先天失聰無聽覺經驗者其內部語言的表徵形式是什麼？或者說思維的形式是什麼？

01-02

這是一個有趣的問題。不過將依賴聽覺的語言視作唯一的語言，還是，有點欠慮，有點待補。

先天性耳聾所能造成的一個很直接的後果是對言語習得的阻礙。那麼，複雜的，具有邏輯性的思維可否在沒有言語能力的情況下發展？失去聽的能力的孩子能否獲得自省能力或短期記憶？手語可否支撐類似言語所促進的抽象心理發展和複雜思維？或者更極端的情況：沒有習得任何言語或手語。

以上所有問題自打有了哲學的拷問以來就被以不同形式提出過。（Lane, 1984）

======漂洗程序======（腦海里回蕩著反抗聲音的可直接跳至「語言≠思維」）

--------------

不言而語--------------

語言能力絕非僅僅是口型、舌頭、聲帶等發聲器官的使用技巧，否則琴鳥早上達人秀了（http://v.youku.com/v_playlist/f5497295o1p9.html）。

語言能力也絕不僅僅是明察秋毫的聽覺，否則汪星人早能做文秘了。語言能力是一種心理能力，就像立體視覺。看到一張平面的照片時，你會不由自主地看出立體的空間；聽到一串模擬的語音（你母語），你會不由自主地解讀為數字信號，或說聽懂，以至於你會無可救藥地把貓叫聽成『巧克力』http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzgxMTk5MTQ4.html。

我想說的是，語言能力是獨立於發聲系統與聽覺系統的。（http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2FBF01067467）

一如聽力正常的寶寶會咿呀學語，先天失聰的寶寶會『咿呀學手』。一如言語過了一定年齡就很難學，手語過了關鍵期再學也會變得異常困難。很多人可能誤以為手語就是比劃來比划去，或是用手拼寫字母，其實不然，正如口語可由有限的音素組成無限的辭彙，手語也可由有限的手形組成無限的辭彙。而且，手語也是有著複雜的語法的。和言語一樣，手語也有『詩歌』等藝術形式，甚至還有『繞手令』（finger-fumbler）正如黑猩猩學不會口語，歷史上也不止一位科學家曾試圖教黑猩猩手語，但都無果而終。和言語一樣，手語也是在大腦的語言中樞地區買的房。

左半腦在識別手語與言語時所激活的腦區(A) 母語為手語者 (大不裂顛手語). (B) 聽力正常的母語為口語者（英語）. (C) 由手語和言語所激活的腦區在顳上回及額下回的重疊區域（也就是著名的語言中樞：白洛卡區和維尼克區！）。此外，手語識別激活視覺與運動皮質結構（A），而言語識別則激活聽覺結構（B）

所以『啞巴打手勢：不言而喻』這一歇後語是完全不科學的！其實，有很多學者甚至認為，在人類的發展歷史中手語先於口語。

綜上，對於大部分先天性耳聾的人來說，他的第一語言就是某種手語。當然，很多聾啞人還能閱讀另一種語言。

手語者的認知能力特徵（跳讀首選）

1.視覺能力

根據 Bettger, Emmorey 和 Bellugi (1997)，母語為美國手語的聾啞人在本頓面部辨識測試中，特別是在帶陰影的面部上，表現得都比不使用手語、聽力正常的人出色。而另一個實驗發現不懂手語的聾啞兒童在本頓面部辨識測試上沒有優勢。（Parasnis, Samar, Bettger 和 Sathe, 1996）。

2.空間能力

通過研究使用手語的中國兒童和年齡相匹配的聽力正常的兒童對移動漢字的記憶，研究人員發現，學習並使用手語具有提高對移動圖案的視覺空間辨識能力。（Fok, Bellugi, Van Hoek 和 Klima, 1988）此外，不管是聾啞的還是聽力正常的以手語為母語的人都能比不會手語的人更快地生成並旋轉視覺圖像。（Emmorey, Kosslyn 和 Bellugi, 1993）

3. 短期記憶

早在1917年 Pintner 就發現失聰兒童的短期記憶短於聽力正常的兒童。

4. 非語彙智商

根據 Sisco and Anderson (1980) 對超過1000聾啞學生的研究，父母親聾啞的孩子以107分的非語彙智商均分超過了平均分為97分的父母聽力正常的孩子（一般會導致父母不會手語或手語很差，從而影響聾啞兒童的母語習得）；其實，107分的分數甚至超過均分100的聽力正常兒童。

--------------無言無語--------------

那麼，一個殘忍的追問便是，未能習得任何語言的人是如何思維的？思維是否依賴抽象的『語言』？

「歷史插曲」

根據歷史學家希羅多德的記載，埃及國王普薩美提克一世將兩個嬰孩與母親在出生時分離並在牧羊人的安靜小屋養大。國王對於世界原始語言的好奇在兩年後牧羊人報告說聽到孩子們使用了弗里吉亞語的一個單詞，一種小亞細亞的印歐語。在隨後的歷史中，偶爾會出現阿韋龍省（Aveyron）的野孩子維克多（Victor）、印度的卡馬拉（Kamala）、美國的吉妮等。但是當你發現他們的時候，你忍心讓他們繼續過著沒有語言的生活嗎？由於種種原因研究被完全剝奪語言的案例很困難。我們知道的是，美國的吉尼到了十三歲半才開始接觸語言，而由於過了語言習得的關鍵期，她終身沒有真正學會英語。在三十一歲的時候她遇到了一位傑出的神經學家，經過高強度的訓練，吉尼的恢復到可以在智力測試中達到十歲孩童的水平，並知道了兩千個單詞，在一家獸醫診所工作，能夠獨立生活。

「語言≠思維」

即使你不說，即使你沒『想說』，你也大概在想這答案怎麼這麼死長。我們都有這樣的經驗：『誒，這不是我要說的』『誒，都到我嘴邊兒了……』。且如@佘炤灼（shé zhào/zhāo zhuó）所說，失語症並不會影響所有智能。再如@陳章魚這條答案中的奇葩思路http://zhi.hu/MPWY，應該是即便患了失語症也應該可以運用的吧。顯然，思維是獨立於語言的。否則沒有語言的人類幼體又是如何學會語言的呢？一個不知道『正在下雨』是什麼意思的寶寶又是怎麼學會『正在下雨』這句話的呢？

其實要想了解沒有語言的世界，只要了解失語症患者的世界即可。白洛卡失語症（語法失語症）的一位患者，在語言能力失而復得之後如是回憶到：

當我早上醒來時，我感到一點點頭痛，而且以為我一定是睡覺時把右臂壓在身體下面了，因為我感到右邊像針扎一般的麻，而且不聽我使喚。我下了床，但是站不穩；事實上，我是摔在地上的，因為我的右腿虛弱到無法支撐我的體重。我叫隔壁的妻子來幫我，但沒發出任何聲音——我講不出話了……我驚呆了，嚇壞了。我簡直不能相信這件事會發生在我身上。我開始覺得迷惑、恐懼，然後忽然一下子，我想到我肯定是中風了。從某個角度來講，這樣的分析讓我感到了些許輕鬆，不過也就一下子，因為我以前一直覺得只要中風都是永久性的……我發現我可以說一點點，但即使對我來說聽起來都像錯誤的單詞，而且也不是我想要說的。

就像 iOS 不止是 Siri 和 Wolfram Alpha，對於思維，任何朦朧而性感的討論都是耍流氓！下面我們給智力做個小解剖：

符號操控（無影響）： (Spencer and Meadow-Orlans, 1996) 發現一下12個月大的孩童儘管沒有語言但依然參與了代表性的遊戲。（例如用玩具假扮角色）
概念獲得（有影響）：Friedman（1987）比較了三組孩童在一個物體分類任務上的表現，（1）聽力正常語言正常習得的兒童，（2）聽力正常語言部分障礙兒童，（3）訓練過口語的耳聾兒童。與聽力正常的兩組想比，耳聾兒童的語言習得滯後並且不知道所要分類的物體的名稱。然而，耳聾兒童對物體的分類能力幾乎和聽力語言均正常的兒童一樣好。相較之下，具有語言障礙的兒童可以叫出所有物體與類項的名稱，但在分類任務上卻有困難。
心智理論（理解他人，有影響）：Peterson 和 Siegal（1997）比較了四組孩童：（1）父母耳聾的耳聾兒童，也即母語為手語的兒童（2）父母聽力正常的耳聾兒童（3）自閉症兒童（4）正常發育的兒童。他們發現（1）和（4）都能很好的理解他人的意思，而（2）和（3）有困難。
推理能力（無影響）：據說很難考察，（Furth 1964）認為影響不大。

======脫水程序======

先天耳聾而正常習得手語：思維和正常人幾乎無差別。

先天耳聾而未正常習得語言：學習類項概念、理解他人意圖有困難。

================最後奉上平克的經典論述=========================

其實《語言本能》一貼以上都白說了……可惜手頭譯本實在不敢恭維。自己試著翻了兩頁，各位湊合著看……

沒有語言的思考

人們會高估語言也是情有可原的。辭彙製造聲響，或是橫在紙上，等待著你的聆聽或閱讀。思想被困在思考者的腦中。要想知道別人在想什麼，或想互相之間聊聊思考的本質，我們必須使用，（對了，還能是啥呢）辭彙唄！這也難怪很多評論家甚至無法想像沒有辭彙的思想——亦或是他們壓根就沒有討論那個的語言。

作為一位認知心理學家，我可以得意地說常識是對的（思維與語言不同）並且語言決定論就是一個有著悠久傳統的荒唐。有兩個工具能讓我們將這整個問題想得更清楚一些。一個是一系列實驗研究打破了詞語的屏障並評估了各種各樣非語彙思維。另一個工具是思考如何工作的理論，一個令人滿意地組織問題的理論。

我們已經看過了沒有語言的思考：福特先生，第二章中討論到的一點都不笨的失語症患者。（當然，你可以辯解說他的思考能力是在他中風前，建構在他當時所擁有的語言之上的。）我們也見過了缺乏語言而後發明語言的耳聾孩童。更對題的是偶爾發現的耳聾成年人。他們任何形式的語言都壓根沒有---沒有手語，沒有書面語，沒有唇語，沒有言語。在蘇珊·莎樂（Susan Schaller）的新書《一個無言以對的男人》中，莎樂講述了伊爾德方索（Ildefonso）——一個莎樂在洛杉磯當手語翻譯時認識的，一個二十七歲，來自墨西哥小村的非法移民。伊爾德方索靈動的眼神投射出確鑿無疑的智慧與好奇心。而後莎樂成了他的志願老師和同伴。他一下子就讓她看到了他對數字的十足把握：他用三分鐘學會了在紙上做加法並且在理解兩位數以內的十進位邏輯幾乎沒有問題。在一次令人想起海倫·凱勒的機緣中，伊爾德方索在莎樂試圖教他『貓』的手型時，突然領悟到命名的原則。有如一瀉千里的河水，他要求給他看看所有他所熟悉的物體。很快他便能給莎樂傾訴他的生命歷程：他兒時是如何央求他窮困的父母送他上學，他在各州所摘的不同莊家，他如何躲避移民局的官員。他將莎樂印象另一些被遺忘在社會角落，語言缺失的成年人。儘管他們被隔離在語言的世界之外，他們展示出了許多抽象的思考形式，比如重組壞掉的鎖頭，比如使錢，比如玩卡牌，比如欣賞彼此之間的啞劇表演。

我們對於伊爾德方索以及其他語言缺失成年人群的精神生活的知識必須停留在印象層面，因為種種人道主義的考量：當這些現象出現時，我們優先考慮的應當是如何教他們語言，而不是研究他們如何可以不使用語言。但還有其他被實驗研究過的，語言缺失的生靈，而且有部部描寫他們如何思考空間、時間、物體、數字、頻率、因果和類項。請允許我講講三則天才例子。其一關於寶寶，那些不能以詞語思考因為還沒學會的傢伙。其二關於猴子，那些不能以詞思考因為他們無法學會。其三關於成年人類，那些不管用不用辭彙思考，聲稱他們最好的思考都沒用到辭彙。

發展心理學家凱倫·韋恩的最近實驗顯示，5個月大的寶寶可以做簡單的心算。她用的是關於寶寶的研究中最常規的方法。給寶寶看一堆東西，看久了，寶寶覺得無趣了就會看別處。這時改變場景，而如果寶寶能注意到差別，他或她就會重拾興趣。這種方法顯示才只有5天大的寶寶就已經對數字敏感了。在一個實驗中，實驗者先使寶寶對一個物體感到厭倦，然後用一面不透光的屏將物體遮蔽。當屏被拿走的時候，如果同樣的物體還在，寶寶看一小會兒就會再次厭倦。但是，如果通過無法視察的替換，最後變成了兩個或三個物體，吃驚的寶寶們就會盯得久一些。

在韋恩的實驗中，她給寶寶們看一個橡膠米老鼠，知道嬰兒厭倦，眼神遊移。

（翻不動了，直接貼上影印譯本和英文原本，以後有空再更新好了……）

The developmental psychologist Karen Wynn has recently shown
that five-month-old babies can do a simple form of mental arithmetic.
She used a technique common in infant perception research. Show a
baby a bunch of objects long enough, and the baby gets bored and
looks away; change the scene, and if the baby notices the difference,

he or she will regain interest. The methodology has shown that babies
as young as five days old are sensitive to number. In one experiment,
an experimenter bores a baby with an object, then occludes the object
with an opaque screen. When the screen is removed, if the same
object is present, the babies look for a little while, then get bored
again. But if, through invisible subterfuge, two or three objects have
ended up there, the surprised babies stare longer.
In Wynn"s experiment, the babies were shown a rubber Mickey
Mouse doll on a stage until their little eyes wandered. Then a screen

came up, and a prancing hand visibly reached out from behind a
curtain and placed a second Mickey Mouse behind the screen. When
the screen was removed, if there were two Mickey Mouses visible
(something the babies had never actually seen), the babies looked for
only a few moments. But if there was only one doll, the babies were
captivated—even though this was exactly the scene that had bored
them before the screen was put in place. Wynn also tested a second
group of babies, and this time, after the screen came up to obscure
a pair of dolls, a hand visibly reached behind the screen and removed
one of them. If the screen fell to reveal a single Mickey, the babies

looked briefly; if it revealed the old scene with two, the babies had
more trouble tearing themselves away. The babies must have been
keeping track of how many dolls were behind the screen, updating
their counts as dolls were added or subtracted. If the number inexplicably
departed from what they expected, they scrutinized the scene,
as if searching for some explanation.
Vervet monkeys live in stable groups of adult males and females
and their offspring. The primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert
Seyfarth have noticed that extended families form alliances like the
Montagues and Capulets. In a typical interaction they observed in

Kenya, one juvenile monkey wrestled another to the ground screaming.
Twenty minutes later the victim"s sister approached the perpetrator"s
sister and without provocation bit her on the tail. For the
retaliator to have identified the proper target, she would have had to
solve the following analogy problem: A (victim) is to B (myself) as C
(perpetrator) is to X, using the correct relationship "sister of (or
perhaps merely "relative of; there were not enough vervets in the
park for Cheney and Seyfarth to tell).
But do monkeys really know how their groupmates are related to
each other, and, more impressively, do they realize that different pairs
of individuals like brothers and sisters can be related in the same
way? Cheney and Seyfarth hid a loudspeaker behind a bush and
played tapes of a two-year-old monkey screaming. The females in the
area reacted by looking at the mother of the infant who had been
recorded—showing that they not only recognized the infant by its
scream but recalled who its mother was. Similar abilities have been
shown in the longtailed macaques that Verena Dasser coaxed into a
laboratory adjoining a large outdoor enclosure. Three slides were
projected: a mother at the center, one of her offspring on one side,
and an unrelated juvenile of the same age and sex on the other. Each
screen had a button under it. After the monkey had been trained to
press a button under the offspring slide, it was tested on pictures of
other mothers in the group, each one flanked by a picture of that
mother"s offspring and a picture of another juvenile. More than ninety
percent of the time the monkey picked the offspring. In another test,
the monkey was shown two slides, each showing a pair of monkeys,
and was trained to press a button beneath the slide showing a particular
mother and her juvenile daughter. When presented with slides of
new monkeys in the group, the subject monkey always picked the
mother-and-offspring pair, whether the offspring was male, female,
infant, juvenile, or adult. Moreover, the monkeys appeared to be
relying not only on physical resemblance between a given pair of
monkeys, or on the sheer number of hours they had previously spent
together, as the basis for recognizing they were kin, but on something
more subtle in the history of their interaction. Cheney and Seyfarth,
who work hard at keeping track of who is related to whom in what
way in the groups of animals they study, note that monkeys would
make excellent primatologists.
Many creative people insist that in their most inspired moments
they think not in words but in mental images. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
wrote that visual images of scenes and words once appeared
involuntarily before him in a dreamlike state (perhaps opium-induced).
He managed to copy the first forty lines onto paper, resulting
in the poem we know as "Kubla Khan," before a knock on the door
shattered the images and obliterated forever what would have been
the rest of the poem. Many contemporary novelists, like Joan Didion,
report that their acts of creation begin not with any notion of a
character or a plot but with vivid mental pictures that dictate their
choice of words. The modern sculptor James Surls plans his projects
lying on a couch listening to music; he manipulates the sculptures in
his mind"s eye, he says, putting an arm on, taking an arm off, watching
the images roll and tumble.
Physical scientists are even more adamant that their thinking is
geometrical, not verbal. Michael Faraday, the originator of our modern
conception of electric and magnetic fields, had no training in
mathematics but arrived at his insights by visualizing lines of force as
narrow tubes curving through space. James Clerk Maxwell formalized
the concepts of electromagnetic fields in a set of mathematical equations
and is considered the prime example of an abstract theoretician,
but he set down the equations only after mentally playing with elaborate
imaginary models of sheets and fluids. Nikola Tesla"s idea for the
electrical motor and generator, Friedrich Kekule"s discovery of the
benzene ring that kicked off modern organic chemistry, Ernest Lawrence"s
conception of the cyclotron, James Watson and Francis
Crick"s discovery of the DNA double helix—all came to them in
images. The most famous self-described visual thinker is Albert Einstein,
who arrived at some of his insights by imagining himself riding
a beam of light and looking back at a clock, or dropping a coin while
standing in a plummeting elevator. He wrote:
The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought
are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily"
reproduced and combined. . . . This combinatory play seems
to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is
any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of
signs which can be communicated to others. The above-mentioned
elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional
words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in
a secondary state, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently
established and can be reproduced at will.
Another creative scientist, the cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard,
had his own moment of sudden visual inspiration, and it led to
a classic laboratory demonstration of mental imagery in mere mortals.
Early one morning, suspended between sleep and awakening in a
state of lucid consciousness, Shepard experienced "a spontaneous
kinetic image of three-dimensional structures majestically turning in
space." Within moments and before fully awakening, Shepard had a
clear idea for the design of an experiment. A simple variant of his
idea was later carried out with his then-student Lynn Cooper. Cooper
and Shepard flashed thousands of slides, each showing a single letter
of the alphabet, to their long-suffering student volunteers. Sometimes
the letter was upright, but sometimes it was tilted or mirror-reversed
or both. As an example, here are the sixteen versions of the letter F:

The subjects were asked to press one button if the letter was normal
(that is, like one of the letters in the top row of the diagram), another
if it was a mirror image (like one of the letters in the bottom row).
To do the task, the subjects had to compare the letter in the slide
against some memory record of what the normal version of the letter
looks like right-side up. Obviously, the right-side-up slide (0 degrees)
is the quickest, because it matches the letter in memory exactly, but
for the other orientations, some mental transformation to the upright
is necessary first. Many subjects reported that they, like the famous
sculptors and scientists, "mentally rotated" an image of the letter to
the upright. By looking at the reaction times, Shepard and Cooper
showed that this introspection was accurate. The upright letters
were fastest, followed by the 45 degree letters, the 90 degree letters,
and the 135 degree letters, with the 180 degree (upside-down)
letters the slowest. In other words, the farther the subjects had to
mentally rotate the letter, the longer they took. From the data, Cooper
and Shepard estimated that letters revolve in the mind at a rate of
56 RPM.
Note that if the subjects had been manipulating something resembling
verbal descriptions of the letters, such as "an upright spine with
one horizontal segment that extends rightwards from the top and
another horizontal segment that extends rightwards from the middle,"
the results would have been very different. Among all the topsyturvy
letters, the upside-down versions (180 degrees) should be fastest:
one simply switches all the "top"s to "bottom"s and vice versa,
and the "left"s to "right"s and vice versa, and one has a new description
of the shape as it would appear right-side up, suitable for matching
against memory. Sideways letters (90 degrees) should be slower,
because "top" gets changed either to "right" or to "left," depending
on whether it lies clockwise (+ 90 degrees) or counterclockwise (— 90
degrees) from the upright. Diagonal letters (45 and 135 degrees)
should be slowest, because every word in the description has to be
replaced: "top" has to be replaced with either "top right" or "top
left," and so on. So the order of difficulty should be 0, 180, 90, 45,
135, not the majestic rotation of 0, 45, 90, 135, 180 that Cooper and
Shepard saw in the data. Many other experiments have corroborated
the idea that visual thinking uses not language but a mental graphics
system, with operations that rotate, scan, zoom, pan, displace, and
fill in patterns of contours.

如果思維不用語言，用什麼？擔心知乎伺服器無語，此處省略難以言傳的譯文。

What sense, then, can we make of the suggestion that images,
numbers, kinship relations, or logic can be represented in the brain
without being couched in words? In the first half of this century,
philosophers had an answer: none. Reifying thoughts as things in
the head was a logical error, they said. A picture or family tree or
number in the head would require a little man, a homunculus, to
look at it. And what would be inside his head—even smaller pictures,
with an even smaller man looking at them? But the argument
was unsound. It took Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician
and philosopher, to make the idea of a mental representation scientifically
respectable. Turing described a hypothetical machine that
could be said to engage in reasoning. In fact this simple device, named
a Turing Machine in his honor, is powerful enough to solve any
problem that any computer, past, present, or future, can solve. And
it clearly uses an internal symbolic representation—a kind of mentalese—
without requiring a little man or any occult processes. By
looking at how a Turing machine works, we can get a grasp of what
it would mean for a human mind to think in mentalese as opposed
to English.
In essence, to reason is to deduce new pieces of knowledge from
old ones. A simple example is the old chestnut from introductory
logic: if you know that Socrates is a man and that all men are mortal,
you can figure out that Socrates is mortal. But how could a hunk
of matter like a brain accomplish this feat? The first key idea is a
representation: a physical object whose parts and arrangement corre-
spond piece for piece to some set of ideas or facts. For example, the
pattern of ink on this page
Socrates isa man
is a representation of the idea that Socrates is a man. The shape of
one group of ink marks, Socrates, is a symbol that stands for the
concept of Socrates. The shape of another set of ink marks, isa,
stands for the concept of being an instance of, and the shape of the
third, man, stands for the concept of man. Now, it is crucial to keep
one thing in mind. I have put these ink marks in the shape of English
words as a courtesy to you, the reader, so that you can keep them
straight as we work through the example. But all that really matters
is that they have different shapes. I could have used a star of David,
a smiley face, and the Mercedes-Benz logo, as long as I used them
consistently.
Similarly, the fact that the Socrates ink marks are to the left of
the isa ink marks on the page, and the man ink marks are to the
right, stands for the idea that Socrates is a man. If I change any
part of the representation, like replacing isa with isasonofa, or
flipping the positions of Socrates and man, we would have a
representation of a different idea. Again, the left-to-right English
order is just a mnemonic device for your convenience. I could have
done it right-to-left or up-and-down, as long as I used that order
consistently.
Keeping these conventions in mind, now imagine that the page has
a second set of ink marks, representing the proposition that every
man is mortal:
Socrates isa man
Every man ismortal
To get reasoning to happen, we now need a processor. A processor
is not a little man (so one needn"t worry about an infinite regress of
homunculi inside homunculi) but something much stupider: a gadget
with a fixed number of reflexes. A processor can react to different
pieces of a representation and do something in response, including
altering the representation or making new ones. For example, imagine
a machine that can move around on a printed page. It has a cutout
in the shape of the letter sequence isa, and a light sensor that can
tell when the cutout is superimposed on a set of ink marks in the
exact shape of the cutout. The sensor is hooked up to a little pocket
copier, which can duplicate any set of ink marks, either by printing
identical ink marks somewhere else on the page or by burning them
into a new cutout.
Now imagine that this sensor-copier-creeper machine is wired up
with four reflexes. First, it rolls down the page, and whenever it
detects some isa ink marks, it moves to the left, and copies the ink
marks it finds there onto the bottom left corner of the page. Let loose
on our page, it would create the following:
Socrates isa man
Every man ismortal
Socrates
Its second reflex, also in response to finding an i s a , is to get itself
to the right of that i s a and copy any ink marks it finds there into
the holes of a new cutout. In our case, this forces the processor to
make a cutout in the shape of man. Its third reflex is to scan down
the page checking for ink marks shaped like Every, and if it finds
some, seeing if the ink marks to the right align with its new cutout.
In our example, it finds one: the man in the middle of the second
line. Its fourth reflex, upon finding such a match, is to move to the
right and copy the ink marks it finds there onto the bottom center of
the page. In our example, those are the ink marks i s m o r t a l . If you
are following me, you"ll see that our page now looks like this:
Socrates isa man
Every man ismortal
Socrates ismortal
A primitive kind of reasoning has taken place. Crucially, although
the gadget and the page it sits on collectively display a kind of intelligence,
there is nothing in either of them that is itself intelligent.
Gadget and page are just a bunch of ink marks, cutouts, photocells,
lasers, and wires. What makes the whole device smart is the exact
correspondence between the logician"s rule "If X is a Y and all Y"s
are Z, then X is Z" and the way the device scans, moves, and prints.
Logically speaking, "X is a Y" means that what is true of Y is also
true of X, and mechanically speaking, X isa Y causes what is printed
next to the Y to be also printed next to the X. The machine, blindly
following the laws of physics, just responds to the shape of the ink
marks isa (without understanding what it means to us) and copies
other ink marks in a way that ends up mimicking the operation of
the logical rule. What makes it "intelligent" is that the sequence of
sensing and moving and copying results in its printing a representation
of a conclusion that is true if and only if the page contains representa-
tions of premises that are true. If one gives the device as much paper
as it needs, Turing showed, the machine can do anything that any
computer can do—and perhaps, he conjectured, anything that any
physically embodied mind can do.
Now, this example uses ink marks on paper as its representation
and a copying-creeping-sensing machine as its processor. But the
representation can be in any physical medium at all, as long as the
patterns are used consistently. In the brain, there might be three
groups of neurons, one used to represent the individual that the
proposition is about (Socrates, Aristotle, Rod Stewart, and so on),
one to represent the logical relationship in the proposition (is a, is
not, is like, and so on), and one to represent the class or type that
the individual is being categorized as (men, dogs, chickens, and so
on). Each concept would correspond to the firing of a particular
neuron; for example, in the first group of neurons, the fifth neuron
might fire to represent Socrates and the seventeenth might fire to
represent Aristotle; in the third group, the eighth neuron might fire
to represent men, the twelfth neuron might fire to represent dogs.
The processor might be a network of other neurons feeding into these
groups, connected together in such a way that it reproduces the firing
pattern in one group of neurons in some other group (for example,
if the eighth neuron is firing in group 3, the processor network would
turn on the eighth neuron in some fourth group, elsewhere in the
brain). Or the whole thing could be done in silicon chips. But in all
three cases the principles are the same. The way the elements in the
processor are wired up would cause them to sense and copy pieces
of a representation, and to produce new representations, in a way
that mimics the rules of reasoning. With many thousands of representations
and a set of somewhat more sophisticated processors (perhaps
different kinds of representations and processors for different kinds
of thinking), you might have a genuinely intelligent brain or computer.
Add an eye that can detect certain contours in the world and turn on
representations that symbolize them, and muscles that can act on the
world whenever certain representations symbolizing goals are turned
on, and you have a behaving organism (or add a TV camera and set
of levers and wheels, and you have a robot).
This, in a nutshell, is the theory of thinking called "the physical
symbol system hypothesis" or the "computational" or "representa-
tional" theory of mind. It is as fundamental to cognitive science as the
cell doctrine is to biology and plate tectonics is to geology. Cognitive
psychologists and neuroscientists are trying to figure out what kinds
of representations and processors the brain has. But there are ground
rules that must be followed at all times: no little men inside, and no
peeking. The representations that one posits in the mind have to be
arrangements of symbols, and the processor has to be a device with
a fixed set of reflexes, period. The combination, acting all by itself,
has to produce the intelligent conclusions. The theorist is forbidden
to peer inside and "read" the symbols, "make sense" of them, and
poke around to nudge the device in smart directions like some deus
ex machina.
Now we are in a position to pose the Whorfian question in a precise
way. Remember that a representation does not have to look like
English or any other language; it just has to use symbols to represent
concepts, and arrangements of symbols to represent the logical relations
among them, according to some consistent scheme. But though
internal representations in an English speaker"s mind don"t have to
look like English, they could, in principle, look like English—or
like whatever language the person happens to speak. So here is the
question: Do they in fact? For example, if we know that Socrates is
a man, is it because we have neural patterns that correspond one-toone
to the English words Socrates, is, a, and man, and groups of
neurons in the brain that correspond to the subject of an English
sentence, the verb, and the object, laid out in that order? Or do we
use some other code for representing concepts and their relations in
our heads, a language of thought or mentalese that is not the same
as any of the world"s languages? We can answer this question by
seeing whether English sentences embody the information that a
processor would need to perform valid sequences of reasoning—
without requiring any fully intelligent homunculus inside doing the
"understanding."
The answer is a clear no. English (or any other language people
speak) is hopelessly unsuited to serve as our internal medium of
computation. Consider some of the problems.
The first is ambiguity. These headlines actually appeared in newspapers:
Child"s Stool Great for Use in Garden
Stud Tires Out
Stiff Opposition Expected to Casketless Funeral Plan
Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
Queen Mary Having Bottom Scraped
Columnist Gets Urologist in Trouble with His Peers
Each headline contains a word that is ambiguous. But surely the
thought underlying the word is not ambiguous; the writers of the
headlines surely knew which of the two senses of the words stool,
stud, and stiff they themselves had in mind. And if there can be two
thoughts corresponding to one word, thoughts can"t be words.
The second problem with English is its lack of logical explicitness.
Consider the following example, devised by the computer scientist
Drew McDermott:
Ralph is an elephant.
Elephants live in Africa.
Elephants have tusks.
Our inference-making device, with some minor modifications to handle
the English grammar of the sentences, would deduce "Ralph lives
in Africa" and "Ralph has tusks." This sounds fine but isn"t. Intelligent
you, the reader, knows that the Africa that Ralph lives in is the
same Africa that all the other elephants live in, but that Ralph"s tusks
are his own. But the symbol-copier-creeper-sensor that is supposed
to be a model of you doesn"t know that, because the distinction is
nowhere to be found in any of the statements. If you object that this
is just common sense, you would be right—but it"s common sense
that we"re trying to account for, and English sentences do not embody
the information that a processor needs to carry out common sense.
A third problem is called "co-reference." Say you start talking
about an individual by referring to him as the tall blond man with
one black shoe. The second time you refer to him in the conversation
you are likely to call him the man; the third time, just him. But the
three expressions do not refer to three people or even to three ways
of thinking about a single person; the second and third are just ways
of saving breath. Something in the brain must treat them as the same
thing; English isn"t doing it.
A fourth, related problem comes from those aspects of language
that can only be interpreted in the context of a conversation or text—
what linguists call "deixis." Consider articles like a and the. What is
the difference between killed a policeman and killed the policeman?
Only that in the second sentence, it is assumed that some specific
policeman was mentioned earlier or is salient in the context. Thus in
isolation the two phrases are synonymous, but in the following contexts
(the first from an actual newspaper article) their meanings are
completely different:
A policeman"s 14-year-old son, apparently enraged after
being disciplined for a bad grade, opened fire from his
house, killing a policeman and wounding three people
before he was shot dead.
A policeman"s 14-year-old son, apparently enraged after
being disciplined for a bad grade, opened fire from his
house, killing the policeman and wounding three people
before he was shot dead.
Outside of a particular conversation or text, then, the words a and
the are quite meaningless. They have no place in one"s permanent
mental database. Other conversation-specific words like here, there,
this, that, now, then, I, me, my, her, we, and you pose the same
problems, as the following old joke illustrates:
First guy: I didn"t sleep with my wife before we were married, did
you?
Second guy: I don"t know. What was her maiden name?
A fifth problem is synonymy. The sentences
Sam sprayed paint onto the wall.
Sam sprayed the wall with paint.
Paint was sprayed onto the wall by Sam.
The wall was sprayed with paint by Sam.
refer to the same event and therefore license many of the same inferences.
For example, in all four cases, one may conclude that the wall
has paint on it. But they are four distinct arrangements of words. You
know that they mean the same thing, but no simple processor, crawling
over them as marks, would know that. Something else that is not
one of those arrangements of words must be representing the single
event that you know is common to all four. For example, the event
might be represented as something like
(Sam spray painti) cause (painti go to (on wall))
—which, assuming we don"t take the English words seriously, is not
too far from one of the leading proposals about what mentalese looks
like.
These examples (and there are many more) illustrate a single important
point. The representations underlying thinking, on the one
hand, and the sentences in a language, on the other, are in many ways
at cross-purposes. Any particular thought in our head embraces a
vast amount of information. But when it comes to communicating a
thought to someone else, attention spans are short and mouths are
slow. To get information into a listener"s head in a reasonable amount
of time, a speaker can encode only a fraction of the message into
words and must count on the listener to fill in the rest. But inside a
single bead, the demands are different. Air time is not a limited
resource: different parts of the brain are connected to one another
directly with thick cables that can transfer huge amounts of information
quickly. Nothing can be left to the imagination, though, because
the internal representations are the imagination.
We end up with the following picture. People do not think in
English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought.
This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languages;
presumably it has symbols for concepts, and arrangements of symbols
that correspond to who did what to whom, as in the paint-spraying
representation shown above. But compared with any given language,
mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others. It
must be richer, for example, in that several concept symbols must
correspond to a given English word like stool or stud. There must
be extra paraphernalia that differentiate logically distinct kinds of
concepts, like Ralph"s tusks versus tusks in general, and that link
different symbols that refer to the same thing, like the tall blond man
with one black shoe and the man. On the other hand, mentalese must
be simpler than spoken languages; conversation-specific words and
constructions (like a and the) are absent, and information about
pronouncing words, or even ordering them, is unnecessary. Now, it
could be that English speakers think in some kind of simplified and
annotated quasi-English, with the design I have just described, and
that Apache speakers think in a simplified and annotated quasi-
Apache. But to get these languages of thought to subserve reasoning
properly, they would have to look much more like each other than
either one does to its spoken counterpart, and it is likely that they
are the same: a universal mentalese.
Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese
into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would
still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably
have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese
to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English
could take place, or even what learning English would mean.
So where does all this leave Newspeak? Here are my predictions
for the year 2050. First, since mental life goes on independently of
particular languages, concepts of freedom and equality will be thinkable
even if they are nameless. Second, since there are far more
concepts than there are words, and listeners must always charitably
fill in what the speaker leaves unsaid, existing words will quickly gain
new senses, perhaps even regain their original senses. Third, since
children are not content to reproduce any old input from adults but
create a complex grammar that can go beyond it, they would creolize
Newspeak into a natural language, possibly in a single generation.
The twenty-first-century toddler may be Winston Smith"s revenge.

看官，您受累了！

參考

Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct - The New Science Of Language And Mind
Jerry Fodor. Review of Jose Luis Bermudez, "Thinking without Words" 踩↓吐槽說諸多思維都非推理……說思考自己所思的時候不一定是輸入自然語言，或者說二級思考不見得依賴自然語言的反輸入
José Luis Bermúdez- Thinking without Words 認為思維是推理性的
Pessi Lyyra. 2005. Review of José Luis Bermúdez- Thinking without Words 挺↑
Martine Nida-Rumelin. 2010. Thinking without Language
Cognitive development in deaf children Ch.4
Spencer, P. E. and Meadow-Orlans, K. P. (1996), Play, Language, and Maternal Responsiveness: A Longitudinal Study of Deaf and Hearing Infants. Child Development, 67: 3176–3191. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1996.tb01908.x
手語言語腦成像：Heather Patterson Knapp, David P. Corina, A human mirror neuron system for language: Perspectives from signed languages of the deaf, Brain and Language, Volume 112, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 36-43, ISSN 0093-934X, 10.1016/j.bandl.2009.04.002. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X0900056X)
L.Weiskrantz. 1988. Thought Without Language

補充：http://www.zhihu.com/question/19887068這個問題是文盲人做夢是怎麼樣的。可以參考一下。基本上這個案例說明了：沒有過的感覺經驗，是不會出現在夢境里的。連做夢都不會出現的心理過程，我們就更難指望平時出現了。夢境絕對是一種內部思考過程，夢中聽見的話也算是內部語言。同理可證，先天失聰的人夢中是不會有聲音信息的。所以平時的內部語言估計也就沒有聲音信息。

瀉藥@丁若水我記得這個問題我在知乎心理學群里自己問過別人一次。

答案是：由於他們先天沒有聽覺經驗，所以思維和內部語言只能夠以視覺、觸覺、動覺等其他形式存在。

原因在於：『感覺是一切高級心理過程的基礎』——我讀過的所有教科書都這麼寫。

一般我們在思考的時候，會有一個『默念』的過程，這個默念是以在腦海中『響起』語音的形式存在的。而因為先天失聰，他們就無法進行『默念』的內部語言。但是他們可以進行在腦海里想像一個個字句的『表象』，也就是視覺想像。

問題是他們是否就藉助這種視覺想像進行內部語言呢？或者他們完全跳過了這個過程？這方面的研究我沒看過，不好下結論。但是就我所知的知識來說——這是有可能的。

因為人腦的記憶和思維，並不是以『語言』『語音』『文字』的形式記載的。思維的形式也不一定要藉助內部『默念』的語言。

最明顯的案例就是——做物理和數學題的時候，人是可以不在腦海里自言自語，而只想像物理過程和運算過程的。

另一個案例就是——人的思考有一個『頓悟』的過程。有些問題你放一段時間不想了，突然有了靈感。這事兒不少見，我相信每個人都有體驗。從心理學實驗史來說，認知心理學家做過一個猩猩拿香蕉的實驗，大家或許也聽過。黑猩猩並不是不停試錯後才用箱子當墊腳工具爬上去拿香蕉的，而是又有一個沉默、靜止、觀察的過程。猩猩會說話嗎？——不會。所以猩猩是不會在腦海里『自言自語』想說：『怎麼辦呢？這箱子能不能用？好像我能爬上去？要不我試試看？』——猩猩不會有這些內部語言。但是並不妨礙它思考和頓悟。

猩猩都做得到的，沒理由人做不到吧？——特指腦認知功能方面。

我想這個問題另一個有趣的延伸是——我們寫作、思考的時候的內部『默念』語言究竟是一種『副產物』還是『工具』呢？它的具體作用到底是什麼？這個問題先不說，放一放。

剛剛說到了記憶的儲存。我這裡說一下『失語症』。失語症分很多種，有閱讀不能的，有說話不能的，有書寫不能的。這裡不一一細說，但這些病人都沒有思維上、智商上的其他問題——沒有任何一個我所見的資料提及。

我們表達同一個意思的時候，每一次說話都有細微的差異。如果我把上文全部刪除，重新寫——雖然內容意思大致一致，可是很多細節必定是不同的。這就說明，我們在使用語言的時候，語言是一種輸出形式。形式可以多種多樣，而未必我們的思維本身就是這種形式的。

再比如，我們看見一個場景，我們記下來了。回憶的時候，可以輸出語言，也可以在腦海中重現視覺場景。例如，你看到有人拿了杯水喝——幾秒鐘後另一個人問你：『有沒有看到一杯水？』你回答：『剛剛我看到一個人喝水，說不定就是你的。』因為喝水這件事情很平常，看到的時候我們並沒有一個抓換成內部語言的過程，我們不會想說『哇！有人在喝水啊！』。但是別人問起，我們依舊可以快速的轉化成語言輸出。我想，這從一個側面證明了我們的思維、記憶有一個更加基礎直接的形式——而非只是語言。

以上結束。等看過更多認知心理學資料研究的人來回答。