Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 4, Issue 1, 1996

On formal and empirical grounds, the overt form of language cannot be the vehicle that the mind uses for reasoning. Nevertheless, we most frequently experience our thought as "inner speech". It is argued that inner speech aids thought by providing a "handle " for attention, making it possible to pay attention to relational and abstract aspects of thought, and thereby to process them with greater richness. Organisms lacking language have no modality of experience that provides comparable articulation of thought; hence certain kinds of thought very important for human intelligence are simply unavailable to them.

I begin by distinguishing constant properties of consciousness (a focus and periphery, constant movement, a point of view, and the need for background orientation) from variable properties (the different sources of conscious experience, immediacy vs. displacement, factuality vs. fictionality, degrees of interestingness, and verbality vs. nonverbality). Foci of active consciousness are seen as reflected in language in intonation units. Within them, ideas are expressed differently depending on their activation cost, characterizable in terms of given, accessible, or new information. By hypothesizing that each focus of consciousness is limited to one new idea, it is possible to achieve a clearer understanding of lexicalization and related phenomena. Coherent chunks of semiactive information are reflected in language as discourse topics, within which decisions regarding intermediate levels of coherence lead to sentences. Immediate and displaced consciousness have distinct properties, which are sometimes exploited by fiction writers with the pretense of displaced immediacy, a style of language that highlights a basic distinction between spatiotemporal adverbs and tense. It is concluded that we need to take consciousness seriously if we are to understand more fully a variety of linguistic phenomena, including pronouns, adverbs, conjunctions, tense, person, sentences, paragraphs, and prosody.

It is argued that Wallace Chafe's approach of relating studies of mind and consciousness to studies of real spoken language interaction is precisely what is needed in linguistics and psycholinguistics. However, the way Chafe attempts to establish the link between spoken language and consciousness is, in several respects, in need of clarification. The paper critically examines several of Chafe's claims and points to areas — e.g., the notions of 'consciousness', 'intonation unit', and 'new idea' — where clarification or possible revision is needed.

Jackendoff comes to some appealing overall conclusions, but several of his assumptions and arguments are questionable. The present commentary points out the following problems: oversimplifications in the translation-based argument for the independence of language and thought; a lack of consideration of the possibility of unconscious use of internalized natural languages; insufficient consideration of possible characteristics of languages of thought (as opposed to internalized natural languages); neglect of the possibility of thinking in example-oriented and metaphorical ways; unfair bias in contrasting visual to linguistic imagery; neglect of other types of imagery; and neglect of the possibility of unconscious attentional processes.

In "How language helps us think", Jackendoff explores some of the relationships between language, consciousness, and thought, with a foray into attention and focus. In this paper, we will concentrate on his treatment of consciousness. We will examine three aspects of it: I. the method he uses to arrive at his views; 2. the extent to which he offers us a theory of consciousness adequate to assess his views; and 3. some of the things that we might need to add to what he offers to achieve an adequate theory.

Language, according to Jackendoff, is more than just an instrument of communication and cultural transmission. It is also a tool which helps us to think. It does so, he suggests, by expanding the range of our conscious contents and hence allowing processes of attention and reflection to focus on items (such as abstract concepts and steps in chains of reasoning) which would not otherwise be available for scrutiny. I applaud Jackendoff s basic vision, but raise some doubts concerning the argument. In particular, I wonder what it is about public language that uniquely fits it to play the functional role which Jackendoff isolates — why couldn't expression in a private inner code induce the same computational benefits? I suggest a weaker position in which the communicative role of public language moulds it into a suitably expressive resource, such that natural language emerges as the logically and technologically contingent filler of a functional role which could, in principle, be filled by other means. I also compare and contrast Jackendoff's position with some related ideas due to Daniel Dennett and others, concluding with a sketch of my own view of language as an external artifact whose computational properties complement those of the basic biological brain.

Since Jackendoff has shown that language facilitates abstract and complex thought by making possible subtle manipulations of the focus of attention, and since the kind of attention relevant here is attention to aspects of intentional objects in conscious awareness, it follows that the abstract and complex thinking that language facilitates owes much to the working of a conscious process. This, however, conflicts with Jackendoff's view of consciousness as something which does not play a direct part in thinking, but is only a byproduct of a non-conscious computational process in the brain which does the real thinking. I argue that, since Jackendoff s phenomenology of language shows that attention plays such an important part in thinking, yet language can help us attend only to what we are conscious of consciousness does play an important part in thinking. Moreover, consciousness cannot be merely an epiphenomenal byproduct separable in principle from underlying physical mechanisms, because this would imply that consciousness itself is not physical, which would lead to dualism. But if consciousness is inseparable from its physiological substratum, then it also causes whatever effects the physiological substratum causes.

The distinction between I- and E-concepts, derived from Chomsky's (1986) distinction between I- and E-language, has become an integral part of Jackendoff's conceptual semantics. Where, if at all, are they to be found in the model of the mind proposed in Jackendoff's core paper, i.e., in which of the three rings? How do they relate to the idea of I- and E-values, independently proposed by myself (but similarly inspired) in the framework of a theory of lexical semantics known as conceptual axiology? Where in the mind, if at all, are the latter to be found? I will argue that something is missing both in Jackendoff's conceptual semantics and in his picture of the mind: he fails to distinguish between meanings, values and concepts, and talks instead about "conceptual structure "—which presumably belongs to the conscious mind, and to it alone. In an attempt to bring values and concepts together in a comprehensive picture, I will point to the similarities between sensory and linguistic input, and provide details relating to the act of communication as I have come to see it throughout the years.