language is the vehicle of thought

October 07, 2003

“Thought and language are intimately associated. The expression of a thought is not merely a postscript to the process of thinking the thought in the first place. It’s not as if our thoughts exist and grow in some pure, ethereal “thoughtworld”, devoid of any manifestation, until such time as we choose to pluck one out of the mist and condense it into base words. No! The act of expressing a thought is part and parcel of the thinking itself. Language is the vehicle of thought.” (Chris Crawford)

I have always felt that the ways that we communicate affect how we think. When I was in high school I spoke 3 languages (English, Spanish and German) and had studied a bit of Latin and French. I choose which college I wanted to go to because I was impressed that they taught 13 foreign languages. I was intrigued by the observation that some languages have multiple words for something that another language covers in a single word. It wasn’t till much later that I realized that I probably wanted to study cognitive science, rather than spoken language fluency.

In the meantime I majored in computer science. It was practical, yet interesting. (It balanced my impractical other-major of visual art.) I added C++, Pascal and assembly language to my collection. One way of thinking about programming is that it is the act of naming things. In writing classes and methods, we define nouns and verbs. Writing code is the perpetual evolution of a specific language, customized for describing the task at hand.

I agree with Chris Crawford that communication develops thought. The passage above is from his book You Should Learn to Program. I already know how to program, but enjoyed his first chapter. It reminded me of why I like to keep a web log. Writing about a topic causes me to think more clearly about it. I realize that I have more questions and I make connections in my mind. Thought doesn’t just happen in your head.

“A clearer view of human intelligence and cognitive development emerges if human-class intelligence is recognized as inherently a socially distributed phenomenon.” (Daniel Bullock)