1. Preliminary

The philosophy of language concerns precisely the philosophical investigation of language. It focuses on features that are specific to language; that is, sense, meaning, truth, reference, names, understanding, interpretation, generative capacity, and so on. Language, particularly, allows the transfer of a thought complex from one mind–or one brain–to another.

Thoughts which, for Frege, are not words are identified precisely by their semantics, whereas words which are true only in a derivative sense are identified by shape, syntax or spelling, or by the event of their production. The identity of words leaves their content open. So the content open of given words must depend on further factors; that is, on the character of their surroundings. This leaves it open that their surroundings might account as referring one semantics on the words, while on the other such occasions those surroundings might account as referring another. In that way, the semantics of words may be an occasion-sensitive affair. According Tanesini (2007: 163) who cited Frege’s view on thought is that “For Frege, a thought is the objective content that we grasp when thinking.” Thoughts, in Frege’s view as pointed out by Tanesini, are not psychological entities since they exist independently of our ability to think them. Further, for Tanesini “thoughts are public so that different individuals can literally have the same thought, rather than having thoughts which are only exactly alike.” Thus, for Frege “a thought is a proposition. A thought, so understood, is the sense of a declarative sentence and has as its constituents the senses, or modes of presentation, of the logical parts of that sentence.” An alternative to Frege’s theory can be found in Russell’s work.^[1] Russell takes at least some propositions, with which Fregean thoughts have been identified, to have objects and properties (rather than their modes of presentation) as their constituents. These are known as singular propositions. It has been argued by John McDowell (1998) that it is possible to wed a Fregean theory of thought as having modes of presentation as its constituents with the view that some thoughts are singular or object-involving. McDowell claims that some senses or modes of presentation (Fregean thought-constituents) are object involving since the singular terms, whose senses they are, have no semantic value if the objects they purport to refer to do not exist. He thus rejects the idea that these singular terms could have genuine senses when they lack a referent. Moreover, as talking about Singular thought Tanesini asserts that “A thought which is object-involving in the sense that the thought’s existence depends on the existence of the object it is about.” He then takes an example, the sentence ‘That [while pointing to Fido] is a dog’ could be said to express a singular thought about Fido. For him, the thought would exist only if Fido exists, so that if one were hallucinating Fido’s existence, and uttered the words ‘That is a dog’, these words would express no thought at all. The view that at least some thoughts are singular is not universally accepted. There is also a certain amount of variation in the terminology used by those discussing these topics. Thus, he goes to concludes that “the expression ‘singular proposition’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘singular thought’ since in their Fregean conception thoughts, which are the senses of declarative sentences, are basically the same as propositions. Also, it is. not uncommon to see singular thoughts referred to as Russellian thoughts, although not all supporters of singular thoughts agree with Russell in taking the object itself to be a constituent of the thought. Finally, a few have used the expression “singular thought simply to mean the thought expressed by a proposition containing a singular term.” As for ontological priority, Davison (1975) argues that “there cannot be thought without language: in order to have thought (specifically beliefs), a creature must be a member of language community, and an interpreter of the speech of others. As for epistemological priority, he argues (Davidson, 1974) that “it is not possible to find out in detail what a person believes without interpreting that person’s speech.”

Language is an essential part of human cognition and it is difficult to imagine any kind civilization in which there is no form of language. Apart from structure of language, in the current years, many psycholinguists concentrate on cognitive aspects of language, with an emphasis on how people process language. All studies bring out the answer that language is not an isolated system; it depends heavily on other cognitive processes. Whereas cognition is in its general sense, largely independent from the peculiarities of any language, and can develop to a certain extent in the absence of the knowledge of language (Lenneberg 1967). The examination of Furth (1966) on subjects even showed that there is no difference in intelligence between normal and deaf persons. This, however, is not to deny the aid of certain types of linguistic knowledge in cognitive process, like memory tasks.

Cognition can be considered as an act or process of knowing. It includes attention, perception, memory, reasoning, judgment, imagining, thinking, and speech. A characteristic of modern cognitive science is the goal of developing a theory of cognition powerful enough to encompass all human mental abilities, including language abilities. There emerges a debate concerning two ways of conceptualizing the basic design of cognition. One approach, called “Unified theories of cognition,” proposes that generalpurpose processes and mechanisms provide a foundation for all varieties of human intelligence. Another is referred to as the “Modularity of Cognition” or “Mental Modules” approach which emphasizes the differences between language and other abilities. The main idea of this approach is that many distinct domains of cognition exist and must be learned independently, using different mental mechanisms. There is much of the appeal of this approach which comes from findings in neuropsychology to show that different areas of the brain serve different functions such as vision, language processing, motor coordination, memory, and face recognition (Gupta 2002).

Thus, language and thought have had an important position in Buddhist literature and Buddhist philosophy in particular, and the study of philosophy of language in general. The chapter seeks to present a brief critical appraisal of language and thought in Buddhist literature and Buddhist philosophy as well as the Five Nikāyas. In doing so, the chapter also takes into consideration the importance and universality of the causal principle as well as the role of causality. The main argument in the chapter continues the earlier strands concerning language and thought. The questions raised are to emphasize on the issues for the requirement of the study in this chapter: What is the relationship between language and cognition? Whether language is necessary for thought, whether the nature of language determines the nature of thought, or whether there is simply a partial dependence between the two, with some aspects of language structure influencing or determining some aspects of thought. Is there a particular style of thinking that is natural for speakers of each language? If so, do people who speak different languages think differently? Is a certain level of cognitive development required for language acquisition? How are new word created? Where in the brain does language reside? Such questions have engaged the attention of linguists, psychologists, and philosophers. In order to clear up partly such problems, this chapter basically presents thirteen basic sections including preliminary and conclusion ones. Following that, the second section will seek to deal with and discuss the relationship between the body and the mind. The third section will give a concise view of the cognitive conception and communicative conception. The fourth section will discuss the historical theory from behaviourism to cognitivisim. Section five will study on sense and reference and their concerns. The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis drawn by Benjamin Lee Whorf will be dealt with and examined in section six. On this theoretical background, the seventh section will go to analyze the matching of linguistic structure with cognitive structure through two major linguistic levels that are lexical and syntactic. The eighth section will deal with and study the issue of modularity in cognition. The problems of language, thought, and language of thought will be mentioned and discussed in the section nine. Section ten will deal with and examine the issues of language and thought at which main problems related to language and cognition will be in turn studied in detail. The eleventh section will discuss on metaphor and metonymy respectively. Section twelve will deal with and focus on discussing the position of Buddhism on the concept of language and thought within which the Buddhist theory of cognition, the questions of reality and ideality, as well as the Buddhist view on the relationship between language and thought will be presented and fully analyzed. Last, a summary will be given to conclude all works having been done through the chapter.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Russell Principle: “In order to be thinking about an object…one must know which object it is thinking about.” Bertrand Russell (1918). The philosophy of Logical Atomism. In Logic and Knowledge, ed. R.C. Marsh. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956. For Evans (1982), Russell took his principle to imply that one must be able to distinguish that object from all other object.