"Thought without symbols — life without language — it’s a cognitive reality that is virtually impossible for most modern humans to fathom. For the vast majority of us, our thought processes have been profoundly shaped by the introjection of language into our cognitive worlds, the taking on board of a massive intellectual prosthesis, the collective product of countless generations. Human thought, for the majority, is not simply the individual outcome of our evolved neural architecture, but also the result of our borrowing of the immense symbolic and intellectual resources available in language. What would human thought be like without language?"
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Life without language (via azspot)
Reblogged for Simen and for later reading.
You know how there people who are really really into shitty industrial/noise music and you don’t know why/how they get pleasure from something so intolerable and painful? Simen’s kinda like that but for linguistic determinism. No, really.
Actually, I don’t know what this analogy means. I think he’s a genius on a pretty perverse and (IMHO) unappealing topic.
