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The Role of Language in Intelligence

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  • 15-01-2010 4:40pm
    #1
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 4,630 ✭✭✭


    I'm just after reading this essay by Daniel Dennet (of militant atheism fame) on the importance of language to our intelligence. It's a rather long essay: it'll take a while to read, but it's definitely worth it.


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    #2
    espinolman
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,205 ✭✭✭espinolman


    Language is nessesary for communication but i don't see how it could be essential for intelligence , i can think much faster without language and i am always coming up with ideas that i don't know how to express in language , the english language is very limited because there are a lot of concepts that cannot be communicated with that language , so it can limit communication of ideas if the language is not fully developed such as the english language . Thinking in language , such as the english language is very slow where if you don't use language to think you can think tremendously fast and come up with ideas and concepts which cannot be expressed in language .


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    #3
    studiorat
    Closed Accounts Posts: 6,408 ✭✭✭studiorat


    Dennett’s stuff is always pretty dense.
    I think the ability to make predictions about the future is the crux of intelligence, it's not really a measure of external behaviour. Rather it is an internal measurment of how one remembers things and how those memories are used to make predictions. Plenty of animals do this...

    I like his idea that language itself stores information about different types of situations, so we don’t have to learn them and they just come along with language. Through language we are able to invoke memories and create juxtapositions of mental objects in other humans, "thinking about thinking" as it were.

    Regarding this “thinking about thinking” I came across a story the other day about a 1.7 million year old female hominid skeleton found quite recently. She had injuries from a bone disease with growth on those injuries showing she would have been very sick for up to six months before she actually died. This meant that someone would have had to take care of her for her to survive that long. So although there was no language there is evidence of being aware of others’ thoughts.

    I also like that he mentions Music as a kind of language. Music has a grammar that must be learned just like any other language and different cultures music has different grammars. Studies of aphasia and amusicia have shown that sentances with incorrect language trigger spikes in the same neural pathways and with the same onset time as pieces of music with purposeful mistakes. However it’s possible to be aphasiac and still have a sense of musical tone and vice versa.


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