Yo Dawg, Heard You Like Thinking

 ... so we gave you this Aeon piece about thinking about thinking so you can think about what you think.

But I digress.

This is an interesting piece on the interplay between language and thought. In essence : where do thoughts come from ? Does language only express what we're thinking or does it also shape and enable it ?

For my part, as I've probably mentioned before, I've always found it interesting that I'm able to think in complete sentences. This means that the process of assembling the sentences - that is, articulating what I want to say - must be done at a deeper, subconscious level, otherwise I'd just spew at random works with all the eloquent coherency of an American president.

Taken to extremes, this means that language is just some way of expressing, storing and conveying what it is we're really thinking. Articulation crystallises our thoughts into something more real, something we can easily reach back to and trigger that essential essence we began with. There's a very interesting everyday experience which occurs most often when thinking about something complex, or when a memory is on the tip of the tongue; the moment when you have that literally indescribable awareness and understanding of the deeper thought process but are unable to capture it in words. Eventually, usually, something snaps in the mind and you find some way to express it verbally (or otherwise), generally capturing the vital essence of the original in a handy, far more memorable form. It's like diving through a cloudy sea and clutching the solid pearls of wisdom, or, more commonly, cat memes.

This process is not perfect. Language seldom ever captures our original thoughts and feelings perfectly even to ourselves, and while it may succeed in recreating that deeper process in us, it's less successful at triggering an identical response in others. But it's usually good enough to make ourselves understood, and often the flaws are helpful by accidentally invoking ideas we might not have otherwise had. It does a good enough job to get us through the day, but it itself, in this view, is not what we're thinking on the deepest level.

But there's also at the very least an interplay between language and thought itself. This is somewhat easier to see with visual art. One begins with a vague image in one's head, but the act of physically expressing it changes it from the original concept - sometimes subtly, sometimes wholesale. Likewise when you say something, sometimes you realise that isn't what you meant at all. Language is also a process of discovering what it is you're really thinking as well as being, at least on a very shallow level, itself a thought process.

The tricky part, then, is the nature of this deeper underlying thought. How can you think something in words that you haven't already expressed in words ? If it's not language, then what the heck is it ? How do you begin to analyse something which you can't even - by definition - describe ? Paradoxical indeed...

What is it for a thought to be clear? What made our initial thought unclear? And how do we make a thought clear, in the relevant sense? These questions engage fundamental issues about the relation between thought and language, and between the unconscious and conscious mind. 

The point of searching for words, in the hard cases, is to clarify what we’re thinking; and the clarity that we’re after seems to consist in the knowledge that we’re thinking some specific thought. At the same time, our choices of words make sense to us, and so it seems that we must make them for a reason. But it is hard to see how we could have a reason to accept or reject any words if we don’t already know which thought we’re trying to express.

In describing a picture or translating a sentence into another language, we have the picture or sentence clearly in mind and search for the words that would fit it. We can’t select the appropriate words unless we know what the picture depicts or the sentence says. So, if our goal is to express a particular thought, it’s unclear how we could select the appropriate means for achieving it, if we’re ignorant of what we’re thinking.

Consider an analogous case: emotional expression. In her account of emotional expression, the philosopher Rosalind Hursthouse in 1991 argues that many actions expressive of emotions can’t be explained in terms of reasons at all: I might allow myself to smash a vase in the grip of anger, but I don’t deliberate and decide to do it for the reason that it would optimally express my mental state.

Could we therefore say that an emotion is something akin to a direct thought, the more fundamental substrate from which we articulate our deeper thoughts into language and images ? Maybe.

[In contrast] Articulating a thought takes sensitivity, flexibility, attention and care. Articulating my objection to the government measure is manifestly something that I do rather than something compulsory that overtakes me. Although the process is controlled by the thought, it is simultaneously controlled by me. There lies an intriguing feature of our involvement in articulation. Once the process is underway, I can become absorbed in it and experience myself as intentionally carrying it out. The words that I produce are deliberate not in the sense of being deliberately selected but in the sense of being unimpeded by internal censorship or constraint. 

This understanding of articulation provides a way out of the paradox by showing how we can not only recognise but, also, actively produce the words that express our thoughts without drawing on any explicit knowledge of what we’re thinking.

I'm not sure how that helps though. It seems to me it just opens up the age-old questions of what we really mean by the self and free will. What does it mean to say that I am actively producing words ? I certainly do feel like I'm in control of my thoughts - at least some of them - but what is this "I" and how the hell does it work ? How does my non-physical self influence the physiological processes occuring in my brain ? How could we produce the same effect in a computer ? It's a very nice article, to be sure, but ultimately all it does (indeed, all it can do) is articulate the problems, not address them.

What comes first: ideas or words? The paradox of articulation - Eli Alshanetsky | Aeon Essays

I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again.