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I'm not sure if this warrants a whole new thread, but anyway. . .
I was intrigued by what Avy said about dreaming with languageless thoughts and got to thinking about how one actually thinks without language. I can't speak for everyone else, but when I think, I basically hear the words in my mind. But how would someone, say a person that was raised by wolves, think? Obviously there are wordless feelings and impulses, but does this constitute thought? Also, does a deaf person think by mentally seeing sign language or the written word? In what manner did Helen Keller think?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Well, this is a very interesting topic to me. I have said here before that I often think in images or pictures, and
very much wish that I could transfer these images to the intended recipient. For example, I'd like to send either one of my kids an image of their room perfectly cleaned, and know that they cannot mistake my meaning (oh, I didn't know you meant under the bed, too!).
I haven't read or done any studies, but I should think that most people think in images, don't they? What comes to mind when I ask you about your first bicycle? A favorite
birthday celebration? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could
get across to others, not merely the description of how we felt, but the actual feelings themselves? Oh, the thrill/fear of my first "big" bike, and the terror when the chain fell off! And sounds, too--they could "hear", not my actual childish scream, but my memory of it.
I can't guess how a person without language would think, but surely it would have to be in terms of something he'd
experienced. To take your example of a wolf-boy, perhaps if he is very hot, he'd think of himself in the river, and how cool, wet, and smooth the water feels to his skin?
I think Brandon, whom I was delighted to find a post from today (yesterday?), would be the best-qualified person here that I know of to say how deaf people think of language.
I somehow doubt that thinking in sign language is common.
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Pooh-Bah
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I think the ability to be rather fuzzy about feelings may be a defence mechanism provided by our body.
After having a baby a mother can talk about experiencing pain but cannot re-live it. I remember disliking having a tooth out and remember it as being unpleasant but I can't think myself into the experience so I can really remember the pain.
In the process we lose the ability to remember pleasurable feelings too, other than in the vaguest terms. Perhaps it's nature's way of letting us put things behind us. If we were stuck in the bad experiences it would stop us moving on. If we could conjour up the good experiences it might stop our motivation to achieve and give ourself another pleasurable feeling. That may also be part of the problem with mood enhancing drugs, de-motivating the user to get pleasure in less "quick fix" ways.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Perhaps it's nature's way of letting us put things behind us.
Spang on, Jo, I'll bet. Good thinking! And yet--mayn't it not work the same for everyone? Can't we choose, at least to some extent, what to recall the clearest? For me, when I have good life-experiences, and think about them (which I do almost constantly), it just makes me look all the more eagerly to see what neat new thing is coming next. It doesn't stop my motivation to achieve.
Is there an "opposite" for the term 'vicious circle'?
Exuberant circle, maybe? Whatever, I think it works in the same pattern as a vicious circle does: each happy instance reinforces the feeling of happiness, which in turn attracts more happy occurrences.
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Pooh-Bah
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>For me, when I have good life-experiences, and think about them (which I do almost constantly), it just makes me look all the more eagerly to see what neat new thing is coming next. It doesn't stop my motivation to achieve.
Yes you think about them and it inspires you try to achieve another good experience or maybe you are lucky and another good one just comes along. Thinking is significantly different to feeling. The point is that you can't feel it all over again and really re-live it, it is elusive, the actual feeling itself is very short lived. Try as hard as you will you won't be able to re-capture it (at the same level of intensity). Maybe if we could command our bodies to do that then we might never feel the need to achieve anything anymore.
I'd love to know of anyone can actually re-feel something. Perhaps it is possible.
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enthusiast
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Jazz, this a very interesting subjet.
Let me remind this quotation
How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.
Maurice Maeterlinck .
This is very often my feeling: my thoughts are pre-verbal and it is sometimes hard to me to find the correct words to express them (even in my Italian, which is rich enough). I feel that the language is like a cage.
I would say that the possible thoughts are MORE than the possible sentences - even if infinite in both cases.
In fact, it is possible to give a meaning to the sentence
an infinite set is BIGGER than another infinite set (Cantor did - about 1880)...My apologies if I went too much in my mathematical field - someone dislikes it?!!
Ciao
Emanuela
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I'd love to know of anyone can actually re-feel something.
I re-feel. I broke the bone in my left thigh in a car accident about 6 years ago. If I think about it, it starts to hurt again. The injury is fully recovered, but in my head, if I think about that pain a small portion of it comes back to me. I also feel pain for others. If I see someone who is injured my head tells me that I hurt in that place. Certainly not to the extent of the injured person, but I feel that person's pain. Same goes for others' scars. I dated a guy once who had a deep scar on one of his fingers from a paper cutter accident. Every time I noticed that scar my hand would start to hurt. After a while, I learned not to see the scar to save myself the pain.
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Pooh-Bah
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xara
I think this also happens in "phantom limb syndrome" where people can still feel a missing limb, even though it is no longer there.
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Carpal Tunnel
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language is like a cage.
YES! Exactly!
I am not a mathematician, but I think I followed you on the
sets. Thoughts are infinite. Language is finite.
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In management jargon these days, the phrase "virtuous circle" or "virtuous cycle" is much used - to refer to the positive feedback spiral you are talking about. 
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Thoughts are infinite. Language is finite.
Mathematically speaking (Emanuela please correct me) the opposite may be true. As many linguists have pointed out, the potential sentences available to a user of any language are literally infinite. Language is, however, limited. If this sounds paradoxical, think of an infinitely long tunnel - you can travel along it for any arbitrarily long distance, but you cannot change direction.
Thought, on the other hand, may just be unbounded but finite. Unbounded because it does not exist in the tunnels of language (at least, the putative thought medium 'mentalese' is not linguistically bound), but any given person, or defined finite group of people, must be capable of having only a finite number of thoughts in the time available to them.
Yes, I know I finessed this a bit, but the important point is that language may be bounded, or limited, but it is certainly infinite. Perhaps Emanuela can demonstrate that its infinity is only that of the rational numbers, as opposed to the greater infinity of the irrational numbers that 'thought' might be. It is a demonstration I would look forward to with bated pen...
cheer
the sunshine warrior
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people, must be capable of having only a finite number of thoughts in the time available to them.Ah, but I wasn't talking about the numbers of thoughts! I agree with you on that--we are not eternal! I meant (uh oh, language is going to be troublesome here, I can tell) that the content of our thoughts is infinite. Our thoughts can travel to places that are indescribable.
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phantom limb syndrome
I think this also goes to another important principle of the way our whole being works, which we tend to underestimate in daily appreciation. That is, the ability of the body to remember sensation, ground into a neural path just as securely as say a learnt language. For example, I can go down my dog-legged staircase in complete darkness because my body knows it in great detail - knows every feel and muscular tension involved. Teachers recognise this as the route of a learning style which they tend to call kinaesthetic - learning by doing an activity can provide the body's memory key.
And I agree that dreams are inherently pre-language. Think back to childhood nightmares; surely they feature shapes, sometimes colours, above all very strong emotions - but not always words?
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I meant (uh oh, language is going to be troublesome here, I can tell) that the content of our thoughts is infinite. Our thoughts can travel to places that are indescribable.
Agreed. I suspect that I merely preferred to refer to it as thereby being unbounded, rather than infinite.
Oh derriere! How to put zis?
Hokay:
1. There are an infinite number of rational numbers between 0 and 1. Yet, they are bounded - by being no less than 0, and no more than 1. Perhaps language is like that - capable of infinite permutations, but bounded as to the range within which they operate.
2. There must be a number which is follows an infinite number of other numbers on the positive whole number scale (1,2,3,4...) This is only one number in itself (not an infinite number of them), but it is obviously an unboundedly large number.
Nah. Zis is not making sense. I give up.
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le sunshine warrior
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I suspect that I merely preferred to refer to it as thereby being unbounded, rather than infinite.Oh, boy, this is fun! And it's all Emanuela's fault--let's blame her, shall we?  In your aborted explanation, you seem to still be thinking in terms of numbers, as in naming or counting, if you will. I suppose in a way, I am, too. When I used the word infinite as applied to the content of our thoughts, I meant that there are an infinite number (uh oh, did I just tie myself up in a knot?) of places our thoughts can go. Thoughts are unbounded by the real world, and thoughts into the world of imagination can indeed be infinite. Even if you take the thoughts of just one individual, and assume for argument's sake that he has thought of everything that, up to that point, he is capable of thinking of, each new experience that he has will open up further vistas to him of possible thought paths. I suppose that one's self could be a boundary at one end. But even death doesn't mark a boundary--just because the person didn't think every thought that was possible for him before he died, doesn't mean that they weren't there. I do not expect to name all the numbers before I die, but that doesn't mean they aren't there! An aside--our paper yesterday had a bit about large numbers, with some names I've never heard, or have long forgotten. It said, if you counted to a billion at the rate of one number per second, it would take nearly 32 yrs. (31 yrs., 259 days, and some hours/seconds.) Wow.
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Well, this one of the cases in which the language is a cage...I will just give up.
But I want to recall a short (?) story by Borges, called - I know it just in Italian, La biblioteca di Babele - something like Babel library...
More or less, the idea is that , if you give a bound to the size of a book- and fixed the alphabet - you can imagine a library in which there are all the possible books -even meaningless, since there is a finite -even if hugely huge - number of such possible books.
Ciao
Emanuela
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I'm entering a little late...forgive the delays. As Jackie mentioned, I do have some ideas about the deaf issue, relating to how they think and in what form.
It might seem appropriate to assume that since Germans think in German, the French think in French, that those who are native users of sign language would think in pictures. This, however, is not the case (or so I understand, not being deaf myself). However, the deaf do think using a visual foundation, not an auditory foundation.
American Sign Language (the only manual language I know) is not merely iconic or mimetic. The language has methods it uses (through handshapes, movement, facial expression, etc) to communicate abstract concepts that do not have an immediate visual connection. When deaf people think (and sometimes I think in this vein, too), they think in sign language. When deaf people talk to themselves, they do it in sign language. And I can attest that my deaf brother does not talk in his sleep; he signs (and quite illegibly, if indeed that adverb can be ascribed to a non-written language).
As good evidence, I would present Helen Keller herself. Her ability to think in pictures may have been hampered by her blindness, but she surely could think in either signs or in braille or in tactile movement.
Brandon
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I appear to be running counter to the general view here. I feel that a great deal of my thought is languageless, like Jackie's "thinking in images". There are obviously exceptions to this, such as when I am thinking about words, and forming puns in my mind, and in fact whenever I am thinking about something that someone has said or written. When I hear a word, I visualize it spelled out, but that's something entirely different. If I think to myself "I'll just go down to the corner shop and buy a newspaper", I don't believe that there are words associated with that thought, just a picture in my mind.
I have heard people say that you don't know a particular second (third, fourth,..) language until you think in that language, but, given what I have said above, I have never understood the concept.
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