Language is a useful tool for allowing us to think through many more subjects and ideas and take our thoughts down many more paths than before. Language has allowed us to have discussions, exchanging and receiving ideas we would have never learned our own. We have a richer vocabulary to think about with more abstract subjects to center our attention on. We can write things and read them from cultures that have existed long ago and that have completely different perspectives.
Language has changed the game for the human species. It has opened up many opportunities, and one of them is the opportunity to think with much more freedom and direction that has never existed before. The guidance of language can help guide our thought in both good ways and bad. We may also look at how a specific language in a culture or domain of inquiry may change the way we think and perceive. With the freedom and ability that language gives us, comes the requirement of knowing how it changes our patterns of thought.
Thinking, with Words
Conscious thoughts are the mind’s unconscious tendencies punctuated by attention to something perceptible. For instance, the sight of a loved one contains what it is literal, the content, but also ingrained into the moment of consciousness is more that we might just call the peripheral parts of the thought. In the background of attention to the loved one is the present situation, memories and meaning of this person, current bodily states, and so on. But what is conscious is simply the attended objects and the actions we take towards them.
When we add language to this basic understanding of consciousness, we have the ability to make conscious the things which are not present, which can only become conscious through the medium of some object, a symbol. With language we can frame unconscious thoughts as conscious.
“Freud argued that attaching words to thoughts makes it possible to bring those thoughts to consciousness.”
Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull in The Brain and the Inner World
Thoughts that are unconscious are because they have no character about them that can be perceived by senses. The premise of psychoanalysis, or the “talking cure,” is to let language uncover the unconscious impulses with are responsible for suffering in one’s mental life. Sometimes this means to talk without preparing.
“Before speaking, one barely knows what one intends to say, but afterwards one is filled with admiration and surprise at having said and thought it so well.”
M.V. Egger
By giving a name to something imperceptible, we give it a face to be seen, and therefore, it becomes a conscious thought our attention can center around.
Vivid Language in the Stream of Thought
Having the conscious thought in front of us can help guide our stream of consciousness into the corners of understanding which would have been impossible to reach before. Language makes more vivid and lasting the things which were transient and unclear. This allows them to last in memory and affect the subsequent thoughts more effectively.
To make vivid abstract ideas with language, and putting them in the center of attention, allows us to carry on thinking by using the conscious thought as a launching point. The phrase we utter can create the context for the next thought and contribute to a chain of intentional thinking. As we know in reading, the sentence one just read contributes to the feeling and understanding of the sentence one is currently on.
This explains why it is so helpful for people, when dealing with a difficult problem, to speak their thoughts out loud, making them more vivid, and more likely to contribute past the moment they are uttered. One may speak all of the premises and reasons out loud to make sure that they are given the voice they need for a proper conclusion. The sentence resonates in the mind for longer, to be turned over again and again in relation to other thoughts. This is opposed to a total reliance on an intuitive conclusion.
Specific Language’s Effect on Thought
Does this mean that improving our vocabulary can improve one’s freedom and direction in thoughts? There has been research to suggest being able to talk about one’s feelings is important for emotional health. James Pennebaker played a large role in discovering the therapeutic effect of disclosing one’s emotions. There is also research on alexithymia, a trait which produces distress by the inability to express or describe one’s feelings. It may be an improved emotional vocabulary that allows the expression of emotions that seem repressed because they do not have the language to accompany them.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes that in order to understand a domain of work or knowledge, and to be creative in it, we must know the language of the domain. He praises rote memorization as important especially in this age of information. People can rely on the Internet instead of knowing a subject themselves. Even though rote learning seems to be being phased out of school, Csikszentmihalyi defends it as adding to the vocabulary of a domain and other subjects.
“A mind with some stable content to it is much richer than one without. It is a mistake to assume that creativity and rote learning are incompatible. Some of the most original scientists, for instance, have been known to have memorized music, poetry, or historical information excessively.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow
Creating vocabulary to describe a phenomenon that was not describable before can also improve one’s range of thinking. In philosophy of mind, there is a problem which has been recently defined about the nature of subjectivity in an objective world. David Chalmers calls it the “hard problem” and although many philosophers disagree with its premise, Chalmers still defends it more as a tool for thinking about consciousness rather than representing something real. Without the term, it may be harder to connect ideas in conversation.
Being familiar with technical language certainly helps us understand a domain in an abstract, neutral way, but does it go on to change our lives in a deeper way than within a technical domain? You may be already drawing the conclusion that learning as much vocabulary as possible is the way to truth and knowledge.
Problems with Rote Learning
One thing we must remember is to not conflate improving one’s vocabulary and language with improving ones thought. As noted earlier, understanding the vocabulary is essential in learning within a specific domain. But as we recall from another article, language has more meaning than its literal definition. And for us to fully understand language, we need to have the vibrant color and meaningfulness of its psychological essence. That means to have a rich understanding of the connotations and use of words. We can then say things with the metaphors that help us not only have the language to state a truth, but the feeling to actually understand its wider meaning.
One of the world’s greatest thinkers, Albert Einstein wrote “when words intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely auditive.” We should take this seriously in that logic, definition, and words are not the only means to good thinking even in the so-called hard sciences.
For Einstein, and for the rest of us, we must be able to use the psychological meanings of words, not just the authoritative, written definitions. This is where we fully connect with the domain, and become motivated to live in it and be creative in it. Some of the best thinking comes from the depths of our psychology that do not abide by the logic of well-defined vocabulary.
Consider all of the helpful metaphors for the mind that did not come from pure abstract definition, but a deeper understanding: the “stream of consciousness,” the iceberg metaphor for the unconscious, or having “attraction” to something. The best ways we have learned to talk about our mind has come from the tools and metaphors which were created by really witnessing the psychological definitions of the language we use.
Words and language have more real meaning from their usage in a psychological context. This is based on the specific culture with specific feelings and implications for the words. This adds much more important definition to something. Consider a lot of poetry or rapping. There are always references to historical events or earlier works. Instead of saying the abstractly and analytically what one wants to say, they say it succinctly in the way someone who has a similar language or history can understand. It is much more powerful to connect that way. It also gives people the power of interpretation and dialogue with a text, which is not the case in the “textbook knowledge” we think we get.
Our textbooks end conversation. They are the facts without the dialogue. Their lesson is made with little room for interpretation by leaving out figurative language that implies too much without explaining it away. They are said with little connotation and psychological meaningfulness. This kind of factual and definition-gathering knowledge is clearly not the end of what knowledge must be, but can it actually be a detriment to knowledge?
Alienated Thought and Integration by Conversation
When words do not have personal meaning they are used in a scripted way, remaining at the symbolic level. There is an alienation from our symbolic signaling when it is kept literal and unemotional. We become the mouthpiece of ideas said by some authority without it having any feeling for ourselves.
Children with autism have a difficult time pairing the symbolic world of gestures and language with their own feelings and the context they are used in. This is why autistic children struggle with social interaction, emotionality, and creativity. They may be able to imitate some artwork very well, but they would not be able to integrate the abstractions into a personally creative work.
According to Stuart Shanker and Stanley Greenspan, true symbol formation requires an emotional connection to the language.
“Images without emotion, or affect—that is, without meaning—create memories without meaning. We see this phenomenon in some children with autism. They just repeat words rather than convey what the words mean.”
Shanker and Greenspan in The First Idea
When we cannot pair the symbolic to our actual living experiences, we struggle to have a healthy relationship with our interests. We do not converse with our subject. We are only adding up the facts about it. We see things through the lens of strict definition, rather than personal experience.
To integrate ourselves into this alien language, which has nothing inherently emotional about it, we must allow ourselves to add to even abstract language the ways that our specific culture uses it. Understanding the context in which to use language is important in our own relationship to that language. This can be don’t most effectively by having conversation with language which one may not have a nuanced grasp of. When we hear the way people use certain words, we can get an idea of what the nuanced meaning of the words are. Language is a social agreement, and as such it requires social skills to flourish even in the individual thinker’s mind.
