Page 107 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

to be distinguished and what particular constructions are correlated with these different degrees across languages (see Gundel, et al. 1993).
See also: Pragmatics; Relevance. Bibliography
Clark H H, Marshall C R 1981 Definite reference and mutual knowledge. In: Joshi A K, Webber B L, Sag I A (eds.) Elements of Discourse Understanding. Cambridge Uni- versity Press, Cambridge
Gundel J K 1985 'Shared knowledge' and topicality. J Prag 9: 83-107 (issue devoted to Shared Knowledge)
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KreckelM 1981 Communicative Acts and Shared Knowledge in Natural Discourse. Academic Press, London
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Sperber D, Wilson D 1995 Relevance: Communication and
Cognition, 2nd edn. Blackwell, Oxford
There are two themes to this article. First, that think- ing involves mental operations or 'representations.' Representations may be of the real world—how to tie a shoelace, the layout of a supermarket, Chomsky's current views on transformations—or of fictional or hypothetical worlds—Hedda Gabler's motivations; what I would do if I were Prime Minister. Successful thinking involves manipulating these representations: planning an efficient route round the supermarket; deciding who would be Chancellor of the Exchequer in my hypothetical government. It should be clear from these examples that representations are necess- ary: without them we would live in a here-and-now world with an overlay of habits derived from past experience, where no planning is possible beyond overt trial and error. It should also be clear that by no means all representations are readily described by language, spatial representations being an obvious example. The success of preverbal human infants and nonverbal animals in solving spatial problems is a straightforward indication that thought can exist without language. Nonetheless language is a very powerful and flexible medium for creating rep- resentations, and this is where one should look for its influence on thought.
Thesecondthemeisthatthereisaprogression from immediate reactions to the world (catching a ball that has been thrown towards one) to reflections about the world (remembering catching a ball yesterday, coaching someone in catching balls, writing a treatise on ballistics). The more immediate the task the more likely it is that the representations will be determined by external nonlinguistic factors (space, gravity); the more reflective tasks will show greater propensity for
language to play an important role in the represen- tation. These points may seem obvious, but in the history of discussions about language and thought they have often been ignored.
1. History
The prime difficulty in discussing the relationship between language and thought is being forced to use language to describe this relationship: in particular, by attempting to summarize thoughts in some form of words it is but a short (and erroneous) step to assuming that a thought and a verbal summary of it are the same thing. This tendency pervades European thought of the last few centuries. Thus the influential Port Royal grammar of 1660 examines different men- tal operations and identifies them with different gram- matical devices: prepositional judgments with the subject-predicate structure of simple sentences; interrogation with the various syntactic devices for asking questions, etc. (see Chomsky 1966).
From a more general perspective, Jenisch, in a prizewinning essay of 1796 (cited in Jespersen 1922), identifies national stereotypes and their language:
In language the whole intellectual and moral essence of a man is to some extent revealed... As the Greek was subtle in thought and sensuously refined in feeling, as the Roman was serious and practical rather than speculative, as the Frenchman is popular and sociable, as the Briton is profound and the German philosophic, so are also the languages of each of these nations.
(Jespersen 1922:30)
Sentiments such as these are part of a tradition developed in the nineteenth century by Wilhelm von
Thought and Language P. T. Smith
Thought and Language
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