Language is a term often used by semioticians as well as by other scholars in a very broad sense to denote any system of signs.
It is also often used in a narrower sense to denote a system of verbal signs, as verbal here includes spoken/auditory and written signs.
A third meaning of the term language is in an even narrower sense, used by some linguists (such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield), as well as by others to denote a system of auditory signs.
“Language and writing are,” according to Saussure, “two different systems of signs, the second existing for the sole purpose of representing the first” (1916 [1966], 23).
The function of language was taken as a main one in the dominant tradition of Western thinking in antiquity and the Middle Ages – the function of transmitting ideas, intentions, feelings, etc. This suggests another definition: language is a tool or means of communication. But if we think of an instrument or means in the usual sense of these words, several misleading factors arise regarding this definition.
While we could take or set aside a hammer or a saw, we could not imagine ourselves separated from our language. It is so deeply essential to us that if it is taken away from us, it would be the same as being deprived of our bodies. What would be left of us?
We often imagine that we are a free spirit without a body, and our thoughts are extralinguistic units, but it is not clear whether the human being or human thinking is possible separately from some form of concrete incarnation.
In the case of the individual, this form is, of course, what is usually called a body – an organism of flesh and blood, created by a woman and a man; in the case of thought, it is a system of signs. Therefore, language in the broadest sense is just as much an instrument of thinking as it is of communication. This view, in turn, raises the question of the possibility of thinking separately from language, considered in a narrower sense (as a system of verbal signs, or even more limited, as a system of spoken signs). At one pole are those who accept this possibility, at the other – those who deny it.
For Charles S. Peirce, all thinking is in signs, though not necessarily in words.
For John Dewey “If language is identified with speech, there is no doubt thought without speech” But if the word language is used to denote all kinds of signs and symbols, then there is certainly no thought without language…“(1931 [1960 ], 90).
For these two pragmatists, there may be extralinguistic but no extrasemiotic thinking – thinking separate from verbal signs, not thinking separate from all signs and symbols.
But they are both aware that for some types of beings who could use linguistic or verbal signs, thinking involves a confusing and inevitable game between linguistic and non-linguistic cues.
How these beings use non-linguistic signs depends on the conventions of their specific language, but even in those cases where thinking is determined by non-linguistic signs, such as mathematicians (who think mainly in diagrammatic signs), artists who think mainly in visual signs. ), or musicians (in acoustic signs) – linguistic signs often play a complementary role.
This position is true of several equally important features of human thinking:
- the importance of spoken and written language;
- the multiplicity of irreducibly different sign systems used by human beings;
- the similarity and inevitable interaction between these sign systems in any actual process of human thinking.
In conclusion, it would be useful to recall Roman Jakobson‘s observation that “the image of language as a unified and monolithic system is highly simplified. Language is a system of systems, a generalizing code comprising many subcodes” (1985, 30).
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