语言思维与非语言思维

人类究竟是用什么方式思维?一定要用语言进行思维,还是可以脱离语言进行思维?对于这些问题,科学界一直没有明确的定论.一直以来存在着两种观点:"等同说"和"分离说"."等同说"将语言和思维视为一体,而"分离说"又将这两种东西截然分开.其实这两种观点都过于极端,因此有必要从语言和思维的关系入手来阐述人类思维的两种形式:语言思维与非语言思维.

Thinking with and without Language

What on earth is the means of thinking for human beings Do we have to think with language or may we think without language Though such questions have aroused the interest of linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, neuro-scientists and even computer experts, up till now they still cannot offer a satisfactory and unimpeachable answer to these questions. In academic fields, there exist two extreme points of view. One is Identification and the other is Disjunction. The theories of Identification see language and thinking as a single matter while the theories of Disjunction take the two apart. It is claimed by the authors that either of them has its reasonable side but both go to the extremity, and that language and thinking can be combined as well as departed from both perspectives of phylogeny and ontogeny. Thinking is actually the process of concept while words and images are terms to express and expand thinking in working storage. The course of thinking is the course of processing concepts in the brain, during which language is sometimes involved and sometimes not. Although language is one of the major means of thinking for Homo sapiens and although there is an intimate relationship between language and thinking, language is not equal to thinking, which emerges before the acquisition of language, which can also be conducted with means other than language, and which processes information much swifter than the generation of language. Therefore, it is attempted in this paper from the perspective of the relationship between language and thinking to declare that thinking can be categorized into thinking with language which may be subdivided into natural language thinking, special language (sign language and braille) thinking and formula language thinking, and thinking without language which may be subdivided into image thinking and paralinguistic thinking. If we take all these thinking models as signs, then we may conclude that thinking is by means of signs and that thinking is represented by signs in the mind.