The Language of Thought

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

Where do thoughts come from?? Is there any structure to them before they manifest themselves in language?? Is there a universal grammar that underlies every actual grammar?

These questions have been asked many times before.? My answers are as follows:

1. They come from below, not above.
2. They do have a readily describable structure.
3. That structure does indeed underly every actual grammar.?

The first answer is the most important one.? If the language of thought precedes symbolic language, then symbolic language is emergent from it, and the way to study is not through self-examination but rather by observing the behavior of non-language speaking agents.? Of these my favorite two are babies and dogs.? Both exhibit a myriad of strategic behaviors that imply thought but clearly do not entail language.? So, based on observing them, what can we say about the structure of such thinking?

Babies and dogs, I propose, process the following five concepts routinely and effectively:

1. Agents.? They recognize and respond to people and animals that can interact with them, as indicated by their eye contact, their coming and going, and response to commands and gestures.
2. Objects.? They recognize and can discriminate among objects that interest them, both inanimate and animate, including foods, toys, playmates, and parents.? They do not distinguish between animate and inanimate objects in any consistent way.
3. Actions.? They initiate and respond to actions in ways that further their interests, be that in feeding, playing, or getting attention.? They are inherently attracted to action in any form.
4. Valence.? They discriminate between things they like and things they don’t like, seeking the former and avoiding the latter, as witnessed by their eating and their expressions of mood.
5. Uncertainty.? When uncertain, they hesitate and respond tentatively until they can resolve their uncertainty.

My claim is that these five concepts map directly to the fundamental syntax of every one of the six thousand or so symbolic languages currently in use.? Agents and objects both convert to nouns and noun-like entities that serve as subjects and predicate objects in declarative statements.? Similarly, actions convert to verbs and verb-like phrases.? When we combine nouns with actions, we get predications, or what I like to term claims, which are the fundamental units of symbolic discourse.? Valences foreshadow the use of adjectives, adverbs, and other modifiers that add nuances to our claims, and uncertainty is represented by modal verbs expressing possibility, probability, or necessity.

As much ground as all this covers, it is important to understand what the language of thought does not entail.? Take the sentence “John is tall.”? That thought would never occur to either a baby or a dog.? It is inherently symbolic in nature, and until you have a symbolic language, it cannot exist.? In The Infinite Staircase, it belongs to the stairstep of analytics, whereas the language of thought can reach no higher than the stairstep of narrative.

It is on the stairstep of narrative that the language of thought passes the baton to symbolic language.? We cannot tell stories without symbolic language, but it is clear from the behavior of both toddlers and long-term pets that we want to.? The connection that binds the two at this point is a realization of cause and effect.? Narrative is how we process cause and effect.? The breakthrough of symbolic language is that we can not only be a lot more precise in our communication, increasing its efficacy, but also that we can abstract from one narrative concepts and patterns that can be applied elsewhere.? This is the miracle of analytics, and it only comes with symbolic language.

To close, let’s revisit our first question—where exactly do our (symbolic-language-expressed) thoughts originate from?? This is not a brain-processing question—that landscape is still under investigation—but rather a question of lived experience.? Where does it feel like they come from?

My answer is that they are chemically generated responses that represent fluctuations in our homeostatic balance.? Like all organisms, we are compelled to seek this balance all the time.? The more we get out of balance, the stronger the chemical signal to respond, the more intense the resultant stream of thoughts will be.? This applies to dreams as well as to when we are awake.? We are continually processing a stream of thoughts that emerge into consciousness and finding their linguistic expression as they do.? We register these thoughts through listening to ourselves and shape them further through talking to ourselves.? It is only when we get to the talking that we are fully immersed in symbolic language.

That’s what I think.? What do you think?

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