/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11915779
Interesting, this seems to be more about the question of non-linguistic thought in animals, infants and aphasics and less about non-linguistic thought in adult humans as a specific cognitive mode - one that is nevertheless dependent on language for the learning of new concepts and ideas.

>It has often been debated whether there can be imageless thinking at all. Moreover, it has been suggested that mental qualities serve as providers of access in the mind. In Bernard Baars’s description, “all abstract concepts are accessed consciously by means of perceptual and imaginal events” and “abstract concepts have qualitative mental symbols”. The associated mental imagery can be of all kinds of sensory qualities: of visual pictorial form, or of auditory form of a sound. In the case of linguistic thinking, the associated imagery is in the form of inner speech.

>Bermúdez concedes that there is metarepresentational thinking that has sensations and mental images as objects, but he does not consider sensations and mental images as instances of genuine thinking. He thinks that “we are not [...] ever conscious of propositional thoughts that do not have linguistic vehicles”

And just like Carruthers in the first article I linked, these men also believe that we cannot be conscious of non-linguistic/sensory thoughts, that there must be a "vehicle" for such thoughts to first come into working conscious memory.

The reviewer seems to get the picture better than Bermudez-

>Perhaps the vehicles of non-linguistic metacognition are non-linguistic conceptual thoughts

however

>(by which I mean mental representations in this context) that are connected to mental images. It is well known that abstract thoughts are often accompanied by specific exemplar-like mental images.