William writes: "How can you prove that "speechless thought does not exist" is an incorrect statement? To answer you must define speech and thought and existence.
"I'll try in the context of the statement. "speech = any word or utterance, including gesture. thought = any conception including feeling sensation and emotion. existence = any conscious awareness of something presumed to be outside the self or independent of the self. "I'm inclined to agree that humans think with 'speech' as defined above. That does not mean that any speech is adequate or correct. wc" Cheerskep's reply: Writers struggle to put their thoughts into words -- how could that be if their thoughts are in words? How could you ever mis-speak yourself? Rock-climbers, chefs, chess-players, even tennis-players -- we'd say they're thinking all the time, just not with words. Ponder how much thinking goes through your mind as you drive. Now ponder how much of this "thinking" is entified in "speech". You are aware of a myriad of elements in your surroundings, and you respond to what you aware of, not to any verbal articulation of those elements. As you're driving you're suddenly aware of a deer right in front of you (a brown deer, a small deer) and you veer to the right because you're also aware of a car coming from the other direction in the lane on your left. What is passing through your mind is AWARENESS, consciousness. You are not "saying to yourself" "There's a small, brown deer in front of me that I don't want to hit with my car, but I also don't want to ram that oncoming car head on, so I'll go to the right because I see room on the shoulder over there..." Your response is "reasoned", but your actions are responses to the awarenesses, not to any verbal articulations of the content and implications of what's in your vision. Beware of begging the question by saying "But it's not 'thinking' until I put into speech each of those elements," or "Any 'understanding' of a vision and response to that understanding is merely instinct before it is 'put into words'." The movie "Brian's Song" tells some of the story of Brian Piccolo, who was the second-string runner behind Gale Sayers on the professional football team, the Chicago Bears. Brian seldom got to play because Sayers was so good. In the movie, Brian asks Sayers, "Gale, when you run, do you think about it or do you just do it?" Sayers replied, "I just do it." So Brian says, "Well, would you try thinking about it?" For football insiders that's a celebrated exchange. I hated it. In my youth I was also the runner in our football games (before you say it, I'll say it: "I didn't have one-tenth of Sayers's talent.") But I could "see" what he was doing. For example, when he was in the clear with only one man in front of him, he'd often run at about 85% speed and the potential tackler would angle toward a point where it appeared he'd meet Sayers. At the last moment, Sayers would hit the accelerator up to 100%, and, when the tackler got to the "point", Sayers was past it. I'd often done that in the past, so I knew Sayers was doing a great deal of cerebration as he executed that stactic. The depiction of Sayers as a kind of nonreflective monkey repelled me. Articulate he was not, but thinking he was.
