't make any of them superior overall--they each have their roles to play.

The idea that language is about thought is only referring to the kind of higher level thinking specific to humans. Any animal can catch a tennis ball, but only humans can construct and then execute complex plans of actions.

This line of thought stems mostly from two observations: one, that the vast majority of language you use is your internal monologue; and two, that this internal monologue would have been extremely helpful for the hominids that would have first developed it even while the rest of the population had not developed language (in contrast, if language is about communication, then it's only useful to a hominid if the whole population speaks language, but then it's hard for it to spread initially).

I consider a sentence as a formatted thought. That implies a thought exists before it is expressed in words. There's a ton of thoughts in my head which can't be transformed into any language I speak. I wish I could somehow acquire some proficiency in the other thousands of languages spoken by humans on this planet, just to proof their immense lack of features.

Also our natural languages restrict information bandwidth to a few bytes per second. Imagine doing sports like tennis, chess or soccer at this speed...

One issue here is semantics. The things that happen in our brains which we can put into words tend to be the things we categorize as ‘thoughts’. But there are things that happen in our brains which we struggle to connect to language too, and we might call those ‘feelings’ or ‘emotions’ or ‘instincts’ instead. So we’re trying to use language to think about how we think about language and I suspect this might be why that end of neurolinguistics falls off the deep end into philosophy.

>But there are things that happen in our brains which we struggle to connect to language too, and we might call those ‘feelings’ or ‘emotions’ or ‘instincts’ instead

Yes, and we could argue that those are not thoughts, while there still being a distinction between thought language (which could very well be subconscious) and inner monologue/spoken language.

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