Do We Need Words in Order to Think?

By Shlomo Maital

        Do We Need Language to Think?    According to Carl Zimmer, reporting for the New York Times on June 19, “A group of neuroscientists argues that our words are primarily for communicating, not for reasoning.”

     Zimmer relates that “For thousands of years, philosophers have argued about the purpose of language. Plato believed it was essential for thinking. Thought “is a silent inner conversation of the soul with itself,” he wrote.  “Starting in the 1960s, Noam Chomsky, a linguist at M.I.T., argued that we use language for reasoning and other forms of thought. “If there is a severe deficit of language, there will be severe deficit of thought,” he wrote.”

      But a student of Chomsky, Dr. Evelina Fedorenko used brain scanning to investigate how the brain produces language. And after 15 years, her research has led her to a startling conclusion: We don’t need language to think!  Her data is based on extensive brain scanning, focused on language centers and reasoning centers.

       I am a skeptic.  I am certain Fedorenko has massive data to support her position. But thinking about myself:  I find that I do not really know what I am thinking, until and unless I frame my thoughts in words.  Until then, my thinking is not ‘reasoning’ but closer to fog.  Only when the words emerge, do I really have a thought.  That is one of the reasons I’ve written 2,099 blog entries.

       What about you?   Do you reason with words?  Or is your logic wordless?