What do you think evolved first - verbal communication or thoughts? Presumably we were able to think before we could speak, no? The words we have in our language are like pointers to internal concepts, and it seems to me that those internal concepts would have existed before language was a thing. The mouth-sounds as you put it are not the thoughts themselves, rather just labels for specific concepts. It might be possible and even convenient to think in mouth-sounds but it’s not necessary for logical thought.
Yeah I agree with you. There might be something to the other side of the coin though. For example, a feral human with no language will have “thoughts,” as we both agree. But they will probably be quite different than thoughts from someone with language. Having a word for something has a way of crystallizing a concept. With a lot of those at your disposal you might be capable of more sophisticated thought. It’s really hard to say since we don’t have feral people to study and we couldn’t examine their “thoughts” even if we did.
What do you think evolved first - verbal communication or thoughts? Presumably we were able to think before we could speak, no? The words we have in our language are like pointers to internal concepts, and it seems to me that those internal concepts would have existed before language was a thing. The mouth-sounds as you put it are not the thoughts themselves, rather just labels for specific concepts. It might be possible and even convenient to think in mouth-sounds but it’s not necessary for logical thought.
Yeah I agree with you. There might be something to the other side of the coin though. For example, a feral human with no language will have “thoughts,” as we both agree. But they will probably be quite different than thoughts from someone with language. Having a word for something has a way of crystallizing a concept. With a lot of those at your disposal you might be capable of more sophisticated thought. It’s really hard to say since we don’t have feral people to study and we couldn’t examine their “thoughts” even if we did.