Thinking and Language

Judith Greene

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138696471
• eBook ISBN: 9781315524436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Language in Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1875, this book discusses thinking and language and traces the development of different pscyological approaches, assessing their theoretical significance and the experimental evidence behind them. It ends by drawing together the various lines of argument to arrive at some general conclusions about language and thought, since it clearly emerges that the two are inextricably linked.

1
Introduction

There is a special difficulty about trying to write a book about thinking and language, since these are just the processes that go into writing the book itself. (At least one hopes some thinking has gone into it and it is certainly presented in written language.) Take as just one example the logic and psychology of reasoning which are the subject matter of chapter 4, section 4. The experiments quoted there show that people can make valid logical deductions and test hypotheses against empirical evidence, but that they often resort to looser sorts of reasoning in everyday life. Since logical deductive and inductive reasoning form the basis of all scientific inquiry, how can the psychologist stand outside the system when his very methods of scientific investigation are the subject matter of his own investigations?

A further problem is that, despite the logical distinction between scientific theories and the experiments designed to test them, psychological theories of language and thinking often stem from preconceived theoretical approaches to behaviour in general. In turn, these determine the kinds of behaviour that will be experimentally investigated. If a psychologist believes that there is no essential difference between human thought and the way a rat learns to run down a maze, then he will be likely to design experiments in which human beings are hard put to display anything but rat-like behaviour. On the other hand, a belief in the complexity of human mental processes encourages experiments in which people are given the opportunity to solve complicated problems requiring logical reasoning and creative thinking. The argument then becomes to what extent, even in the apparently simple rote learning experiments, human beings are trying to devise logical strategies to deal with the situation; another ploy is to demonstrate that even rats are not as simple as they seem.

Clearly, in a book of this size it is impossible to cover all the psychological research which has been done on thinking and language. I have preferred to discuss the main theoretical approaches, and, rather than skating over the full range of evidence, concentrate on a representative selection of experiments, describing them in sufficient detail to get over the flavour of what is really going on. This has inevitably meant that some important areas have only been mentioned in passing; for instance, imagery, cognitive styles and cognitive development under thinking (but see D4 and C2) and phonetics, language acquisition and sociolinguistics under language (but see C2).

Finally, a brief word about how this book is organized. Chapters 2 to 4 concentrate on theoretical and experimental approaches to thinking, especially as it is used in problem solving. Chapter 5 takes up the question of possible relations between thinking and language, to lead into chapters 6 and 7 on theories and experiments concerning language. You can, of course, start at the beginning and read through to the end, as with a novel or detective story, guessing as you go along what the final conclusions are going to be. But a better strategy may be to turn straight to the end and read chapter 8 first. It may not seem to mean much without a prior explanation of some of the terms used, but it does summarize the main themes and arguments. As you follow through the theories and arguments in the main body of the book, every now and then something may strike a bell, at which point a quick look at the conclusions in chapter 8 may well help to clarify the issue. Reading a book has a lot in common with going on a journey, so, whichever way you decide to tackle it, bon voyage.

2
What is thinking?

If asked to define thinking, most people would probably agree on a list of mental activities including all or some of the following: daydreams, wishes, fantasies, images, taking in ideas, ruminating over ideas, having new ideas, philosophical theorizing, political arguments, making decisions, reading, writing, planning a holiday, working out a problem – and I dare say one could add many more. How do we arrive at such a list? Essentially by scanning what goes on inside our head during our waking – and perhaps sleeping – hours: in other words, what passes through our conscious minds. Clearly, there is some quality which enables us to distinguish between the mental activity we call thinking and other more physically overt kinds of behaviour – although, as we shall see, this is not a distinction acceptable to all psychologists.

Perhaps one essential feature of thinking is that it seems to be under our own control, in the sense that we are free to conjure up the world – or even an imaginary world – and try out various courses of action in our minds without necessarily committing ourselves to action. It has been argued that it is this property of being able to run through actions symbolically rather than in actuality that constitutes human thinking; in the same way a bridge-builder will create models to try out stresses and strains without going to the expense of building a full-scale bridge each time. And yet we all know times when our thoughts seem to ‘take over’, although, interestingly, this is often taken as indicating some kind of abnormal state.

1 Conscious and unconscious thought

The subjectively different ‘feel’ of consciously controlled ‘rational’ thought and unconscious ‘irrational’ thought is mirrored in a distinction that has of ten been made in psychological theories of thinking. Neisser (1963) summarizes several versions of this dichotomy: intuition versus reason, autistic versus realistic thinking, primary versus secondary process. The first is a traditional philosophical distinction, the second stems from Bleuler’s analysis of schizophrenic thought, the third from Freud’s definitions of unconscious and conscious mental processes. Neisser argues that the underlying distinction is between a logical, reality-oriented type of thinking as opposed to the elusive fragments of thought that appear and reappear seemingly from nowhere, following not the laws of logic but the vagaries of free association. Neisser draws an analogy with computer programs which can be either sequential, in that each step follows as the result of a previous operation, or parallel, where decisions depend on many simultaneous operations. After pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of each method, Neisser suggests that both have a place in the multiple activity of human thinking. However, he makes the point that, although many mental activities may be going on simultaneously, only one can be the focus of our conscious attention at any one time. Under normal circumstances this would be a sequential process carrying out rational, logical operations adapted to controlling our behaviour in the real world. Parallel or multiple processing, on the other hand, is likened to the multitude of irrational thoughts and perceptions of which we are not usually aware but which can on occasion become part of our conscious thinking. Although Neisser equates multiple and sequential processing with Freud’s primary and secondary process, Freud’s position was that, while unconscious processes affect behaviour, they are never accessible to consciousness, except perhaps in a censored form in dreams or the free associations produced in psychoanalysis. Neisser’s interpretation is more like William James’s notion of ideas hovering around in the fringe of consciousness, half attended to, but capable of suddenly entering consciousness, as in the case of a mother who is half consciously listening for a child’s cry.

For most of us, it might be said that Neisser is flattering the human mind by supposing that the norm is to concentrate on a carefully worked out logical sequence of operations rather than being at the mercy of every passing thought. But complaints about lack of concentration and distractibility have to be weighed against the advantages of a mind open to situations that may suddenly require attention. Moreover, Neisser, like many other writers, believes that creativity depends on unconscious free associations being allowed to break through the formalistic constraints of logical thinking. Under the guise of convergent (logical) thinking and divergent (tangential) thinking, just this contrast has provided the rationale for the recent interest in tests of creative abilities (see discussion in section 4).

So far we have been trying to describe thinking by examining the contents of our minds. But there are several snags about this method of introspection. For one thing, as soon as one starts thinking about thinking, this new activity subtly alters whatever processes were already going on. Or, to use Neisser’s terms, the act of examining our thought processes itself takes over the role of the main focus of conscious attention, pushing other thinking out into the fringe. In any case, plausible as is the notion of unconscious thought processes, they are by definition resistant to conscious introspection.

For reasons such as these, psychologists have tried to find other ways of observing processes that by their very nature are unobservable mental events. In their attempts to solve this fundamental methodological problem of externalizing thinking, they have tended to confine their investigations to those kinds of thinking that are easiest to manipulate and control. What it usually comes down to is that, after a ritual bow to the richness of our mental life, discussion centres on just one type of thinking, namely, problem solving.

The point about problem solving which makes it seem more amenable to experimentation is that an experimenter can set his subjects a definite task. Assuming that they are well motivated – and most subjects appear surprisingly so – it can be assumed that their thinking will be directed towards the goal of achieving a solution. Instead, then, of trying to pin down the more wayward kinds of thinking which may be fleeting and unpredictable even to the person experiencing them, or grappling with the complexity of philosophical reflections about thought itself, the task becomes the more manageable one of deducing a subject’s thought processes from his behaviour in dealing with a carefully specified problem.

But, even if one limits thinking to problem solving, there is still a difficulty about defining problem-solving behaviour. For instance, do you solve a problem every time you reach for your toothbrush or walk downstairs? Or does a problem only arise when your toothbrush is not where you expect it, or your legs or the stairs have disappeared overnight? Neisser defines a problem as occurring on just those occasions when the obvious previously learned response is not appropriate, since it is only then that one has to produce a novel solution. On the other hand, there is no doubt that even when faced with the trickiest problem we make use of methods and strategies that have worked well in the past rather than starting from scratch each time. What is involved here is the relation between current thinking and past experience.

2 Thinking and memory

To take this point a bit further, there are two ways in which the relation between thinking and past experience can be approached. First, one can ask to what extent thinking itself can be considered as a learning process, in the sense of learning to produce responses appropriate to the situation. Since this is the basic tenet underlying the S–R school of psychology, I shall come back to it when discussing theories of thinking in the next chapter. Here, I shall be concerned with the second, even more general question of how past experience gets incorporated into current thinking. So far the emphasis has been on the transient nature of the mental processes that occupy our minds from one moment to the next. But, as we all know, besides these current activities, the contents of our minds include a vast store of more or less permanent information.

The question of how information is stored in our memories has fascinated psychologists since the earliest days (see A6). However, most work in the field has concentrated on the learning of individual items that after a certain interval of time have to be reproduced exactly. Following in the tradition inaugurated by Ebbinghaus’s monumental work in the 1880s on memorization of nonsense syllables (such as WOF, JIK), experiments have been designed to look at the laws governing storage of meaningless items. It is only very recently that interest has shifted to the way in which we build up a permanent store of interconnected conceptual systems which represent our knowledge of the world (for further discussion see chapter 6, section 5).

When one considers memory in this way, it is obvious that, far from remembering unrelated items, even our most basic representations of reality are grouped into class concepts like ‘dog’, ‘animal, ‘red’, ‘justice’, and so on. Perhaps because of their original preoccupation with storage of items, experimental psychologists have tended to set up a dichotomy between concepts as the objects or raw material of thinking, on the one hand, and actual thinking processes on the other. This leads to the paradox that, if concepts are needed for thinking, and yet some sort of thinking is needed to acquire concepts in the first place, how can either process get off the ground?

However, a quite different approach to memory has been to regard it not as a reproductive store where copies or images of concepts are laid down, but rather as a continuously active process. (Bartlett, 1932). Pointing out that our use of previous experience virtually never takes the form of exact repetition, Neisser (1967) argues that what are recorded in memory are the active processes by which we originally constructed our perception of reality.

An interesting point is that this equation of memory with previous action fits in surprisingly well with some other, quite independently arrived at, psychological theories. Although it is possible to make only the briefest reference to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development (see C2), his central notion is that the child’s ability to represent and act symbolically on the world results from the internalization of physical actions. Since concepts such as number, space and time are analysed in terms of the active operations that a child must be able to carry out, there can be no dichotomy between concepts as the objects of thought and mental operations.

In the field of memory, Craik and Lockhart (1972) have recently suggested that memory consists, not of copies or images stored in little boxes in the brain, but of traces of the original processing activities which can be reactivated on later occasions. A similar trend can be seen in the development of computer programs, where it has been found that the most suitable programming languages for simulating human problem solving are those in which there is no essential difference between program instructions and the data stored in the computer’s memory.

All these views converge on the central idea that memory is a dynamic repository of our past actions, which builds up an internal representation of our experience of the world. Current thinking draws on the traces of previous mental operatons and, at the same time, results in a new restructuring of experience, which itself becomes part of the cumulative memory record. This continuous interplay between past and present thinking makes it impossible to draw a clear demarcation line between thinking and memory, or between learning and problem solving. Problems will vary according to the extent to which resurrected traces of past operations will be sufficient to provide a solution or, alternatively, whether a great deal of symbolic restructuring of earlier experience will be needed. In the next section I have suggested a basis for grading problems according to the relative levels of old or new thinking required.

3 Levels of problem solving

Level 1: Solver already knows solution (e.g. that Paris is the capital of France)

Level 2: Solver already knows the rules for obtaining solution (e.g. formula for doing long division sums)

Level 3: Solver learns correct responses during task (e.g. finding the way through a maze)

Level 4: Solver has to select and evaluate operations for obtaining a solution (e.g. doing a crossword puzzle)

Level 5: Solver has to reformulate problem and/or produce some unusual method of solution (e.g. inventing a new kind of windscreen wiper)

Level 6: Solver has to realize that a problem exists at all (e.g. Newton realizing that the falling apple needed explanation).

Looking at this grading of problems, one point that immediately springs to mind is that the level of thought required depends on each individual’s past experience with similar problems. A child who has no previous knowledge of long division will obviously be in a totally different position from an adult for whom it is a trivial problem. More subtly, de Groot (1965) has some very interesting things to say about the way chess problems appear to chess masters and to less experienced players. He talks about a ‘treasury of ready experience’ which enables the more experienced player to ‘see’ the position of the chess pieces in configurations which themselves represent the possible consequences of alternative moves. Apparently, it is impossible for chess masters even to imagine how the board looks to a weaker player, who consciously has to work out possible moves. In exactly the same way, experience with geometry problems or, to take another example, familiarity with map reading changes one’s actual perception of the problem, transforming it into something with an easy and obvious solution.

But over and above amount of experience, can any of the difference be put down to a person’s intelligence, either in the way he is able to structure his past experience or in his ability to apply it to a new problem? Ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is thinking?
• 3 Theories of thinking
• 4 Problem-solving experiments
• 5 Thinking and language: some problems
• 6 Theories of language
• 7 Psycholinguistic experiments
• 8 Thinking and language: some conclusions
• Further Reading
• References and Name Index
• Subject Index