3.1. The Cognitive Conception

1. Philosophy

The Swiss philosopher and psychologist J. Piaget (1896-1980) had studied the developmental sequence of stages in cognitive development, specifically in the acquisition of concepts fundamental to knowledge.^[1] He approached the acquisition of knowledge as a process of transformation and growth, with language neither causal nor even particularly instrumental in this development. According to him, the child’s language merely follows his or her development of cognitive structures, and is only important in the child’s later development, as it reflects intellectual growth derived from verbal interaction with others. For him, language appears as the medium in two different functions for the child; that is, in moving from egocentric to socialized speech. These two functions thus emerge sequentially and progresssively with each stage with evidence of an increased logical capability in the child. The child first utters solely for its own purposes in the egocentric stage. These utterances have little communicative intent. Eventually, the child begins to be more social in orientation, perceiving language as needed to satisfy the communicative needs of others. At this time, the child begins to be conscious of others’ ideas. The child is, gradually, more and more able to make sense of the world, and is continually creating new levels of cognitive organization as it matures (Rieber & Voyat 1981).

Piaget, thus, appears to reject pre-programming drawn by Chomsky as considering all cognitive acquisition, including language, to be the product of a gradual process of construction. In other words, language, for him, is secondary to the developmental processes of thought in children. Cognitive structures, a coherent system of mental operations, enable to arrive at concepts, to solve problems, and to make conclusions. Cognition, thus, is logically prior to language, and cognitive structures must be taken to explain language structures, as well as their acquisition. As observed by (Kess 1992: 262) “logical organization is obviously not derived from language, and intellectual development is obviously possible without language. Acquiring language is just another expression of the general human cognitive capacity for organizing experience, although special one.” Rejecting the Chomskyan proposal of language as a biological behaviour in the strict sense in which it has been used there, Piaget (1979) places language among the selfregulatory mechanisms where all the cognitive processes belong. However, in another subsequent reconsideration he admits that intelligence is not subordinated to language (see Piaget 1979, and Rieber & Voyat 1981).

The cognitive conception of language has also been presented and approved by others philosophers such as Wittgenstein (1921, 1953), Davidson (1975, 1982), Dummett (1981, 1991), Dennett (1991), Mcdowell (1994), Carruthers (1996a), and so on. These philosophers, generally, have the similar viewpoints on the relationship between language and cognition. For them, human beings are unique in the range and sophistication of the thoughts of which they are capable; human beings are also unique in processing natural language; and the simplest explanation of the cooccurrence of these two unique characteristics is that it is natural language which makes distinctively human thought possible. This argument evidently has at least some force. However, notice that it does not support a version of the cognitive conception according to which all thought involves language; nor does it support the constitution-thesis over and above the requirementthesis. Rather, it is only an argument for the much weaker idea that those of our thoughts which are distinctively human require language. These philosophers have defended the cognitive conception of language in universal and conceptual terms. They have claimed that it is conceptually necessary that all thought should involve language. So animals and young infants lack thoughts altogether, and it is supposed to be logically impossible for a languageless creature to have propositional attitudes at all, let alone to have sophisticated beliefs and desires like ours. The arguments for this view are basically epistemological (Carruthers & Boucher 1998).

2. Psychology

Even if studies of language and cognition are not scarce in psychology, yet they are far few and mostly focus on it in the broader perspective of some other issues. Cognition, on the contrary, has always remained a topic in the mainstream research of psychology. The Russian psychologist L.Samyutta Nikāya Vygotsky (1896-1934), in his book Thought and language (1934, translated into English 1962), shared the viewpoint with Piaget by placing the study of cognitive development as central to understanding thought processes, and as taking place in stages. According to Vygotsky, language and cognitive development begin as separate and independent processes, at least until about the age of two, at which time not only acquisition of language begins to take place with emergence of clear distinguishing features of linguistic competence but also thought interacts with the emerging faci1ity of language and is gradually transformed by it. Thus, although language and thought are not identical, they do share a very close relationship. Once the child is able to establish the connection between experience and language, developments in the one will enable or influence developments in the other (Kess 1992).

Although both Piaget and Vygotsky share the concern that language also serves to mediate the external world for the child, and admit the concept of egocentric speech, their interpretations are different from each other. While Piaget described egocentric speech as invariably preceding social speech, and serving no particularly useful function, Vygotsky regarded this form of speech as a necessary transition from the external to the inner speech, and even proposed that egocentric speech has social origins, and tends to develop into the inner speech which generates the functions of controlling and regulating human activities (see Wertsch 1986).

Generally, the opinion of Vygotsky is that language reflects and even transmits social, cultural, and historical experiences, and how this fact might channel higher levels of thought. The child’s developmental stages of thought reflect mastery of the mediating tools of thought that humankind has developed in the course of social history. For Vygotsky, the most important tool was language, since it a1lows the child to be exposed to and master increasingly higher thought processes. Vygotsky finally even argued that concepts are impossible without words so much so that thinking in concepts does not exist beyond verbal thinking (Kess 1992).

Another well-known Russian psychologist Sokolov (1972) maintained that ‘inner speech’ was involved in many aspects of thinking, including solving standard test of non-verbal ability, and reproducing pictorial material. In his Directive Function of Speech in Development and Dissolution, A. R. Luria, the famous Russian psychologist, (1959) described inner speech as ‘the second signaling system’, and demonstrated its role in the conscious control of motor action, in addition to its role in more intellectual forms of thought. He showed that children with language were able to inhibit a reaching response in a situation in which not-reaching was rewarded, whereas children without language were unable to inhibit the response.

Apart from the Russian group, other psychologists working around the middle of the century tended to favour a related set of views, including the view that language is learned using domain-general cognitive resources, and especially associative learning (Skinner, 1957); that the brain is not innately highly specialised but has, rather, a high degree of plasticity (Lashley, 1950); and that adult language and thought share a common symbolic basis (Goldstein, 1948).

According to Carruthers and Boucher (1998), even psychologists who are strongly committed to the cognitive conception of language have always stopped short of argument that ‘languageless’ thought is veritably impossible. Visual and other forms of imagistic thinking are always accepted, even if only for certain individuals, and that in their observation, no psychologist would ever deny that pre-linguistic children have concepts, memories, and expectations which constitute at least some form of primitive thought. Vygotsky (1934) argued equally strongly that language and thought have different and independent roots, and different modes of operation in the pre-linguistic child. In this more guarded commitment to a cognitive concepttion of language, psychologists therefore differ from philosophers such as McDowell (1994), who claim that languageless thought is impossible.

3. Linguistics

Interestingly, the growth and development of modern linguistics in the twentieth century reflects the fact that the most radical and best-known form of the cognitive conception of language does not come either from philosophers or from psychologists, but from linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956). In his Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (see §5.6), Whorf asserted that human concepts and ways of thinking, and much of the very structure of the human mind itself, are acquired by young children from adults when they acquire their native language and thus become inducted into the surrounding culture. These concepts and structures differ widely, depending upon the structures and conceptual resources of the natural languages in question. This mind-structuring and social-relativist view of language, as pointed out by Carruthers and Boucher (1998), is still dominant in the social sciences: indeed Pinker (1994) refers to it disparagingly as the ‘Standard Social Science Model’. To provide the support to such a model, and to point out the variations in behaviours of different cultures and languages,

Carruthers and Boucher (1998) showed that:

The line of thinking behind the Standard Social Science Model goes something like this: the wide variations in behaviours and social structures between different cultures, and equally wide variations amongst languages; yet these languages are not genetic, children born of one culture but brought up in another will of course develop the behaviours and practices of a native; so the natural explanation is then that the mind is initially a more or less blank slate, just as traditional empiricism supposed; and that all the structure imposed upon it comes from the particular language the person acquires, and from the particular culture they find themselves immersed in. (p. 6)

Some other linguists such as Lakoff and Johnson (1999), Langacker (1987) have noted that it is fairly difficult to describe which sentences are syntactically valid and which are invalid unless one makes reference to nonlinguistic concepts. They pointed to the tendency for the same words describing movement in space to be used to describe movement in time and emphasized necessity of incorporating the cognitive psychology of human category formation into linguistics. This approach to linguistics came to be called cognitive linguistics, because aspects of general cognition were assumed to be important in an account of linguistic structure (Gupta 2002).

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

For more detail, see J. Piaget & B. Inhelder. (1958). The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. New York: Basic Books.