Thoughtless Language

Thoughtless Language

We normally suppose that adding language to an animal mind would enrich it, but might this be the opposite of the truth? Might language subtract from the mind? Might language act like a prison of thought rather than opening up new vistas? Might a cat or dog have a richer mental life than a human? Heresy, I know, but listen, it might be true. Animals have richer mental lives than us from a purely sensory point of view—hearing and smell (dogs and cats), vision (some birds), touch (probably the octopus), echolocation (bats and porpoises). And surely their thoughts (as well as emotions and decisions) are tied to their sensory consciousness. We don’t have this; what we have is a symbolic system consisting of combinable words that evolved comparatively recently in evolutionary history. The fact that this system is capable of infinitely many combinations does nothing to show that it has an expressive power in excess of a nonlinguistic creature, since that kind of productivity is consistent with only a few lexical items and a couple of iterative procedures. What is relevant is the coding power of language in relation to experience: how good is a word at coding an experience? Doesn’t a word bleach out a lot of the reality of even simple sensations? It denotes but it doesn’t express, embody, incarnate. Suppose an animal thinks in sensational terms while we think in verbal terms: it can preserve its experience in its thought contents, while we must make do with a mere word. Doesn’t language leave all that richness behind, replacing it with something much more impoverished expressively? It fails to capture the full reality of what we are experiencing, while in animals that is not the case. The linguistic mind reduces the content of experience, because language is a mere code, whereas animal thought preserves this content. Its thoughts are fuller, richer, more imbued with detail than ours, which have been squeezed into a linguistic format. We will be more prone to think in abstract generalities not concrete differences; we will ignore of lot of what is going on subjectively. Think of the mind of a whale or elephant: not stifled and etiolated by language but open to everything its senses can deliver, which is a lot compared to us. Cognitively, we have become language specialists, but this may well have left a good deal behind; we have a hammer so we think everything is a nail. Animals have no such all-consuming compressive device at their disposal, so they can see beyond it. Their thoughts may be far more capacious than ours, less streamlined and stripped down. Our thoughts may have reached a higher level of efficiency but at the cost of a loss of sensory depth—digital instead of analogue. Our thoughts about smell, for example, will be highly impoverished compared to a dog’s—and that means specific smells as well as the full range of smells. The dog is better at thinking about smells than we are, because we think in words. We are really good at combining these words, but the words themselves are expressively straitjacketed, mere labels. In this sense, language is like a prison that enables the mind to move quickly around inside it but provides no escape from it. We can surely imagine a creature for which this is true, and we look like candidates to be such a creature. To put it simply, animals have better thoughts than we do content-wise (if not efficiency-wise). They don’t think about the world by describing it in symbols but by experiencing it, and experience contains more information than description. Language has only been around for a relatively short time while sense experience goes back billions of years. Human language is therefore as much a curse as a blessing. It has colonized our minds and driven out the old inhabitants, and our mental lives are poorer for it.[1]

[1] I was stimulated to write this piece by my cat Blackie. The other night he began to mount the steps to the attic and paused with senses on full alert—ears, eyes, nose. After hesitating a few seconds, he decided not to bother and turned round, having clearly thought the matter over. I thought: there is a lot more going on in his head when he goes up those steps than what goes on in mine. In my case a sentence might flit lazily through my consciousness, summing up the situation, but in his case his mind was flooded with mental goings-on, sensory and cogitative. I use up my brain up with language, but he has a more direct way of experiencing the situation. Feline thought has dimensions that human thought doesn’t have (of course, the converse is also true). Because of language, human thought is less colorful than animal thought. A language of thought is less saturated with sense experience than sensation-based thought. Linguistically based thought is attenuated and desiccated. What you gain on the roundabout you lose on the swings.