3 The place of natural language in thought
When the question of the place of natural language in cognition has been
debated by philosophers the discussion has, almost always, been conduc-
teda prioriin universalist terms. Various arguments have been proposed
for the claim that it is a conceptually necessary truth thatallthought
requires language (for example: Wittgenstein, 1921, 1953; Davidson, 1975,
1982b; Dummett, 1981, 1989; McDowell, 1994). But these arguments all
depend, in one way or another, upon an anti-realist conception of the mind
- claiming, for instance, that we cannotinterpretanyone as entertaining
any givenWne-grained thought in the absence of linguistic behaviour
(Davidson, 1975). Since the view adopted in this book – and shared by
most cognitive psychologists – is quite strongly realist, we do not propose
to devote any time to such arguments.
Notice, too, that Davidsonet al. are committed to denying that any
non-human animals can entertain genuine thoughts, given that it is very
doubtful whether any such animals are capable of understanding and
using a natural language (in the relevant sense of ‘language’, that is – see
Premack, 1986). This conclusion conXicts, not just with common-sense
belief, but also with what can be discovered about animal cognition, both
experimentally and by observation of their behaviour in the wild (Walker,
1983; Allen and BekoV, 1997). So not only are the arguments of Davidson
et al. unsound, but we have independent reasons to think that their
conclusion is false.
We propose, therefore, to take it for granted that thought isconceptually
independent of natural language, and that thoughts of many types can
actuallyoccur in the absence of such language. But this leaves it open as a
possibility thatsometypes of thought may involve language as a matter of
natural necessity, given the way in which human cognition is structured. It
is on this, weaker, claim that we shall focus. Such claims seem to us to have
been unjustly under-explored by researchers in the cognitive sciences –
partly, no doubt, because they have been run together with thea prioriand
universalist claims of some philosophers, which have been rightly rejected.
We shall refer to all forms of this weaker claim as (versions of) thecognitive
conception of language, since they have in common that they assign to
natural language some constitutive place in central cognitive processes of
thinking and reasoning. The contrasting standard-cognitive-science view
of language as a mere input/output system of the mind – that is, as a mere
conduitfor passing beliefs from mind to mind – we shall refer to as the
(exclusively)communicative conception of language. Of course, on any view
language is going to be used for purposes of communication. The question
is: what else can it do for us?
208 Forms of representation