A thought can be described as an idea that pops into your mind at random occasions, or it could also be described as your own personal opinion that you thought of while listening or reading something. I personally believe that it is impossible to think without language Theory of Knowledge is a thought provoking class for me; it opens up my mind and lets me view a situation or a subject from many different perspectives. There was a time in my life where I wouldn’t let myself think about anything from a perspective other than mine. This period was around the time of a political crisis in Pakistan, which influenced me to become greatly narrow-minded and only propagate my own personal thoughts and opinions. However, my thoughts were altered only due to the speech that a certain politician made. Therefore, my way of thinking would not have changed if it were not for language. Hence, this knowledge claim will be evaluated through the lens of two Ways of Knowing which are language and imagination, and through two Areas of Knowledge which are the mathematics and the arts.
A real life example to prove that it is not possible to think without language can be an example of a deaf and/or mute person like Linda Bove. Linda Bove is one of America’s most famous deaf actresses as she acted in the longest television role for a deaf person which was Linda the Librarian on Sesame Street from 1971 to 2003. She attended a school for the deaf when she was younger and is said to have thought of different things by picturing different hand gestures mimicking sign language and having dreams in which she remembers talking to different people using hand-gestures and other types of body language. Even if this claim is not true, she was still able to use “sign language” to convey what she wanted to say.
A claim, to back up the statement “it is not possible to think without language”, could be that as we are raised and taught to understand different ideas and understand complex functions like thought using language, it would be impossible for us to think without language. For example, a process like meta cognition wouldn’t be able to occur. As metacognition is to think about thinking, you wouldn’t be able to reflect about your abilities, strengths and weaknesses without knowing what it is. And in order to gain knowledge about those aspects, you need to understand the language used to describe them in the first place. This brings in the concept of linguistic relativity, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which states that language determines our view of the world and it goes so far as to say that language determines the way we think. If you view it from a mathematical perspective, maths is the “the abstract science of number, quantity, and space” which is based off of a foundation of theorems. However, in order to create and establish the validity of those theorems, mathematicians had to first process their thoughts and ideas into words. Even if they did not have to use the English language, they still had to create examples and model formulas using different numbers and notations which happen to be part of the mathematical scripture or the mathematical language. Therefore no, it would not be possible to think without language.
An argument against the previous claim is that without the use of language, we can still think about different events, ideas or opinions by creating a mental image. This could be done with the use of the Way of knowing, Imagination. Imagination is described as the “action for forming new ideas not present to the senses”. Using one’s imagination, one could create a series of pictures in his or her head which depict whatever they are thinking about, whether it be an event which occurred in the past or their opinion about a certain object. Imagination would allow the person to have a larger scope of what is going on as they would be able to understand something from a three dimensional point of view, rather than a superficial one dimensional view. For example in the arts, artists are able to convey what they want to say or what they are thinking using a canvas as a medium. They are able to present their thoughts in a visual presentation, and many have claimed that they don’t need words to think and can visualize mental images of whatever they truly mean to say.
I wholeheartedly agree with my claim as I believe that it is impossible for one to think without language because as young children, we have been taught to think and speak using different languages,therefore, we have been trained to think and convey our thoughts using language.
