1975, p. 156. This “mentalese” is an encapsulated medium of thought that provides conceptual representations and, more importantly, is viewed as
being wholly independent of language. For as Pinker 1994 argues those with impaired linguistic capacities i.e. aphasics though lacking a natural
language, still obviously have thought and are capable of intelligent thinking. He argues, “knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese
into a string of words and vice versa” p. 82. For instance, at the physiological level of receiving an auditory or visual code e.g. the linguistic stimuli there
is a mechanistic process that connects this code to an abstract symbol and this is considered the symbol manipulation level of thought Newell, 1990. So
according to this view of cognition, linguistic relativity is completely untenable since thought and language are entirely separate entities. In recent
decades there has been a growing shift away from this traditional view of cognition as a “thinking machine,” and a movement towards viewing
cognition as “being in the world.”
2.2 Searle sitting in the Chinese room: The symbol grounding problem
A general criticism of this traditional model of cognition is called “the symbol grounding problem” Hanard, 1990; Vogt, 2002. Searle 1980, in an article
where he provides a thought experiment called the “Chinese Room,” brings up the problem of intentionality and how mental representations are about
something, while mere symbols have no intentional content and thus cannot capture cognition adequately. The “Chinese Room,” in brief, is about a person
sitting in a room with two doors. In the room a person who does not know Chinese as true of Searle himself sits with the necessary material to
decipher these symbols with a set of formal rules in his language English. From one door the input, someone from the outside passes some Chinese
text through a small opening. The person inside this room uses the material provided to decipher the code and offer a response. He then passes this
response through a small opening in the second door the output. The question is, does this person actually know Chinese? Like a computer, this
person receives a group of symbols and, following a formal set of rules, manipulates these symbols accordingly and provides a logical response. It
may appear to people on the outside that this person is competent with the language; whereas, in fact, he truly is oblivious to the meaning, as he does
not know what any of these symbols are about, otherwise the intentional content they have. Consequently, somehow these “symbols must be grounded,
that is, related to something other than additional symbols” Glenberg, 2010, p. 587.
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This symbol-grounding issue points out the trouble of a disembodied approach to cognition. According to this approach, cognition is being
regarded as something that resides within the individual mind as internal representations states that encode some external states in the world Fodor
Plyshyn, 1988, rather than being viewed as something “grounded in the human body and its interaction with the environment, and thus in perception
and action” Pecher Zwaan, 2005, p. 2. Barsalou 2008 provides a couple of reasons why this traditional approach to cognition has been challenged; irst,
“little empirical evidence supports the presence of amodal symbols in cognition” and second, these “traditional theories … fail to explain how
cognition interfaces with perception and action” p. 620. Glenberg and Robertson 2000 share this same view as they also argue against the symbol-
manipulation perspective of language due to the scarcity of any empirical evidence to support it. In the next section, I will provide a brief outline of the
embodied view of cognition.
3. BODY, LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT: UNDOING DESCARTES
