Every Sense as a Form of Thought

Recently Nature published a Perspectives article, entitled “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought”

with the introduction

Language is a defining characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking.

Which is correct, and of course, also incorrect. The purpose of language is not thought, but we do use language for thinking — the same way we use music, drawing, walking through the garden and just about every sense and sensory stimulus available to us for thinking.

Art-forms are of course also for communication, generally through narrative

However one purpose of communication is interior communication, communication with the self

A communication that is saved and available for the the future

The Primary benefit (aside from any financial one) is that the creation exists afterwards, and is thus available as a form of mnemonic for the creator. They can revisit and re-experience that sensation of creation that would otherwise have been transitory.

And of course it is this narrative that allows us to form the self

The self exists as a narrative in our minds of who we are, the reasons for the things we do, what things we feel bad about, what we feel good about, memories of the past.

Every sense is a form of thought is an obvious conclusion once we conclude, as is the wide-spread agreement of current philosophies, that the mind and body are not separate things.

This is also a recurring trope in our arts, for example — that the mind is stirred to thought by a sensation of taste — as in À la recherche du temps perdu

Language is of course a tool for communication, just as the sense of taste a tool of eating, and it is perhaps primarily a tool for communication — if we take primarily to mean that more language exists at any particular time as communication than as thought.

But I am no convinced, this may be due to how I myself think, because I think almost exclusively in language. Most of my thoughts are as though I were writing, I think in complete sentences, that is to say I am practicing that interior communication I noted earlier. The interior communication will have to be accepted as a form of thought, otherwise I would be pretty much thoughtless.

In the same way when I read I think what I am reading, how do the words I read get communicated to me if I do not think them. It is true that I do not think words that I am told, I often think the opposite, but I do read a lot. Of course after I have thought the words I am reading I may very well think the opposite, and then go off to write an article like this one, and think the words I am writing while I write them.

Despite these provisos I am willing to accept that language is not primarily a tool for thinking but is primarily a tool for communication, based on the observation that surely the largest amount of language is in talking, and that not everyone thinks as I do and even I may think in images at times.

But if this is the case I am not sure there is anything that is primarily a tool for thought, it seems more likely that everything that is used for thought has some more primary purpose. This also seems like the way you would expect it to be.