Language and Communication

Is it possible to think without language?

Many intellectuals, especially those with a background in the humanities, literary people, politicians and philosophers, believe that thinking must be based on language. By this they mean:

Manipulating thoughts in the mind must necessarily happen by making strings of words in gramatically well-formed sentences.

Symptoms of this approach to thought are:

Cultural radio/TV programmes are mainly "talk shows", i.e. people talking to other people, with the only communication being strings of words. If there are images, they are of the people themselves.
Philosophical books almost never contain anything but words: no diagrams, no numbers, no sketches or pictures.
Halls of Parliament have no means of displaying graphical information. This holds for every single such hall I have visited, and I have never seen any televised assembly in which anything other than pure, spoken language was used. That includes all but one of the bitter debates in the UN about the war in Iraq (the exception was the show of an aerial photograph).
Conferences on non-technical subjects use almost exclusively language.

I have also witnessed the following incidents:

The technical assistant in the European Parliament was shocked at my request to have a screen and projector put up so I could show some graphs there. This sort of communication simply "was not done", and nothing was foreseen except simultaneous translation into other languages.
At a German government-organized conference on the future influence of multimedia I was the only plenary speaker who used graphs, diagrams and images. Everyone else read from a fully typed-out text, prepared beforehand, using only language. And this was, as I remarked in my lecture, a conference about multimedia.
A meeting at conference of the World Economic Forum had a large, powerful and therefore fairly noisy projector in the room. It was on all the time, projecting the title of the meeting and a logo on a large screen. It served no purpose but consumed energy and made it difficult for participants to hear each other.

Clearly, we have a problem here!

The technological aids in thinking

Today we have a lot of communication going on with images, but very little with numbers and graphs.

Certainly most scientists and technical people can and do think in terms of diagrams, numbers, formulae, graphs.

Language may have been enough for non-technical civilisations. Language is itself a technology: writing and grammar have not always been in use. They came with cities and made cities possible. We did move away from hieroglyphs to alphabets, we also simplified grammar a lot (e.g. from Latin to English). And with printing we changed from difficult to read gothic letters to very readable electronic fonts. But these are just small improvements in efficiency, the basis still remains language.

I would argue for the opposite point of view: is it possible to express any thought in only a string of words? I believe not: try to convince mathematicians to use words only. Or architects, or engineers, or scientists.

Can we improve communication dramatically, away from language? Yes, it has already been done: the formalisms used in science are not language. Without them our technological civilisation would simply be impossible.

I'm rather suspicious of communication without support from numbers, graphs and images, especially if it is political.

An article in New Scientist (5 January 2008, p.42) discusses an approach to understanding physics by using a different type of language, not based on nouns but on processes.

Danger

In a society based on technology it is simply dangerous to make policy on the basis of language constructs only.

next planned revision: 2009-11