obliged to once again put to death this scornful idea that language might shape thought, as he reiterates in his “obituary” against linguistic relativity
Pinker, 2007, p. 124. Pinker, though, is often accused of postulating a strawman argument and conlating linguistic relativity and linguistic
determinism Casasanto, 2008. Few, if any, researchers propose that language determines thought; in contrast, there is more argument and
interest in how different languages might inluence thought or oblige one to construe a situation differently based on the constraints and requirements of
the speaker’s language.
Language has broad and varying meaning to different people, but in order to discuss it, I limit the deinition of language to the syntactical structure that
binds lexico-semantic units into a meaningful string and is expressed phonetically in a communicative act. On the other hand, thought refers to
representations that form conceptual structures and these can be pre- linguistic since infants have thought before they develop language. One
traditional perspective in cognitive science is the idea that differences in linguistic coding
in the approximately 7,000 natural languages of the world have little or no effect on cognition. Rather, there is a language of thought
called a “mentalese” Fodor, 1975 that all humans universally share and this provides the underlying concepts available to human cognition to which a
language then maps onto. The next section will explore in more detail what this “mentalese” is, and how it denies the possibility of any form of linguistic
relativity.
2.1 “Mentalese” the mind language
The traditional model of cognition, sometimes called the “irst generation” of cognitive science Lakoff Johnson, 1999, p. 75, views
cognition as the computation of certain symbols according to a set of rules. These symbols are viewed as context invariant, static and disembodied and
these symbols are arbitrarily related to the referent Glenberg, Witt, Metcalfe, 2013. These symbols are considered amodal Fodor, 1975. In short,
the sensory input that we experience through our various modal systems i.e. auditory, visual, olfactory, etc. goes through a transformation process called
transduction where these states are preserved as abstract, non-modal speciic symbols, which then can be manipulated by cognitive processes.
These amodal symbols thus are only arbitrarily related to the perceptual states that produce them Niedenthal et al., 2005; Pylyshyn, 1984 and are
considered internal states that encode external states in the world Fodor Pylyshyn, 1988. These inner codes are resources for the codes used in
communication. “[This is] why natural languages are so easy to learn” Fodor,
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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
