Communication, Language and Thinking

The Base is Biological

The Taxonomy represents something innate and used by all cultures. Our language capacity, like communication itself, is not purely culture. Nor is it simply a learned skill. As Chomsky explained, it is an innate ability.

Children create language without thinking about it. For example, they will turn a non-grammatical pidgin into a grammatical creole spontaneously.

Language can be enormously complex: but it's linguistic intricacies and grammatical rules, d-structure and s-structure &c are of no concern to us. For linguistic scholars, "knowing a language ... is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words or vice versa. " (See Ch.3 in Pinker's The Language Instinct.) This is part of a computational theory of mind, currently popular in cognitive science. None of this is relevant or required here.

The Focus is Practical

The issue for language from our endeavour-oriented and psychosocial perspective is "to what use" it is put, and "how it is used" in practice.

  • "What use" refers to choice of goals to be pursued: see Transcendence and Actualization for more info.
  • "How it is used" shapes what goals are possible, which is the focus of this section.

Language does not determine our thinking. Language is a tool that helps us with our thinking. So it is perfectly reasonable to say: "I can't quite express my view." The thought (view) remains utterly dependent on language if anyone is to share it. Thought is part of experience-PH4, so visual imagery may be its medium. Language is part of communication-PH5: it can use physical gestures.

The Goal is Thinking

While non-verbal features are intrinsic to communicating, verbal language is at the heart of a reflective social existence. Words are used to capture and manipulate ideas in the process of thinking.

Ideas and thoughts function primarily as experiences: they may come and go. However, when thinking purposefully, we use ideas and thoughts in a specific way e.g. to become clear about a situation, to articulate some goal, to help pursue some endeavour or to establish values for yourself or one of your groups. Such thinking should be viewed as private or internal communication.

For anything important, we want to communicate to ourselves before we communicate to others. That is the only way to reduce the risk of offending, or saying something foolish, or not saying what we mean.

Clearly some communications require more prior thought than others. When you are secure in regard to the topic and get into a flow, it is normally possible to speak continuously and spontaneously without being aware of any thinking. At other times, you may spend ages mentally re-thinking and rehearsing, perhaps drafting and re-drafting, or reviewing the message with confidantes.

With these fundamentals clarified:

Originally posted: 5-Jan-2013. Last updated: 10-Feb-2023.