Saturday, August 23, 2014

Language and Thought: Moulding or Cloaking?



Theories of language and thought have mostly been polarized on two opposed ends of “cloaking” and “moulding.”
Cloaking
The first school of sees language as “the dress of thought” [1] as merely a tool that makes thought capable of being shared, of being translatable across cultures. To these thinkers, language is an independent system unrelated to thought. It evolved spontaneously through a process much like the Darwinian natural selection in answer to an intuitive, instinctive need for the expression of our cognitive processes[2]
How did we learn language in the first place, they ask, if thought did not pre-exist? And why do most languages have distinct concepts of thought and language as self-determining and free of each other if they are not? They point to the pre-linguistic behaviour of children that is nevertheless intelligent.
Noam Chomsky's concept of Universal Grammar[3] iterates that the brain has a program that can build an infinite number of sentences from a finite lexicon. This program may be called a mental grammar. Children come equipped and hardwired with a universal mental grammar: an all-language, common grammatical schematic that our children how to acquire the syntactic patterns naturally and effortlessly from the speech of elders.
Pre-linguistic children can discriminate between objects and classify them, they can use tactics and intuitive insight to achieve goals. Animals also show intelligent behaviour in communication, avoiding obstacles, using tools, stalking prey etc.
Steven Pinker extends Chomsky’s framework[4]. Language, according to him, is not a cultural artifact but a distinct piece of the biological make up of the brain. Pinker proposes that the acquisition of language is an instinct.

Moulding
Thought, the other school says, is like liquid and language the container that holds the liquid. The container could be a crude earthen pot or an elegant crystal flute—language shapes thought, gives it a structure and makes it intelligible. Language differentiates thought, keeps it locked within a framework, keeps it from leaking and diffusing into undifferentiated consciousness even while it, like a glass or a pot or a mug, makes it possible for the thought to be poured without. Without language, thought would exist but it could not be understood or made comprehensible.
Sapir-Whorf aficionados believe in linguistic determinism[5] or, at the very least, the weaker linguistic relativism:
We dissect nature along the lines laid down by our native languages…the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organised by our minds—and this means largely by linguistic systems in our minds.”[6]
and say that language, in fact, determines—or influences—our very perception of reality.
The author, Dr. Ranee Kaur Banerjee, is Managing Partner at Expressions@Worka training, consulting and mentoring studio for the development of communication and soft skills



[1] The full quotation reads "Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanics, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications." Johnson, Samuel; Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81); London, 1781
[2] Pinker, S and P. Bloom; “Natural language and natural selection” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 1990 pp.707-84
[3] Chomsky, Noam; Language and Problems of Knowledge; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1988 
[4] Pinker, S. The Language Instinct; London: Penguin, 1994 
[5] Sapir, Edward; "The Status of Linguistics as a Science," Language, 5 (1928): 207-214.
[6] Whorf, Benjamin Lee; “Science and Linguistics,” 1940 in  Language, Thought and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Ed. by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1956

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