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Title: Philosophy/Philosophy of Mind/Language of Thought - The Role of Language in Intelligence Article by Daniel Dennett, published in What is Intelligence?, The Darwin College Lectures (1994).
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The Role of Language in Intelligence
The Role of Language in Intelligence
in What is Intelligence?, The Darwin College Lectures, ed. Jean Khalfa, Cambridge,
Cambridge Univ. Press. 1994
The Role of Language in Intelligence
Daniel C. Dennett
1. Does thought depend on language?
We human beings may not be the most admirable species on the planet, or the most likely to
survive for another millennium, but we are without any doubt at all the most intelligent. We are
also the only species with language. What is the relation between these two obvious facts?
Before going on to consider that question, I must pause briefly to defend my second premise.
Don't whales and dolphins, vervet monkeys and honey bees (the list goes on) have languages of
sorts? Haven't chimpanzees in laboratories been taught rudimentary languages of sorts? Yes, and
body language is a sort of language, and music is the international language (sort of) and politics
is a sort of language, and the complex world of odor and olfaction is another, highly emotionally
charged language, and so on. It sometimes seems that the highest praise we can bestow on a
phenomenon we are studying is the claim that its complexities entitle it to be called a language--of
sorts. This admiration for language--real language, the sort only we human beings use--is well-founded. The expressive, information-encoding properties of real language are practically limitless
(in at least some dimensions), and the powers that other species acquire in virtue of their use of
proto-languages, hemi-semi-demi-languages, are indeed similar to the powers we acquire thanks
to our use of real language. These other species do climb a few steps up the mountain on whose
summit we reside, thanks to language. Looking at the vast differences between their gains and
ours is one way of approaching the question I want to address:
How does language contribute to intelligence?
I once saw a cartoon showing two hippopotami basking in a swamp, and one was saying to the
other: "Funny--I keep thinking it's Tuesday!" Surely no hippopotamus could ever think the
thought that it's Tuesday. But on the other hand, if a hippopotamus could say that it was thinking
any thought, it could probably think the thought that it was Tuesday.
What varieties of thought require language? What varieties of thought (if any) are possible
without language? These might be viewed as purely philosophical questions, to be investigated by
a systematic logical analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of
various thoughts in various minds. And in principle such an investigation might work, but in
practice it is hopeless. Any such philosophical analysis must be guided at the outset by reflections
about what the "obvious" constraining facts about thought and language are, and these initial
intuitions turn out to be treacherous.
We watch a chimpanzee, with her soulful face, her inquisitive eyes and deft fingers, and we very
definitely get a sense of the mind within, but the more we watch, the more our picture of her mind
swims before our eyes. In some ways she is so human, so insightful, but we soon learn (to our
dismay or relief, depending on our hopes) that in other ways, she is so dense, so
uncomprehending, so unreachably cut off from our human world. How could a chimp who so
obviously understands A fail to understand B? It sometimes seems flat impossible--as impossible
as a person who can do multiplication and division but can't count to ten. But is that really
impossible? What about idiot savants who can play the piano but not read music, or children with
Williams Syndrome (Infantile Hypercalcemia or IHC) who can carry on hyperfluent, apparently
precocious conversations but are so profoundly retarded they cannot clothe themselves?
Philosophical analysis by itself cannot penetrate this thicket of perplexities. While philosophers
who define their terms carefully might succeed in proving logically that--let's say--mathematical
thoughts are impossible without mathematical language, such a proof might be consigned to
irrelevance by the surprising discovery that mathematical intelligence does not depend on being
able to have mathematical thoughts so defined!
Consider a few simple questions about chimpanzees: could chimpanzees learn to tend a fire--could
they gather firewood, keep it dry, preserve the coals, break the wood, keep the fire size within
proper bounds? And if they couldn't invent these novel activities on their own, could they be
trained by human beings to do these things? I wonder. Here's another question. Suppose you
imagine something novel--I hereby invite you to imagine a man climbing up a rope with a plastic
dustbin over his head. An easy mental task for you. Could a chimpanzee do the same thing in her
mind's eye? I wonder. I chose the elements--man, rope, climbing, dustbin, head--as familiar
objects in the perceptual and behavioral world of a laboratory chimp, but I wonder whether a
chimp could put them together in this novel way--even by accident, as it were. You were
provoked to perform your mental act by my verbal suggestion, and probably you often perform
similar mental acts on your own in response to verbal suggestions you give yourself--not out
loud, but definitely in words. Could it be otherwise? Could a chimpanzee get itself to perform
such a mental act without the help of verbal suggestion? |
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Article | by | Daniel | Dennett, | published | in | What | is | Intelligence?, | The | Darwin | College | Lectures | (1994). |
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http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/rolelang.htm
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Article by Daniel Dennett, published in What is Intelligence?, The Darwin College Lectures (1994).
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