Is it possible to philosophize if you don't speak any language?
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Subject classification: this is a philosophy resource. |
Practically everyone in the world speaks a language. Native speakers of any language generally would have a vocabulary ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 words. With that, you can already express yourself quite well. You think in language and can put your thoughts into words. You can think about life and come up with new ideas about reality. By going deeper into your ideas, these ideas become more and more detailed and complex. But what about people who don't know any language? Can they also philosophize?
You can philosophize even if you don't speak a language
[edit | edit source]Pro
[edit | edit source]- Pro You can think without words, so that also means you can philosophize, since philosophizing is nothing but thinking.
- Objection Philosophizing is also about storing, processing, remembering, analyzing and understanding thoughts. You have to build on thoughts and the best way to do that is with language.
Con
[edit | edit source]- Con When you start philosophizing, at some point you run into very abtract ideas. Because it gets so complicated then, you should somehow store these ideas somewhere. Since you cannot express it well with a drawing or painting, because of the abstraction of the idea, you would have to put it into words through language. Certain words or self-invented terms can help you recall the idea you had in case you get stuck in your thoughts. Words can help as reminders and that is necessary for deep philosophizing.
- Objection If you can recall the idea using self-invented terms, then this should also be possible through a drawing or painting. By expressing something on paper with (abstract) shapes, figures and colors, you can also recall a specific philosophical idea from your thoughts. However, this does not necessarily mean that others will understand this idea after seeing the abstract artwork, because the artwork itself does not have meaning in the sense that there is an agreed-upon understanding of what different elements represent.
- Con Simply because we do not have the words to describe the universe as it is, we cannot philosophize more deeply about it. Some abstract ideas are beyond our imagination because they are not adequately described in language. If words existed for how reality is structured, we would understand the universe much better. However, since we still have to invent these words, as words are a human invention, we do not yet fully understand the universe.
- Objection Is it due to language that we cannot understand some abstract ideas, or is it because we are three-dimensional beings who cannot think in higher dimensions? If it were the latter, this argument would not make sense.