The Limits of Thinking Without Words

Jose Luis Bermudez, in Jose Luis Bermudez, Thinking Without Words (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Excerpt: In the previous chapter we saw that a certain type of thinking is unavailable at the non-linguistic level. Forms of thinking which involve thinking about thought (and hence taking particular thoughts as the objects of thought) are only available to creatures participating in a public language. Thoughts can only be the objects of further thoughts if they have suitable vehicles and the only possible vehicles are public language sentences. Intentional ascent requires semantic ascent. In this chapter I will consider the practical implications which this has for the scope and limits of non-linguistic thought. We will be concerned in particular with the following two questions. What types of thinking are in principle unavailable to non-linguistic creatures? What sort of primitive precursors might there be at the nonlinguistic level for types of thinking which involve intentional ascent in their full-fledged form?

It will turn out that intentional ascent is a rather broader category than immediately appears. There are two types of intentional ascent, which might be termed explicit and implicit intentional ascent respectively. The first type includes all those forms of thought involving what is frequently called metarepresentation. Metarepresentation involves the ability to have thoughts that take further thoughts as their direct objects. We will consider examples of metarepresentational thinking in the first three section of the chapter. In 9.1 I explain the distinctive type of belief revision available only to language-using creatures, contrasting it with the more primitive ways in which non-linguistic creatures can modify their beliefs and behavior in the light of changing evidence, whether supporting or countervailing. Section 9.2 discusses how the possibility of a certain type of higher-order desire involves intentional ascent (the taking of a cognitive attitude towards a particular desire) and hence depends upon language. In section 9. I discuss the relation between language possession and what is often called theory of mind. I argue that the attribution of beliefs, certain types of desires (what I earlier called situation-desires) and propositional attitudes in general is only available to linguistic creatures – again because it involve thinking about thinking. A primitive type of psychological explanation, involving the attribution of goal-desires and perceptual states, is however possible at the non-linguistic level.