[Marxism-Thaxis] human thinking cannot be explained by language alone

[Charles Brown]

>>I do not intend to go into biology; I just want to carry this
regressive analysis back to its beginnings in psychology and to
emphasise again that the formation of logical and mathematical
structures in human thinking cannot be explained by language alone,
but has its roots in the general coordination of actions.>>

THIS is as good as any place I've ever seen for articulatory
phonology, one of my research interests, to start.

C.Jannuzzi
Univ. of Fukui, Japan

^^^^^

CB: I found my hard copy of Ilyenkov's _ Dialectical Logic_ . In some past
reading, I happened to have underlined the below, which seems to be on this
point of human thinking cannot be explained by language alone.




****

Having thus posed the problem Hegel proved to be the first professional
logician who resolutely and consciously threw aside the old prejudice that
thought was presented to the investigator only in the form of speech
(external or internal, oral or written). The prejudice was not accidental;
thought could only look at itself from the side, as it were, as an object
different from itself, only insofar as it had expressed itself, embodied
itself in some external form. And the completely conscious thought that all
the old logic had in view really assumed language, speech, the word, as its
outward form of expression. In other words thought achieved awareness of the
schemas of its own activity precisely through and in language. (This
circumstance had in fact been recorded in the very name of logic, which is
derived from the Greek logos, word.) Not only Hegel and the Hegelians,
incidentally, spoke of this, but also some of their opponents in principle,
like Trendelenburg, who noted that traditional (formal) 'logic becomes
conscious of itself in speech and so in many respects is a grammar absorbed
with itself'.

Let us note in passing that all schools of logic, without exception, having
ignored Hegel's criticism of the old logic have shared this old prejudice to
this day as though nothing had happened. It is most outspokenly professed by
Neopositivists, who directly identify thought with linguistic activity and
logic with the analysis of language. The most striking thing about this is
the self-conceit with which they project this archaic prejudice as the
latest discovery of twentieth century logical thinking, as the manifestation
to the world at long last of the principle of the scientific development of
logic, as an axiom of the 'logic of science'.

Language (speech) is, nevertheless, not the sole empirically observed form
in which human thought manifests itself. Does man really not discover
himself as a thinking being in his actions, in the course of actually
shaping the world around him, in the making of things? Does he really only
function as a thinking being when talking? The question is surely purely
rhetorical. The thought of which Hegel spoke discloses itself in human
affairs every bit as obviously as in words, in chains of terms, in the
lacework of word combinations. Furthermore, in real affairs man demonstrates
the real modes of his thinking more adequately than in his narrations of
them.

But, that being so, man's actions, and so too the results of his actions,
the things created by them, not only could, but must, be considered
manifestations of his thought, as acts of the objectifying of his ideas,
thoughts, plans, and conscious intentions. Hegel demanded from the very
start that thought should be investigated in all the forms in which it was
realised, and above all in human affairs, in the creation of things and
events. Thought revealed its force and real power not solely in talking but
also in the whole grandiose process of creating culture and the whole
objective body of civilisation, the whole 'inorganic body of man' (Marx),
including in that tools and statues, workshops and temples, factories and
chancelleries, political organisations and systems of legislation

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay5.htm