Language Initiates Thinking:Language Singularity and Thinking's Initial Gene
In this article,we defend the necessary connection between language and thinking by an original philosophical argument,in response to the challenging article"Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought"(LFC,meaning"language for communication"),published in Nature(June,2024),by a scientist team of E.Fedorenko,S.Piantadosi and E.Gibson.This article neither denies the achievement of brain science,nor the experimental evidence offered by the team of LFC.However,we argue that brain science does not provide the sufficient knowledge of the operations of brain so far,especially the mysterious quantum phenomena or the unexplainable emergences in our brains,something of which may be underlying the unrevealed link between language and thinking.And we are skeptical of the reductionism in terms of physicalism,which fails to explain the complexity of the multi-dimensional effects in the emergence engaged with civilizational or non-physical factors.Language and thinking are exactly the complexity of the cooperation of the physical and non-physical including the history of civilization as well as the logic of cogito.We argue for the necessary cooperation of thinking and language,though not identical,based upon an analysis in abductive reasoning or retroductive logic.He argues that 1)the concept of language should be confined to the developed language that facilitates or mediates all possibilities of thinking,which is better not to be applied to an overextended family that includes the creatural or prehuman signal systems,for the conceptual extension might lead to confusions.To be noted,the"categorical isolation",something of a reproductive isolation,between signal system and true language makes it impossible for a signal system to evolve naturally or spontaneously into a language;2)a true language should manifest the necessary capacity to operate reflexivity,or the reflexive explanations of itself.A true language should be the one of reflexivity,corresponding to the true thinking as cogito of reflexivity.In one word,without reflexivity,there could be no true language,nor the thinking as cogito.The correspondence between a reflexive language and the reflexive thinking suggests their necessary connection,since no other form of thinking has been found.The language cases in LFC to prove the communication without thinking seem too simple to evoke thinking,for they could be explained within the stimulus-response pattern,as the similar cases of a signal system only for communication.It seems that the communication without thinking or the thinking without language is unlikely to work in the cases of logical inference,plan-making,predictions,and problem-solving;3)the evolution from signal system to language was a revolution,an"ontological event",which was launched with the invention of negation,a magic word of"is-not".Negation has let human mind open to and see many things beyond communication.As this paper argues,negation implies the further invention of possibilities other than actuality,and the consciousness of the future of uncertainty,then the indetermined infinity,which has created the space a priori for thinking and leading to the fabrications of so many things prior to communication.Moreover,the function of negation(～)should have activated the functions as conjunction(∧)and disjunction(∨),so that logic has been made potentially possible.Our conclusion is that,the emergence of language by means of the invention of negation was an event of singularity that has created the speciation of the true language,which is constitutionally of and for thinking.It indicates that language has gone through a Kairos of the reversal of its dominating function from the tool of communication to the form of thinking.
万方数据
维普
