Language and thought

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]

Um. Okay.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the second of the full cognitive psychology lectures on language.

Um, as I mentioned the other day. Today's topic is the relation between language and thought in a very broad sense, remembering that, um.

Complex language and complex thinking. Uh.

Uh, two of the cognitive abilities that distinguish humans from, uh, non-human animals.

Things we do all the time, as I emphasise, uh, last week, we're talking all the time to ourselves or to other people.

We're reading things in books, on screens and so on.

Uh, and we're thinking about things in all sorts of different ways.

I mean, thoughts is a is a complicated, uh, set of processes and various kinds, some of which Tom talked about earlier in the course.

Um, before I start on the content today, uh, I just wanted to say that, uh, as in most of the other, uh, sessions on this module,

there will be a set of, uh, six mic used for this week's lectures for you to, to try out some Qualtrics.

Uh, the obvious is advice. So if you get wrong, you have to think through why you got them wrong and what the right answers.

Uh, I'm also going to just say one thing today about, um,

another type of question that you see on the exam for this, uh, module, which is the short answer question.

And we have found in, uh. Past years that students have been a bit puzzled about these questions and haven't necessarily tackled them in the best way.

So I'm giving you the key tip to that.

I'll give you a couple more tips next week. Typically a short answer question has 2 or 3 parts, and you've got to give two bits of the answer.

If you write nothing at all, you get no marks. Simple as that.

If you write something, there's a chance that you get some loss.

You cannot be penalised for trying to answer the question.

So unless you're really, really pushed for time, do not leave short answer questions blank in the exam.

That's a definite zero. Writing something is a possible one, 2 or 3.

There are only three more questions. Don't leave them blank.

Okay, that's the top tip for short answer questions. So let's turn to today's content on language and thought.

Um. So here's a bit of background, some general background to tell us why this is an important and interesting issue.

So when we think, we often think in language, as I mentioned last time, people report different things about what some people think.

So they think more in images than in language.

But for most people, most of the time, complex thought involves some kind of internal speech.

So this thing raises the question of how language in general and source in general are related to one another.

Last time we were talking about concepts and we were focusing primarily on single words

or short phrases like American psychologists was one of the examples we looked at.

This time it's a it's a broader question.

It's it's about language more generally, not just words, longer phrases, sentences, even broader aspects of language like discourse and so on.

So what are we going to be talking about? And what should you take home from this lecture?

I'll be talking about, uh, three different views about how language and thoughts are related.

One of which, the Lev Vygotsky view is primarily based on observations about the development of language and thought.

We have to think about empirical evidence that can be brought to bear.

This is cognitive psychology. It's the science of psychology.

What kind of evidence is related to this question about how language and thought, uh, linked to one another?

Uh, and we'll be focusing on some problems with the claims made by Benjamin Lee Wolff,

who's the principal components of one of the three views I'll be talking about.

Problems, uh, the way that he couched his views, which partly related to things of his own personal background, which I'll come to later.

Uh, and will say how his ideas came in to psychology.

Initially they were. Well, there was a very brief period when people were very interested.

Then they were rejected. But more recently there's been, uh, a revival of, uh, interest in his ideas.

And, uh, some empirical evidence has been brought forward which we'll look at, which seems to be consistent with those ideas.

Okay, so just before we move on, let me, uh, let me generate the attendance code for today's lecture.

Uh, here we go. If it's something else.

Better looking? No. So the pin is 0795.

Okay. 4795.

If there's anybody who can't hear what I'm saying, can you check with somebody next to you?

I'm not going to put it on the screen. So four, seven, nine, five. Okay.

So. So to return to the content, um. Last time we were talking about concepts and categories.

Uh, and um, so if concepts reflect categories that are out there in the world which seem, you know, it seems quite plausible.

Yeah. There are things out there that adults, whether we talk about them or not.

So there are things out there that the tables, whether we talk about them or not.

Those kind of concepts that makes complete sense.

Is there something called justice out there, whether we talk about this or not?

Well, that's a different question.

And as I mentioned last time, issues about abstract concepts are quite complicated and can be quite different from issues about concrete concepts.

But if concepts reflect categories that are out there in the world, basically independent of the languages that we use, then.

How we think about the world shapes what language must be like, so that we can talk sensibly about things that are actually out there.

We need labels for things that. So. The, um.

Uh. The way that we think about the world, the way that we categorise things,

and more complicated kinds of thinking determines what languages are going to be likes.

So that view. Oh, sorry.

I'm skipping ahead to the next slide. As I've already hinted in what I was just saying, there are categories like, um.

Social categories, uh, and uh, other kinds of abstract categories where this argument,

there are things out there in the world that we're referring to, uh, um, are not so obvious.

We might think, well, these are things like justice is it maybe is is a socially constructed category and therefore.

The relevant set of concepts. We won't call them justice, because other cultures might think of these things in different ways.

Uh, they may be, um, different for speakers of different languages who are also in different cultures.

And so maybe it's the language that we use that, uh, uh, shapes the way we think about the world.

So that would be the opposite way around.

That would be language determining the way we think rather than the way we think, determining how languages have to be.

Uh, and just to emphasise the point, that second idea is more plausible for abstract concepts like justice, democracy.

Love, maybe hate, and so on. Then it is the concrete concepts of the concept of talking about the natural time concepts like mouth and the artefact,

concepts like building and so on. Okay, I think.

So let's focus first on this traditional view, the traditional view that the thought comes to us.

It's the way we think about the world. It's determined by what's actually out there in the world.

And therefore we have to align, which is have to be built so that we can talk about those things that are out there.

This is I call this the traditional view, which can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy and in particular to Aristotle.

It wasn't really made of stone, but it's a statue on the left.

But other people who have, uh, espoused some version of this kind of view are the very influential developed mentalist Jean Piaget, um,

the very influential linguist Noam Chomsky, and a very influential, um, old fashioned eye person who works on language, Roger Schank.

So it's a it's a widely held, long, uh, established view held across a number of different disciplines, as you can see.

Yeah. And it's it's related to an idea put forward by various philosophers, including Jerry Fodor, that we have a language of sorts,

or we sometimes called it mentalism, which is a language used by the brain to do thinking and.

It's difficult to say exactly what this mentally is,

but the idea is it's probably very much like natural languages, but the causal direction is the other direction,

because we're using this mentally to think in our heads when we're thinking out loud or talking to other people about our thoughts,

expressing our thoughts. We have to use languages that map onto this mentally.

So the mentally is how we think. And then that determines how natural language is.

English, French, Swahili, whatever. That's how they turn out because they they allow us to express into.

So externally what we're thinking internally in this mentally.

So language of thought. Okay.

So that's that's the traditional view source has priority language that to express the thoughts we have.

Kinds of thoughts. We have a pretty common across humanity.

Therefore, all languages have things in common that allow us to express those thoughts.

Now they. Alternative view to that is the Sapir wolf hypothesis, uh.

Also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, or sometimes the Ju hypotheses of linguistic relativity and linguistic linguistic determinism.

The name Sapir Wolf comes from these two guys here.

Edward Sapir, who was an academic linguist in North America, works at Yale in the early part of the 20th century.

And. Benjamin Lee Wolf, who wasn't an academic, um.

I'll say a little bit more about what he was in in minutes. Uh, their view is that the language that somebody speaks.

Determines how they think about the world. And languages are obviously.

At least superficially, quite different from one another.

So the conclusion may be that depending what language you speak, you think in different ways.

That's the relativity. The determinism part of it is the strong version of the hypothesis that the language you speak determines how you think.

And if that language, your language, is different than somebody else's language,

you might be forced to be thinking in a different way from the way the other person's thinking.

So I'm just going to give it. Just to give a bit of background while we're talking about, uh, North American languages here.

Wolf Hall also was a North American. He studied Native American languages.

And here are some of the well-known claims that are sometimes associated with in.

The Hopi language, he claimed there isn't a linear concept of time.

The way we have a linear concept of time in European languages is time passing.

You know, from 1920 to 19 21 to 1922, blah, blah blah.

Um, a well-known one much disputed is that, uh, in various of the languages, there are vastly more words for snow than there are in English.

Very funny article, which I was rereading yesterday by Jeff Pulliam about that.

It's called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.

There's no very good evidence for that.

Uh, and another one, the last one here that if you don't have a word for a concept in your language, it makes it hard or impossible to understand.

And we can illustrate this even between English and German.

German has these long, complicated words.

Things like schadenfreude, uh, which is well known or understand situation, which is to do with the German cultural phenomenon,

which is if you're presented with a plate, say, of small cakes, it's regarded as rude to take the last word on the plate.

So the accent is the little thing that remains on the plate up to that.

So there is you can express it in English, but you need a complex phrase, just as you did for schadenfreude.

Here's another, uh, sort of idea that's associated with Wolf in a in a bit more detail here.

We're moving away from seeing we're focusing more specifically on aspects of a sentence.

So imagine you have the English sentence, it's a dripping spring.

And you want to say, well, how do I say something similar in the language of the Apache?

Well, I won't try and say. The Apache sentence, but you can see the parts of it.

You can kind of see how they relate to the way, the way that the idea is expressed in the words.

And how they're put together is quite different. And.

I mean, the trouble I'm going to come to that.

Wolfe wasn't an academic, so his writing is not academic, and it's quite difficult to know exactly what claims he's making.

But he was in places. He seems to be saying that if this is your language, if you're an Apache speaker and that's your language.

This. Word by word translation reflects how you think about Dripping springs, which is very different from the way you think about it.

If you're thinking about it in in English. Now, another problem, uh, with trying to assess the safety of hypothesis.

And this again stems partly from the, um, clarity or imprecision in some of Woolf's writing.

Um, is that there are you can identify different versions, you can identify the strong version, which is the linguistic determinism version.

If you speak Apache, that forces you to think about the world in a certain way.

That means it's very hard for you to think about the world the way English speakers do, unless you immerse yourself in an English speaking culture.

Learn the English language in the way it's used to talk about the world.

Then there are. There are weaker versions. Versions that say, well, it doesn't force you to think in a certain way.

It makes that way easy in that way difficult.

Although there are very weak versions that just seem to refer to how you remember events and and so we'll see them later.

We'll see an experiment that looks at that many reasons.

But because there are these different versions, it's quite difficult to know whether some version of the hypothesis or other is is true.

So who was Benjamin Lee? Well, I just referred to the article by Jeff full on the Eskimo Vocabulary hoax.

It's a fairly old article, so it's slightly politically incorrect using the term Eskimo as the name of the language.

Um, he described Um Warf as a Connecticut fire prevention dispatcher, and we can language fence.

So he worked in, uh, the insurance industry trying to persuade, uh,

industrial sites or owners of industrial sites to, uh, make changes to their practice to prevent funds.

He attended classes from Sapir, who worked at Yale in those days.

And, um. He did a lot of quite interesting work, as I said, on all American Indian languages that were disappearing.

It was still quite important to try and document these languages while they were still some native speakers,

relatively uncontaminated with, uh, learning English as well as us as kids.

Um. He wrote a lot of non-academic pieces that were published here and there during his lifetime,

but they were collected together by John Carroll in the 1950s after Wolfe died,

and published in this book, language, Thoughts, and Reality Collected Papers or Selected Papers, rather.

And this book came to the attention of psychologists, in particular Erich Lindeberg.

Um, and. Some early experiments in the mid 1950s seem to be producing some evidence in favour of the the Wolfe hypothesis that the language you speak.

Influences or even determines the way you think about things.

But. Very quickly.

Word related to the linguistic linguistic relativity hypothesis in psychology started to focus on processing of colour terms,

discriminating different colours, remembering different colours, and, and so on.

Um, and this work was thought to show that Worf was wrong.

Now, I mean, it's it was slightly weird because remembering this colour is discrimination between similar colours,

and so is a very, very minor corner of human thinking.

But it would tend not to be. It was relatively easy to study, and there was some quite interesting linguistic observations about about atoms.

I'll come to those in a minute, but some. Because, uh, Wolf, as I've said, wasn't an academic and didn't really write academic papers.

Uh, there are a number of criticisms and for the lawsuit related to this aspect of his, his own writing and thinking.

So we saw, uh, in the Dripping Spring example that he appeared to sort of take,

you know, he takes a literal, uh, approach to transliteration or translation.

It was this oh, this looks very this literal translation looks very different from English.

It must reflect a different way of thinking, which is a bit of a, uh, a rapid step.

He seems in places to assume that every aspect of language and language structure is reflected in the way you think about things,

without any real justification for accepting that idea.

Um, we've already seen that. Um.

The fact that you don't have a single word for consent doesn't mean you don't have the concept.

I think English speakers do have a concept of schadenfreude.

It's just that we don't have a single word in English for that.

And here's what it means. It's perfectly straightforward to say what schadenfreude is in English.

It's rather a long phrase, and we have to shorten this.

We import the German word, which we often do. The pig.

Is. 4795.

Um. Perhaps the most important issue about, um.

About what Wolf said, and you might. The perceptive divisive.

Noticed this I did. I have mentioned a couple of times the idea of cultural differences,

and there are always cultural differences that go along with language differences.

So even if you take related, very closely related languages, let's say that's probably the two most closely related.

Uh, European languages, Spanish and Italian.

There are differences in Spanish and Italian cultures. Even more so.

There are differences between the culture that Wolff was.

That is, the European immigrant culture in North America and the native cultures in North America.

And perhaps it's the cultural differences, rather than the language differences that reflect different ways of thinking about the world.

And that's that's, again, more plausible with the abstract kind of concepts than the concrete ones, you know.

If you live in North America, you probably know what a coyote is, whether you speak English or perpetual Hopi or in which or whatever it might be,

but you might have different concepts of of justice and so on within those different cultures.

So that that's that's a really key issue for some of the claims that, Wolf is and somebody.

So, uh, as I just mentioned, the, uh, this work in the 50s and into the 60s that was seen as an anti-war film,

saying that no, language doesn't affect thought.

We all think in the same way. Was focussed on this work in, uh, in, uh, in colour.

There was a lot of psychological work, but there was working linguistics that culminated in this very well-known book by,

uh, Brent Berlin and Paul Kaye called Basic Colour Systems.

Uh, basic coloured sam is a term like red or green, which is primary meaning is a colour medium.

So it's not something like brownes, uh, in English, which is the name for a pinkish colour,

but it's also derives from the fact that the rose is a flower and lots of roses.

Lots of roses are pink. So.

So, somewhat surprisingly for English speakers, some languages only have two basic colour terms,

and they basically correspond to lightish colours versus darkish colours.

Um. Uh.

One like you may or may not know that a very large proportion of the world's languages are found in Papua New Guinea,

and the reason is partly because of the landscape there, which is very hilly.

It's very difficult to get from one valley to the next valley. So you get these isolated groups with their own languages.

Anyway, that's by the by Eleanor Ross, who we talked about last time, who at that time was married to the anthropologist Fritz Heider.

She did work in that area, and one of the groups was there that she worked with was the dog.

And they do have a language in which there are only two colour terms.

Uh, million molar. Which, uh, basically all lightish colours versus all dark colours.

If you want to say anything more specific, then you have to use non-invasive terms.

What rush claim to find is that if you look at the way.

Don. These speakers discriminate between colours, remember colours, classify colours and so on.

Uh, it's very similar to the way the English speakers.

Obviously, these guys are not used to doing psychological experiments in psychological labs in North America.

So they work in a different way, uh, interact with them in different ways.

They may respond more slowly to questions. You know, they may, uh, go off on a bit of a tangent when you talk to them.

The basic findings are that if you look at how they deal with colours, it's very similar to the way the English speakers do.

And, um, in basic colour terms, violin and K drew together information from lots of different languages.

What they found was that there are languages with.

All sorts of different numbers of countries will come to one with five colour terms in a minute.

If you look at different languages, the ones that only have two colour terms have ones that mean dark and light up.

Categorise them as black and white. If you get a third colour term, it's always red.

If you have between 4 and 6.

The next three that come in a yellow, blue and green in some order or other not no fixed order, then brown and then purple, pink, orange and grey.

That's the claim made in Berlin in case book.

But the psychological work that goes along a side that says that no matter how many skeletons you've got, which ones they are.

You think about colours in the same way? The wolves are on.

As I've said, it's kind of weird because that is a really, really tiny corner of human thinking.

Thinking about colour, discriminating between colours, blah blah blah.

That was the. A conclusion that was drawn.

So that's how things stood, more or less until about 2000, when, uh, a number of people started looking at these issues again.

There's some work at Sussex by people you will know.

Certainly.

And I think some of the lectures earlier in this course and, and probably more influential, uh, a woman who's won many prizes for her work and, uh.

We've been looking at a paper of was in the embassy signals. She writes really, really nicely and clearly she's a very smart lady.

There have already been a lot of very interesting work, and I'll mention a couple of things she's done in a minute.

So. This is this is, in a way slightly confusing.

This is a more recent study, again done in a different language.

This is a language with five colour terms and you can see them in the bottom panel.

They are there's a red green and a blue. And then there's a light in the dark.

There are the five colour terms that fits with the ballin and k taxonomy.

The first five to come in, uh, but.

What Robertson and et al found. Unlike what Russian food and others were reporting years ago,

that the way that these people seem to discriminate between colours and soul seemed to map home to their colour terminology in the way that,

uh, Russians claimed in other people's time didn't have. So it's now a little bit less clear.

I mean, there's still results on one side and results on the other.

So, um, we're not really sure what the truth is about perception of colour terms,

but there's, uh, more controversy about it than than there was back in the 1960s.

Um. Another, much more specific piece of work by the robotics game is an experiment with Russian speakers that.

It's well known, uh, among linguists and others and obviously Russian speakers,

that Russian has two basic colour terms for what we call blue in English,

and one of them corresponds to the light blue and the blues, and the other corresponds to the dark blue.

And if you present a string of blues to an English speaking well, they're all blue.

You know, there's a very light blue. The very dark blue.

Um, whereas if you show those two colour, it's a, it's a Russian speakers, the light ones, a golden boy in the dark in the city.

So you've got these two different terms.

Does having those two terms in your language affect the way you process colours and think about colours?

And the answer seems to be yes or yes if you allow language to enter into the picture.

Uh, so you probably know from, uh, from the stuff that the, uh, vision people were talking about, that, uh, you can, uh,

identify physical differences between colours so you can get two colours that are the same physical distance,

distance apart distance in the colour space.

So might be two light blues, might be two dark blues, or it might be some two blues that cross the light dark border.

Uh, and what you find with the Russian speakers is that if they cross that border,

it's much easier for them to make the discrimination because one of them's avoid one.

And today.

Uh, whereas for English speakers that same physical difference is equally different, equally difficult wherever you are, from light blue to dark.

The interesting thing in this study is that if you have a so-called verbal interference source,

that is, if you ask people to internally speak to themselves while they're doing the task,

maybe by going 123451, two, three, four five in their heads,

repeating a sentence or repeating a sentence backwards or whatever it might be, that effect disappears.

So they. The greater ability to to make discriminations across that light blue dark blue border.

Is only found when you're able to use language to encode what you're saying and processing.

And that was another condition where there was a nonverbal interference task.

And that didn't produce the same effect that it was specifically the verbal interference task.

So this does show that if you allow the language to come into play as a Russian speaker,

that does affect how you process colour, which is a kind of morphing phenomenon.

Here's another very clever experiment by layer of Autodesk.

Uh this looks at some. English versus Spanish, and we'll see why in a minute.

But it's to do with an intentional action.

So here's an intentional action of spilling. And here's an unintentional.

So this a weird place is an unintentional actions.

But so they're both actions of spilling if we're just struggling. Talk about speed.

If we look at the way these events are described in English and Spanish, in English, sorry for the intentional actions.

We'll say things like she broke the vase or she spilt the tea or whatever it was.

Um. Spanish is a proud rock language, so usually you wouldn't have the subject pronoun.

It's implicit in the ending of the. But that that's neither here nor there.

These are both. These, uh, both, um, intentional constructions.

She broke the vase means she stood in the accidental case.

In English, she quite typically use a passive.

Uh, whereas in Spanish you use, uh, a construction with this particle, say, which has a number of different uses and meanings.

Um. It's used in reflexive.

So sometimes that it would give the translation is the vase broke itself.

But that's that's slightly misleading that the important thing is that it's different, um, from the way you express things in English.

Uh. So there's two questions asked in this study.

Is there a difference in the way that English and Spanish speakers talk about these events?

And is there a difference in the way that they remember them?

So using the videos that I showed that are not the actual ones used in the study, they were much more stylised.

Um, just so that the, um, experiment was well structured and controlled.

So there was one study in which the speakers had to say what happened.

So they had to use their language to say the vase broke or she broke the vase or whatever it was.

And then there was another study when you watched the films, and then some time later, you were asked,

know who was the person involved in the spelling or who was the first involved in the breaking?

Um, and so. What we're asking here is, do you use the a gentle fall?

She broke the vase. In the case where the there's an intentional action one gets almost all the time in English and Spanish.

What about if it's accidental? Well, actually, English speakers tend to use their genitive form even when it's accidental.

So they don't say the vase broke. They say she broke the vase, whereas the Spanish speakers do use that alternative.

Say if they don't say she broke the vase. So there is a difference in the way you describe the events as you see them just after you see.

Uh, that just that's just a text that, uh, tells you.

What's going on? What happens? What happens in the second study.

This is you've seen the same clips.

Sometime later, you're asked to say what happened or more specifically, which actor was involved in which action.

Um, this was deliberately set up so that it was a, you know, you just had to pick one of two people.

It didn't involve, uh, constructing sentences or anything, but you get the same kind of pattern of results if the if the,

um, action's intentional, you remember which person, whether you speak in English or Spanish.

And that's probably because you said.

Well, it was set up so that it was, ah, that the person wearing the yellow shirts or a person wearing a blue shirt who did it.

Um, whereas if you, if you're Spanish and you've tended not to use the identity form,

because if you don't use the genitive form, you don't mention the person who spilt the tea.

If you're Spanish, you're poorer at remembering which person did it than you are in English.

So in English, if it's an accidental event, you've tended to use the genitive form.

So you've thought in your mind about the person who did it in your description of the event, and you remember that person.

If you're Spanish, there's more of a tendency to use this impersonal event corresponding roughly to the English passive.

The vase broke so you don't say who did it, and then when you asked who did it, you can't remember or you can't remember as well.

I mean, it's not it's not a you know, we're still up at 74%.

But that contrasts with the. Much higher percentage in in English.

So here you do seem to be seeing an effect of the language you speak, both on the way you initially describe an event,

which is kind of the way you see it and perceive it and think about it as it happens.

And also because you've thought of that in the particular way,

then it might be easier or more difficult to remember which person did it, if it was actually then so again,

it looks as though these quite subtle language differences here are affecting the way that you think about the event,

both as it happens in how you store in memory.

So that's why I said it when I was talking about the, uh, wolf hypothesis and the weaker versions of the earlier on, or something to do with memory.

This is an example of where you're seeing a memory effect, but you're also seeing an effect at the stage where you perceive the events as well.

Uh, so let's just. So we've talked about two views, which you can see is diametrically opposite.

We think in a certain way that affects how language is turned out.

Or we speak a certain language and that affects the way we're thinking about the world.

So it's thoughts are language or language. The thought.

You must ask yourself, is there a middle way between these two?

Uh, relatively stranger as well. An interesting set of ideas comes from this guy, Russian developmental psychologist.

Levy got scared. Um. In my view.

This relates to the last one. He would have been more influential and more interesting than Piaget had he lived, but he died at 37.

The prime of his powers compared with Piaget, who, um, lived to a ripe old age of 84.

Uh, very interesting ideas. As I mentioned at the beginning,

the ideas that the Gonski put forth about how language and thoughts are related are primarily based on developmental observations.

So it's a sort of it's a different type of perspective.

So to say it's a middle weight, it's not kind of yeah, there's this view and that view and this is right in the middle.

Uh, but it is a view that, uh, takes a more subtle and sophisticated view of how language and thought might be related to one another.

So a couple of his crucial observations were that language and thought seem to be initially rather separate from one another.

This is in, uh, perhaps the period of, you know, when you first start hearing language, you kind of things towards the end,

the first year of a, an infant's life, maybe through to a year and a half, two years, depending on the infant.

So at this stage, what you'll see is imitation is.

Apparently it's kids trying to learn how to make the sounds of their language.

So the echo things that they hear about around them.

Uh, but perhaps not. There's not a crucial communication component.

I mean, there's there's some doubts about exactly what's going on there, but.

A large part of what's going on is imitative babbling, but you're trying to learn how to make the speech sounds.

And to the extent that kids at that age are thinking about the world, they're probably doing in a non-linguistic way,

probably in the kinds of ways that you see, uh, in various kinds of non-human animals.

The other crucial observation from from the Gonski is that, uh.

Internal speech gradually seems to become the main form of thinking.

And. And in fact, it starts out as external speech that goes along with thinking.

And it becomes internalised as the kids get so.

So as I've said. Well, having said that, we got there are basically three main stages of development is his idea of the stages isn't.

So um, it's not it's not so constrained as that Piaget where you see these very rapid and,

uh, quite consequential transitions from one state to another.

But as I've already said in the first stage, this is with rather young infants.

You've got this pre linguistic babbling, which seems to be trying to learn the sounds of the language.

And as far as we can tell, the kinds of thoughts that people have.

But like little kids have um, probably similar to those of non-human animals in stage two, when kids get 2 to 3 four, you start to hear.

Over spoken accompaniments to to behave.

Now we got some cool. This egocentric speech. I speech directed towards yourself as the speaker.

That is, the kids, as it were, saying things for its own benefit.

It's not trying to communicate mainly with others.

They're trying to to direct attention to what's going on.

And in the early stages, a kid will do something and then say something about what they've done.

But as the stage progresses, as kids move from 2 to 3 to 4 to 5,

the language tends to come earlier and earlier and eventually before any behaviour actually happens.

Um, and then in it, as that stage progresses and you move into the next stage, the overt speech disappears.

And then we got Oscar's idea is that the speech has become internalised,

and this internal speech is the main way of, uh, engaging in complex thoughts.

So that's the idea that, you know, you kind of thinking in language inside your head, but, you know,

you don't you don't speak out all the time, partly because you don't need to anymore and partly because that's not socially desirable.

Um, so. You've got this internal speech, but we got his claim is that.

Language and thoughts are never identical.

Because if they were, then that might seem to support, uh, one of the two extreme views, depending what you have.

You thought the relationship came out? Um, so this slide just makes some points that I've made before but are important in thinking about this issue.

It's tempting to say the. Most of adult complex thinking, uh, involves internal speech.

And we've seen that that was kind of we got stuck in a conclusion about what was happening in stage three.

And because most people report that, then the psychologists who studied this A tended to think that that's that's the truth of the matter.

But people who've done more, uh, uh, nuanced studies of, uh, how people think,

what people say about how they think, particularly autobiographical reports by quotes, interesting people.

Um. You will see a wider variety.

You see. You know, people like Einstein, for example, claiming that a lot of his thinking is non-verbal and that involves either,

well, two related things, either imagery or spatial thinking.

Um, so that there is if you look at people's internal reports of, uh, whether their thoughts is mainly in terms of internal speech.

Most people say yes, but there's a substantial minority of people who give different accounts.

Um. So that's that's one thing to bear in mind.

Uh, and then uh, another thing to, to, to think about is obviously we will attribute thinking to,

as I've already hinted a number of times to non-human animals,

you know, very readily to great apes, fairly readily to domestic animals like our favourite dogs and cats.

Maybe too nice. Maybe two frogs. Perhaps not too.

Worms. Anyway, there is there is a lot of thinking in the animal kingdom that we would have to say is not related to language,

because those guys don't have languages. So what's that thinking like and how is it related?

We've seen that we got squeezed. It was basically at the early stages that humans early stages of development.

Your thinking had to be that form. But of course you have to ask yourself even a few novelists.

To what extent is some of that, some of our thinking still in that full?

Um, and that raises questions about, you know, do animals think about the world in the same way as we do?

What you might say in the sense, yes. I mean. All, um, mammals, reptiles.

And so they're interested in finding food. They must, in the sense think about food and how to find it.

But we have to be a bit careful. I've just given this quote from one of my favourite philosophers,

but I'm not really sure on what basis he made it or whether I really believe it or not that big.

Einstein said some points, and I think in part two of the Philosophical Investigations, if a line could speak, we could not understand.

And that's the idea that. Well, big and shiny is the term form of life.

Alliance form of life is very different from a human's form of life.

That sort of maps onto this idea is if you live in an English speaking culture or you live in an Apache speaking culture,

maybe your forms of life are very different in your ways of speaking and thinking about the world of different, which is a Warfield kind of idea.

As I've already. Well, as I hinted right at the beginning, do you think about these questions?

You need to think. What's the evidence for one view or the what does it show?

There isn't any evidence for that. Closing Philosophical Investigations for anyone.

So let's just summarise what have been talking about today. How are language and thought related?

The traditional view, accepted widely across a range of academic disciplines, is that thought shapes language.

So the properties of a lot of languages allow us to express the thoughts that humans are capable of.

Now, I haven't really I mentioned this a bit last time, but the idea is.

Or a question that you need to ask in that context.

Okay. Human languages look very different from one another.

How does this. How does that wide range of differences map onto this idea that languages have to be the way they are to, um,

allow us to express the kinds of thoughts that people have which are fixed by our ways of thinking and not by language.

The idea is that although languages look superficially different, um,

underlying those superficial differences are a set of universal principles, and they're the principles that Chomsky,

who I mentioned earlier, called universal grammar, so that although languages look different,

they all they all work in similar ways and ways that are related to the way that we think.

So that's the traditional view. The alternative view is the Sapir wolf linguistic relativity hypothesis.

And that says that language is the language we speak,

which may be different from the way people over there speak shapes the way that we think about the world.

So that's a. Uh, if we speak different languages, we think about the world in different ways.

And as I've said there, there's this very strong deterministic version of that view which seems to make

communication between people who speak very different languages pretty much impossible.

And that's kind of slightly implausible. And then there are weaker forms that I've seen some favour in psychology.

Then finally that talks about we got a sort of middle way, some middle way, in that he doesn't think that language fully determines thinking,

or thinking fully determines language, but his approach is completely different.

It's looking at the development of relationship between language and thinking in in, uh, in children.

As far as the psychology is concerned, um, there has been a lot of interest in psychology in wars to.

Very brief period in the 50s where people was reporting experiments that seemed to support it.

And all this work on colour that seemed to was claimed to go against it.

And then more recently, work by borrowed it skin others.

That seems to say, well, at least in some instances,

you can see a quite clear relationship between properties of certain languages and things that you see in psychological experiments.

So as I said, I've got a couple of supplementary slides that you can go on and look at.

There's, uh. Uh. Some more stuff following on from politics, because you've done an experiment,

and then there's just a list of other things that you might think about when you're asking questions about how language and thoughts are related,

you can go and look at those. So as I said out, I'll, uh, I'll publish the example multiple choice questions later today or over the weekend.

Have a look at them. If you get any wrong, try and work out why.

You can always post the question in the discussion if you can't figure it out.

And I'll come with another tip or two next week on the short answer questions.

So thank you for today.