Language and Cognition: Understanding Their Interplay
The Form of Knowledge: Language
Language is usually defined as a system of signs expressing ideas. For Saussure, linguistic signs are composed of a signifier and a signified. The meaning is the concept or mental representation of that sign. The signifier is its expression and represents things conventionally. To fix this, it is necessary to predetermine what language is and, if possible, some form of non-linguistic knowledge.
Animal Language and Human Language
Traditionally, it was noted that the fundamental difference between animal and human language was that animal language was innate, and human language was learned.
Another distinctive feature usually attributed to animal language is its mimicry. Non-human communication systems are grouped into three designs:
- A finite repertory of calls.
- An analog signal.
- A series of random variations on a theme.
Unlike animal language, human language is a linkage. This peculiarity has to do with recursion heuristic; that is, anyone can produce a novel combination of an absolutely creative nature.
Finally, modern linguists tend to view human symbolic language as absolutely irreducible to other forms of animal communication. While the latter are always specific and situational, human language is abstract and symbolic. You can use concepts of objects that are not present.
Features of Human Language
- The ability to make sounds with symbolic content, that is, words with meaning.
- The ability to combine words to build sentences with different meanings.
- Language is used to bring order to the world, classify, and, ultimately, understand.
But its fundamental purpose is communication, to transmit knowledge to another subject. Hence, another of the basic skills that presupposes language is understanding what the words say, decrypting the message, and discovering its meaning.
The Relations Between Cognition and Language
The question of whether knowledge can only take linguistic form hides the problematic relationship between thought and language. These issues have been given many answers, ranging from the absolute identity of thought and language to total incompatibility. The latest research in search of animal thought shows that you can get to think without language, while those with cognitive maps are able to make plans and to have intentionality in their behaviors. Studies of language disorders in humans, in turn, suggest that although language skills are lost, some form of thought can still occur. As cognitive processes become more complex and abstract, language appears as the necessary instrument without which certain realities might not be thought.
Thought is Prior to Language
The first to hold this hypothesis was Aristotle when he stated that thought is independent and prior to language. In the twentieth century, the main advocate of this thesis was the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. There would, therefore, be non-linguistic modes of thought that precede language acquisition. For Piaget, the process of maturation creates language.
Language is Prior to Thought
Throughout the learning process, socially determined, the individual will acquire certain language skills. These help you understand the world in a particular way, that subsequently will be reflected in thought. Therefore, there is no objectively perceived world, a pure mode. Everything appears to a speaker; if understandable, it is through the categories of their language, through which they classify and treat experience. This position is known as the Sapir-Whorf thesis. Sapir warned that speakers of different languages tend to pay attention to different aspects of reality. The consequences of this view are several, as it leads to linguistic relativism, whereby each language would have a peculiar and untranslatable way to understand the world.
The Complex Relationship Between Thinking and Speech
Today, the road seems more complex, and there is talk of a dialectical relationship between language and thought. The two interact and influence one another, though it is usually considered that language exerts an active and constitutive role in thought. The classic argument between empiricism and rationalism reappears strongly in the discussion of the relationship between language and thought:
- From an empirical perspective, it highlights the critical theories that consider external factors from the environment and social environment. From this position, there is thought at the time in which there is language.
- In a rationalist line, we find the interpretation of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. This theory admits the existence of innate linguistic universals and basic structures that are born with all future speakers. Every speaker comes with an internalized grammar, with principles underlying the organization and regulation and common to all languages, which enable them to make creative use of language.
The Importance of Language in Contemporary Philosophy
One of the characteristics of twentieth-century philosophy is what has been called the linguistic turn.
- The central concern of the philosophy of language is to make the connections between language and reality. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, logical positivism and atomism posed that the origin of many philosophical problems lies in the weaknesses and vagueness of language. Frege, Russell, the first Wittgenstein, and Carnap addressed the problems raised by natural languages using formal logic.
- On the other hand, there is a more pragmatic line that originates in the second period of the works of Wittgenstein and tries to apply the critical attitude of philosophy to everyday language.