The cognitive functions of language

Abstract

This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is de facto the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include the view that language is necessary for the acquisition of many human concepts and the view that language can serve to scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that language may be the medium of conscious propositional thinking, but argues that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then proposed that natural language is the medium for nondomain-specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive "quasimodules"). Recent experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed and the implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of the architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. The overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and elaborate the most plausible candidate.Keywords: Cognitive evolution; conceptual module; consciousness; domain-general; inner speech; language; logical form (LF); thought Peter Carruthers is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Until recently he Directed the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of eight books, coeditor of four, and has published numerous articles in journals and collections. There are two major foci to his main research area in philosophy of psychology. One is the nature of consciousness, where he has developed and defended a form of higher-order thought theory. The other is the architecture of human cognition, and the place of natural language within it.that language is only a channel, or conduit, for transferring thoughts into and out of the mind, they are then obliged to claim that the stream of inner verbalization is more-or-less epiphenomenal in character. (Some possible minor cognitive roles for inner speech, which should nevertheless be acceptable to those adopting this perspective, will be canvassed later.) The real thinking will be going on elsewhere, in some other medium of representation.One reason for the popularity of the communicative conception amongst cognitive scientists is that almost all now believe that language is a distinct input-output module of the mind (at least in some ...

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