Concepts exist without words, since words are just one part of a concept, and people with left temporal brain damage can lose access to a word without losing access to the concept.
A “symbol” sometimes means something atomic, which concepts are not. We probably have no symbols in our brains, in this strict sense.
Interesting point. I certainly agree that concepts/words are not actually atomic, or Platonic ideals, or anything like that. Concrete concepts, in particular, seem to correspond to “empirical clusters in thing-space”, or probability distributions over classes of objects in the real world (though of course, even objects in the real world aren’t really atomic).
Despite this, most people still view themselves as thinking symbolically, and many people believe themselves to be logical reasoning agents. After reading the first couple chapters of Jaynes, I am very convinced that the mind works probabilistically and does not actually deal with absolutes. Yet at the level of conscious reasoning, we seem to perceive the world in terms of symbolic absolutes. It seems like this could be either verbal or visual, but either way I have difficulty imagining conscious reasoning without symbols, even if more complicated clusters or probability distributions underly those symbols at a subconscious level. I wonder why this is.
Concepts exist without words, since words are just one part of a concept, and people with left temporal brain damage can lose access to a word without losing access to the concept.
We use words to solve word-problems. Before words, people thought without words but not about word-problems. Asking for techniques for solving word-problems without words is like asking how to create potteryware without pottery. There might be some sort of isomorphism that would allow you to think about words without words, but you would mainly end up with an encipherment. That is why I asked, “Has anyone developed techniques to do math without symbol manipulation?” We use words precisely because we need to know and use their systematic properties, in a similar way that we manipulate symbols to do math.
I am not saying that we are not able to understand the meaning and referents of words without words.
Concepts exist without words, since words are just one part of a concept, and people with left temporal brain damage can lose access to a word without losing access to the concept.
A “symbol” sometimes means something atomic, which concepts are not. We probably have no symbols in our brains, in this strict sense.
Interesting point. I certainly agree that concepts/words are not actually atomic, or Platonic ideals, or anything like that. Concrete concepts, in particular, seem to correspond to “empirical clusters in thing-space”, or probability distributions over classes of objects in the real world (though of course, even objects in the real world aren’t really atomic).
Despite this, most people still view themselves as thinking symbolically, and many people believe themselves to be logical reasoning agents. After reading the first couple chapters of Jaynes, I am very convinced that the mind works probabilistically and does not actually deal with absolutes. Yet at the level of conscious reasoning, we seem to perceive the world in terms of symbolic absolutes. It seems like this could be either verbal or visual, but either way I have difficulty imagining conscious reasoning without symbols, even if more complicated clusters or probability distributions underly those symbols at a subconscious level. I wonder why this is.
We use words to solve word-problems. Before words, people thought without words but not about word-problems. Asking for techniques for solving word-problems without words is like asking how to create potteryware without pottery. There might be some sort of isomorphism that would allow you to think about words without words, but you would mainly end up with an encipherment. That is why I asked, “Has anyone developed techniques to do math without symbol manipulation?” We use words precisely because we need to know and use their systematic properties, in a similar way that we manipulate symbols to do math.
I am not saying that we are not able to understand the meaning and referents of words without words.