I’m in a course at the University of Denver on the subject of Individuality and Society. The professor teaching the course is going into Methodological Individualism a little bit as one of the viewpoints that could be adopted. As far as I know, I’m the only Austrian-focused economics student at the University, so my professor is kindly deferring to me on a number of things regarding Mises, Austrian Theory, and Methodological Individualism.
Today, though, he posed a question to me that I was not certain how to answer and so I turn to everyone here to see if someone can give a more precise answer.
The question is: what are Mises’s thoughts on the relationship between Thought and Speech. Particularly, is Speech necessary for Thought. My thinking based on the few passages in Human Action where he insinuates it, is that Mises would NOT think that Speech is necessary for Thought, though Speech greatly expands the diversity, complexity, and accuracy of Thought and Reason.
Praxeologically speaking speech is not necessary at all for thought. Speech is a cognitive method. Thought however is an inherent method to being human. In the absence of speech you still think, you still know when you are hungry. Coming back to praxeology, you still have felt uneasiness.
Human Action occurs with or without a learned oral method.
The answer is simple: thought gives way to language, not the other way around. This is due to the fact that language is a means to show others what you mean by taking references in the world and in others (in general). Whether we’re talking about cave persons trying to tell each other where the nearest pool of water is, or whether it’s two scientists discussing the finer points of particle physics; the mind is the origin of logical order as it is the mind that must act in terms of its survival alone (at bare minimum). Which the mind externalizes the conclusions into language, meaning it produces that channel between itself and another mind.
Here’s a fun paper that covers the relationship between language and thought. Short and readable. What this paper doesn’t cover though is how people who are denied the benefit of language think. Feral kids are a good example. If they don’t learn language by a certain point in their development, they may never really pick it up at all beyond some basics, and they are in many ways socially disfunctional. As to whether or not this can be over come or not, or whether or not their thought is impaired, I guess it’s up for grabs. There’s opinions on both sides of the issue.
Maybe the critical idea isn’t moving from speech to language, but to communication. Even if with one’s self, communication seems to be the key that facilitates thought and memory, and language or some form of ever more precise and differentiated symbolism is what is likely key to developing thoughtbeyond basic rough thought like unarticulated desires to something more refined; the difference between feeling hungry and looking for food, and saying to your friend or even just to yourself, “Man, I could use a good taco right about now.”. My own thought is that thought is inate no matter what, but without language would have difficulty in developing. Language, spoken and written, is a social phenomena, like the price system perhaps, where continuous input from tons and tons of individual participants leads to an ever developing shared framework in the form of spoken languages, the most convenient of which we naturally adopt as we develop, that helps us think and communicate more precisely with ourselves and others. It wouldn’t exist without each individual’s tendency to thought, but it’s also more than the sum of those individual tendencies and wouldn’t exist with just one person, or perhaps even two, just like market prices wouldn’t exist with just one or two people.
And written language, always secondary it seems as some cultures never progressed to it, seems to be different. It’s not as dynamic for one, and it seems like an attempt to formalize and set in stone what really isn’t fixed and static by nature. It’s more of a historical record or something that would always have to be understood in context of the original act of writing. Maybe not so much now as communication in written language has, with the internet and instantaneous text communication, started to rise to the level of dynamism you get with spoken language. Check out leetspeak, itz teh whinz.
All in all I like the price system analogy for understanding language and its relation to thought. Markets would exist without money and money prices, just as thought would exist without language. People would try to better their situations, resources would shift to their highest valued ends over time, etc. But prices and language just seem to naturally occur and snowball, and when they catch on they make the existing processes much more efficient and effective. They are true examples of social phenomena that could not exist without all the individual inputs, but also seem to be more than the sum of the individual inputs. They are the ultimate form of capital maybe. Near costless to maintain, available for free to all in limitless and ever expanding supplies, and they enhance efficiency and productivity beyond anything you can calculate.
I’m writing an entire thesis on this subject right now. Language is for communication, although it does serve some useful function in thought as a memory aid. Einstein thought in pictures and physical sensations. I think in pictures and sounds mostly.
The whole idea that words are necessary for thought has never seemed rational at all to me. Even a feral child raised by wolves can logically navigate in the wilderness, and can make logical deductions such as, “Three tigers are chasing me and I’ve speared two of them. That means there is still one left.” If he couldn’t, he obviously wouldn’t survive long.
“We can get very confused, because we think that words must have some secret meaning that we have to figure out. They don’t. They are just noises or marks, and they mean whatever experience you have learned to mean by them. People tend to use similar words in similar situations, but unless you have specifically agreed on what the words will mean, in terms of underlying experiences, there’s no way to know what another person understands when you use them. The experience you attach to a word when you say it isn’t automatically the same as the experience another person attaches to the same word when hearing it.”
-William T. Powers
If only I wasn’t on my way to work right now I’d write tons on this. Suffice it to say that you won’t have a problem defending the idea that words are not necessary for thought, if you look around. I don’t think Mises would think so, but who knows. People get confused because the words often follow so soon after the thoughts as for the difference to be unnoticeable.
If you want an example, think of how to get to the nearest convenience store to your house. Then think what you would do if the road you would normally take were blocked for construction. You could think of an alternate route without words, and I’m guessing you could also think of tricky things like how you might be able to get past the road construction by going on foot - all without words.
Speech is not the same as language. But neither is required for thought. Language is a very complicated mechanism of communication that only humans posses. But it has nothing to do with the content that feeds this mechanism. Children must be able to think before they can acquire the local dialect. Otherwise they couldn’t possibly make the connection between the words they hear and the concepts that are already in their heads.
That is simply false. It expands your diversity to interact with others, no doubt. But it has nothing to do with thought and reason.
For example, people with aphasia can reason and think. Mises is correct.
Ability to communicate - obviously. But diversity, complexity, and accuracy of thought and reason? Absolutely not, on all counts.
Diversity? A single word pidgeonholes ideas, ironing them flat into a lowest common denominator that the general population can understand. Take a word like “intuition.” The single word makes it seem like there is only one concept there, when really there is a whole complex of ideas or faculties that could be labeled “intuition.” As long as people remember that that one simple words hides a wealth of concepts, there is no harm - but who remembers? The tendency is indeed to forget the details and remember the simple word.
Complexity? Anyone who’s ever had a complex thought and tried to put it into words knows this isn’t easy. If the concept was fully formed and nuanced, words dumb down the concept and shore it of detail and subtlety.
The confusion here is that “talking things out” can help people develop more complex thoughts, but again that’s just words helping you look at something from a new perspective - by warping things in fact. That is certainly useful, but by far the general trend of words is to remove detail rather than add it. In fact, as far as communication is concerned this is a feature not a bug; but for thinking it is the exact opposite.
Accuracy? Take just about any sentence ever uttered and I’ll show you inaccuracies. “As soon as you speak about a thing, you miss the mark.” -Chinese proverb.
Once again, the purpose of words is communication, and for this purpose - to be understood by enough people who aren’t you - words necessarily must simplify. Simplification means inaccuracy, even if only by omission. And cases where omission is the only inaccuracy are virtually nonexistent. The structure of language from the very start forces us to be inaccurate. It’s only because we are all human and have some set of shared experiences that we can fill in the blanks and read between the lines. When we leave the realm of common experience words get us almost nowhere, like when trying to recount a particularly bizarre dream to someone else.
I think the notion that words are somehow the same as thoughts is the biggest problem civilization now faces. I’ve long been convinced that this, more than anything else, is what makes people unable to reason properly. It’s a giant complex of fallacies, starting from the fallacy of magical thinking, which is the fallacy that naming something makes it real.
I would disagree. I think you’re right that words attempt to fix a single common meaning to something for which there are really various concepts, but language isn’t fixed. It can develop and become much, much more nuanced. I see it more as a feedback of sorts to keep the common denominator for adequate communication, but it certainly breaks to become more nuanced when necessary. Otherwise language would never change or adapt. As an example, the word “entrepreneur.” Adam Smith initially used the word “undertaker” which doesn’t really work for obvious reasons. So as a society we ended up merely importing a French word that had the more nuanced and separate meaning we needed.
I think it’d be more accurate to say language as a social phenomena tries to balance the supply of words deemed necessary by people with the demand of those same people to express new or more nuanced concepts. And thus the generation of jargon and specialized language for use by subsets of the population which would be meaningless and useless to the rest. The magical thinking and logical trap you describe happens I think when people try to see language as fixed and static as opposed to dynamic and changing.
You’re right that language isn’t fixed, but it evolves at a glacial pace compared to the act of thinking. It takes but seconds to identify a new concept from among one’s thoughts, and maybe minutes or hours/days of contemplation for a gifted thinker to think of a new idea that is worthwhile (for his own personal purposes at least) and not in the current lexicon.
All this is true, but I think the trap is not so easily avoided, at least judging from every Internet argument I’ve ever witnessed. Academics are scarcely immune either. People have spent millennia wrestling with the question, “What is truth?” without realizing that if there is any such worthwhile question it would have to be, “What is the concept(s) we are trying to get at when we use the word truth? - if there is indeed any such coherent concept.” To this day, the debate is still almost universally framed and talked about as if this were not the case.
As to specialization, I fully agree. People working in small specialized fields who have shared knowledge form much more accurate ways of talking about things. Expert chess players can play without a board just by calling out letters and numbers. Mechanical engineers can differentiate between a wide variety of gaskets, flanges, cutting techniques, etc. using only words. But I think these are all cases in point, or the exceptions that prove the rule. It is precisely because words are inaccurate that people who have a serious need to communicate effectively end up developing more precise language whenever the situation allows it.
Still, these specialized words remain mere aids to communication. I don’t need to know the correct term for a flange to identify it in my own mind. And the fact that every new social theory has to coin its own neologisms and special definitions is notorious for leading to misunderstandings. It’s not so bad for engineers, but it’s very bad for social theorists. And even engineers can surely imagine or identify far more types of parts and processes than they know the names for. Naming them might crystallize them and give them undo importance or undo limitation. It’s not that these limitations can’t be overcome by remaining aware of these fact, but the memory tricks words play frequently make all the little mismatches between words and concepts difficult to keep track of in practice. Given that words are a memory aid in the first place, it’s not surprising that that memory aid can take on a life of its own, especially since it is chosen to look as much like the concept it represents as possible. The map gets mistaken for the territory, as it were.
However, I do think words can help in thought if they are used judiciously and sparingly. They are sort of like pegs to swing on, like monkey bars. They’re also useful when switching modalities. Suppose you were an engineer designing something in your mind, thinking of it all in pictures and animations, and your visual thought process led to the conclusion that these parts in this configuration would do the job:
Now let’s say you are also highly musical and you think in sounds and rhythms for some cognitive purposes. But maybe your short-term memory buffer for sounds is too small to hold all the information you want in there, or maybe for some reason you have a hard time representing the idea of “extruding the O-ring” auditorily. So within your pattern of sounds representing some kind of analysis on the above assembly of parts, you include the words “extrude the O-ring” as words themselves instead of your own system of imagined noises. It’s easier in that case to just remember those three words than try to represent the same concept in sounds, say. The words then would have served as a bridge between the visual representation and the auditory one.
Now I don’t know if this exact situation really happens in anyone’s thought, because I think people tend to mix all modalities pretty dynamically, but who knows. I hope this gives a taste of how words can and do frequently lead to error for the very same reasons that they are helpful. For example, the words “extrude the O-ring” might be insidiously ambiguous to the mechanical engineer, causing him to mess up his analysis slightly if he forgets that the words hid a more nuanced concept. The trouble is that people often forget, because the simple word tends to “overwrite” the nuanced thought, eventually if not right away.
It is clear that language does indeed facilitate clearer and more complex thought, provided that the person uses it “correctly”. To explain my position, I think that I need only to provide two quotations, the first from the book “Human Knowledge” of Bertrand Russell, the second from the book “A Treatise of Human Nature” of David Hume.
[quote=“David Hume, “A Treatise of Human Nature”, Section VII, “Of Abstract Ideas””]
[…] I observe, that when we mention any great number, such as a thousand, the mind has generally no adequate idea of it, but only the power of producing such an idea, by its adequate idea of the decimals, under which it is comprehended. This imperfection, however in our ideas, is never felt in our reasonings[…]
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[quote=“Bertrand Russell, “Human Knowledge”, Chapter II, Section I, “The Use of Language””]
Language serves not only to express thoughts, but [also] to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it. It is sometimes maintained that there can[not] be […] thought without language, but to this view I cannot assent: I hold that there can be thought, and even true and false belief, without language. But however that may be, it cannot be denied that all fairly elaborate thoughts require words. I can know, in a sense, that I have five fingers, without knowing the word “five”, but I cannot know that the population of London is about eight millions unless I have acquired the language of arithmetic, nor can I have any thought at all closely corresponding to what is asserted in the sentence: “The ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter is approximately 3.14159.” Language, once evolved, acquires a kind of autonomy: we can know, especially in mathematics, that a sentence asserts something true, although what it asserts is too complex to be apprehended even by the best minds. Let us consider for a moment what happens psychologically in such cases.
In mathematics, we start from rather simple sentences which we believe ourselves capable of understanding, and proceed, by rules of inference [which describe the relations between the “rather simple sentences”] which we also believe ourselves to understand, to build up more complicated symbolic statements, which, if our initial assumptions are true, must be true whatever they may mean. As a rule it is unnecessary to know what they “mean”, if their “meaning” is taken to be a thought which might occur in the mind of a superhuman mathematical genius. But there is another kind of “meaning”, which gives occasion for pragmatism and instrumentalism. According to those who adapt this view of “meaning”, what a complicated mathematical sentence does is to give a rule for practical procedure in certain kinds of cases. Take, for instance, the above statement about the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter. Suppose you are a brewer, and you desire hoops of a given diameter for your beer barrels, then the sentence gives you a rule by which you can finish out how much material you will need. This rule may consist of a fresh sentence for each decimal point, and there is therefore no need ever to grasp it significance as a whole. The autonomy of language enables you to forego this tedious process of interpretation except at crucial moments.
I do not contend that language cannot aid in thought. I’ve given a number of cases where it can help, and I agree with the mathematics examples. The original quote I was arguing against was, “Speech greatly expands the ability to communicate the diversity, complexity, and accuracy of Thought and Reason.” There are probably thoughts that would be very hard to have without words, but in the vast majority of cases the situation is reversed. That is what I mean to address. I mean that it is absolutely not the case that speech - on balance - greatly expands the diversity, complexity, and accuracy of thought and reason (and I now note I misread the original quote - as it stands it’s saying something entirely obvious).
[quote=“David Hume, “A Treatise of Human Nature”, Section VII, “Of Abstract Ideas””]
[…] I observe, that when we mention any great number, such as a thousand, the mind has generally no adequate idea of it, but only the power of producing such an idea, by its adequate idea of the decimals, under which it is comprehended. This imperfection, however in our ideas, is never felt in our reasonings[…]
[/quote]
[quote=“Bertrand Russell, “Human Knowledge”, Chapter II, Section I, “The Use of Language””]
Language serves not only to express thoughts, but [also] to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it. It is sometimes maintained that there can[not] be […] thought without language, but to this view I cannot assent: I hold that there can be thought, and even true and false belief, without language. But however that may be, it cannot be denied that all fairly elaborate thoughts require words. I can know, in a sense, that I have five fingers, without knowing the word “five”, but I cannot know that the population of London is about eight millions unless I have acquired the language of arithmetic, nor can I have any thought at all closely corresponding to what is asserted in the sentence: “The ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter is approximately 3.14159.” Language, once evolved, acquires a kind of autonomy: we can know, especially in mathematics, that a sentence asserts something true, although what it asserts is too complex to be apprehended even by the best minds. Let us consider for a moment what happens psychologically in such cases.
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Numbers are useful and precise symbols indeed. My critique goes to words in general, the vast majority of which do not share those characteristics.
He sticks with numbers and formal systems to the very end. Indeed, these are exceptions that prove the rule: it is only when we create a perfect formalism that we can state things with 100% accuracy (and still not even then, but that’s another debate). Mathematics just is precisely that area of human knowledge that is entirely formal (math to broadly include formal logic, etc.). If Russell really believes his contention that “all fairly elaborate thoughts require words,” why not present a different example? I don’t actually think his example means what he thinks it does, but I’ll only go down the time-consuming road of laying out that argument in full if someone thinks it necessary (please say so if you sincerely think so).
If he only means for formal systems, then fine. But he seems to want the implications to go deeper. I do not deny even that one could find a certain special class of concepts that are easier with words. What I contend is that such concepts are a rare breed, and that the far more pressing concern is how words have the exact opposite effects: to reduce the diversity, complexity, and especially the accuracy of thought.
No, you did not misread it. What you are now referring to, the quotation which include the phrase “the ability to communicate”, was a tweaked restatement of the original post.
David Hume provided an other, much more general example.
[quote=“David Hume, “A Treatise of Human Nature”, Section VII, “Of Abstract Ideas””]
Thirdly, I believe every one, who examines the situation of his mind in reasoning will agree with me, that we do not annex distinct and compleat ideas to every term we make use of, and that in talking of government, church, negotiation, conquest, we seldom spread out in our minds all the simple ideas, of which these complex ones are composed. It is however observable, that notwithstanding this imperfection we may avoid talking nonsense on these subjects, and may perceive any repugnance among the ideas, as well as if we had a full comprehension of them. Thus if instead of saying, that in war the weaker have always recourse to negotiation, we should say, that they have always recourse to conquest, the custom, which we have acquired of attributing certain relations to ideas, still follows the words, and makes us immediately perceive the absurdity of that proposition; in the same manner as one particular idea may serve us in reasoning concerning other ideas, however different from it in several circumstances.
[quote=“David Hume, “A Treatise of Human Nature”, Section VII, “Of Abstract Ideas”, emphasis added”]
Thirdly, I believe every one, who examines the situation of his mind in reasoning will agree with me, that we do not annex distinct and compleat ideas to every term we make use of, and that in talking of government, church, negotiation, conquest, we seldom spread out in our minds all the simple ideas, of which these complex ones are composed. It is however observable, that notwithstanding this imperfection we may avoid talking nonsense on these subjects, and may perceiveany repugnance among the ideas, as well as if we had a full comprehension of them. Thus if instead of saying, that in war the weaker have always recourse to negotiation, we should say, that they have always recourse to conquest, the custom, which we have acquired of attributing certain relations to ideas, still follows the words, and makes us immediately perceive the absurdity of that proposition; in the same manner as one particular idea may serve us in reasoning concerning other ideas, however different from it in several circumstances.
[/quote]
Re: the bolded part, we don’t really avoid talking nonsense, nor do we perceive any (i.e., “all”) repugnance among such abstract ideas - the fact that people can make statements such as “the government defends rights” and not understand the errors inherent in collectivist thinking seems proof enough of this.
Now, there is subtle peripheral issue here that may be affecting the discussion. It’s possible to conceptualize government, church, negotiation, etc. without words, such as in picture symbols (perhaps collages, etc.) in one’s mind. Such abstractions are more detailed and possibly more precise, but they still share some of the harmful features of abstract words (I don’t complain about this; it’s an inevitable result of dealing in abstractions, whether in language or thought). This may result in some talking past each other now or later.
The main point I wish to get across is that words’ ability to distort is the main thing to watch out for in every single instance of thinking. As useful as it is, language is the primary corrupter of the accuracy and clarity of thought.
Well, I think that your characterization of the situation is somewhat unfair. If you were to adopt that mentality in a situation in which a machine, the only machine applicable to this task, increases by 10 units your ability to reason but misfires regularly and fails to provide 5 of those units, you would probably say that the machine “takes away” some of your reason, whereas you really should say that it just fails to provide it.
I guess the situation may differ from person to person, but in my case I have spent long stretches of time thinking without using words at all, or using them very infrequently. When I am thinking about the State, a series of pictures flashes through my mind that I shunt around and animate, with sound cues and physical sensations. I can’t really explain it, but in the subtlest thinking words do not enter into the picture so to speak. I do have word-like pictorial representations, however, so this may be a kind of a moot issue - just arguing over verbal symbols vs. pictorial ones.
But words aren’t providing me any “thought power” other than memory assistance, and often not even that. In the most careful thinking where I need to be as lucid as possible, I try to forgo words completely. The disadvantage of this approach is that I sometimes lose the insights before I can put them into words for recording purposes. The advantage is there is none of that semantic bias. What I am saying, though, is that advantage is huge.
Thank you all so much for sharing your insights and thoughts on this, it’s been very fascinating reading, however, I’m not certain that my core question has been answered: What would Mises’s opinion on this have been?
