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Language

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...