Language and Thought

Lila Gleitman and and Anna Papafragou, in Keith J. Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Excerpt: Possessing a language is one of the central features that distinguishes humans from other species. Many people share the intuition that they think in language and the absence of language therefore would be the absence of thought. One compelling version of this self-reflection is Helen Keller’s (1955) report that her recognition of the signed symbol for ‘water’ triggered thought processes that had theretofore – and consequently – been utterly absent. Statements to the same or related effect come from the most diverse intellectual sources: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein, 1922); and “The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group” (Sapir, 1941, as cited in Whorf, 1956, p. 75 ).