NON-VERBALITY OF THOUGHT


Is verbalization necessary for thought ? Well am not going to convince you for a 'yes' or a 'no'. All I am going to do here is to take you to the different intellectual planes of reasoning where you will be responsible for your own stand.

Well first of all I would like to quote Mr. Albert Einstein on this mater:

"the word or the languages, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which serve as the elements of thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined... The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in the second stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will."

So far as I have observed all our thinking is done visually in terms of non-verbal concepts, although the thoughts are often accompanied by inane and almost useless verbal commentary such as "that thing goes with that and that thing goes with that thing."

Often we have difficulty translating our thoughts into words (Even people with good vocab face this problem). Often the reason is that there are not enough words available to express the concepts that are required. And most of the time these concepts are innate feelings and deep thoughts that rise only to find that they don't have the right word to which they can cling and float for others to see.
As a related observation I had notices, on occasion, that if I have been concentrating hard for some while on something of my interest and someone tries to engage me suddenly in conversation then I would find myself almost unable to speak for several seconds.

hmmmm.. But this is not to say that we do not sometimes think in words. It is just that we find it useless in most of creative art like doing maths, science, painting etc. Other kinds of thinking like philosophizing, seem to be much better suited to verbal expression... May be because they(philosophers) immerse themselves into the meaning of 'words' like life, mind, matter, body, etc and their associative 'meaning' they don't reach to any definitive answers, And I feel unconscious mind( I don't know what the last two words mean in terms or language! ) still holds a lot of secrets which are hard for 'words' to explore and make sense( means ?).

As I write this post am pretty much convinced that much sophisticated conscious thinking can be done without verbalization and I insist that words are totally absent from my mind when I really think and I fully agree with Mr. Schopenhauer when he writes, "thoughts die the moment they are embodied with words".

May be we can think without words, but to communicate, to appreciate, to abuse, to be known, and to 'some' degree to show our consciousness we need 'the art of word and its maintenance' and may be this is the reason why many philosophers seem to be of the opinion that language is essential for intelligent thought.

Now if I 'think' where I stand on this issue then my answer will be
ummm.... :)