Can one have a thought without mental imagery and language?

[WannabeSaint]

St. Thomas has said that we form a concept by use of an “image” and “word” via our senses.

I’ve tried to do an experiment. For instance I would try to avoid having a thought by consciously refraining from using any mental images and language. (“Try to think “I want ice cream” without using mental images and language.”)

While the thought was kind of muddled, I still felt a sense of awareness of the thought I was trying to avoid having. “I want ice cream.”

I’m not sure if this experiment proves anything or not, but can thoughts be had without these images and language?

 

[Vico]

St. Thomas has said that we form a concept by use of an “image” and “word” via our senses.

I’ve tried to do an experiment. For instance I would try to avoid having a thought by consciously refraining from using any mental images and language. (“Try to think “I want ice cream” without using mental images and language.”)

While the thought was kind of muddled, I still felt a sense of awareness of the thought I was trying to avoid having. “I want ice cream.”

I’m not sure if this experiment proves anything or not, but can thoughts be had without these images and language?

Current perception and memory can be an various sense modalities and one does not have to form words to describe it, including appetites.

 

[Evan]

See the “Prayer of Quiet” Prayer of Quiet - Wikipedia Carmelites should practice this prayer 30 minutes/day when possible.

 

[Wesrock]

I’m not answering the question, but don’t confuse St. Thomas’ terminology as having a mental image or mental word (such as mentally thinking the English word “cat” for a cat, or “picturing” a cat when I think of one). He uses the word “image” only because the expressed concept is a formal similitude to the external object. He does not mean an imagined vision or “phantasm”. Likewise the term “diction” is used for a being bringing a concept to thought and “word” as denoting that concept being expressed in thought, but he does not mean actually thinking a word in any particular language.

A mental picture or mental hearing of a word are particulars. St. Thomas was referring to abstractions.

 

[WannabeSaint]

I’m not quite sure I understand. We can know and think of a cat without an image of a cat? What point of reference would we have then?

 

[Wesrock]

Wesrock:

He uses the word “image” only because the expressed concept is a formal similitude to the external object.

You should explain this further since the word image itself implies similitude and not exactitude.

I’m not going to go into a full explanation of St. Thomas’ philosophy of the mind. I will say that St. Thomas did not think we could entirely understand a thing in its actual existence, but he did believe we could have moderate real knowledge of it and what it is. The universal form that exists as a particular instantiation in nature is what is expressed in thought and the means by which we know the thing. That form exists intelligibly in thought and naturally in the thing apprehended. We know the object by knowing its form. The object itself and its existence isn’t in knowledge, just the form.

A mental picture or mental hearing of a word are particulars. St. Thomas was referring to abstractions.

Also words themselves are at best abstractions of the reality they are trying to represent. The particulars of which words or images are being used are irrelevant as to comparing their necessity to the thought using them to express itself.

Language and pictures have no inherent meaning in themselves, they’re just pointers or signs we use for concepts. The meaning of any word in a language is subjective to the intelligent person using it. Any mental picture is, in some sense, an abstraction. However, any mental picture has particular conditions as if it is a material thing. You picture it with size, with color, with texture, or some combination depending on how detailed you’re being. The concept in knowledge is abstracted from all these material conditions.

 

[Wesrock]

I’m not quite sure I understand. We can know and think of a cat without an image of a cat? What point of reference would we have then?

We come to know things by sensing them, and perceiving them, and that includes the mental picture of them. St. Thomas pointed out that these perceptions are instruments of the external object, and we abstract from the material conditions of these pictures (or really any sense perception and combination of them) their form, and this is expressed as a concept. Your concept of a cat, or a circle, is not any particular picture of a cat or a circle, or even a finite group of pictures. Your concept is the form of the thing existing in an intelligible mode in your intellect.

As for whether you as a rational animal can think of a circle or cat without conjuring a new particular mental picture each time or mental hearing of a word is something I’m not really addressing. I just wanted to be clear St. Thomas wasn’t referring to either of these things when he called the concept an “image” or “word”.

 

[Wesrock]

What else could have St. Thomas meant if not the symbolic representation of the thing in our thoughts?

I’m not really feeling like defending St. Thomas’ description in this topic, I just wanted to comment on a misunderstanding. The general process St. Thomas and his commentators John of St. Thomas and Cajetan is as follows (simplified and streamlined):

External Senses > Inner Senses, i.e. common sense and imagination / phantasm (the “mental picture”) > Active Intellect abstracting the form from the material conditions of the phantasm > Impressed intellect receiving the form > Expressed Intellect “speaking” the word/concept insofar as the knower has the same form as the object in an intelligible manner

By speaking we don’t mean a train of thought or having our language words in our mind, it just means the intellect expresses the concept as a formal similitude to the object.

Edit: And that’s just the general manner of encountering and knowing a thing. I didn’t really speak to recall and reflection or any number of other specifics.

Edit 2: The key point for St. Thomas’ realism is that the concept and the object, while under different modes of existence, are constituted by the same form, and that the concept (outside of reflection) isn’t the object of thought but the medium by which we know the external object, that which contains the intellible content of the object, in a sense, in a psychic way as opposed to its natural way.

 

[Gertabelle]

Philosophy is not familiar territory to me, just to be clear.

This topic reminded me of what Helen Keller (deaf and blind from the age of 18 months) said about her years of existence before her teacher Annie Sullivan found a way to connect language with experience.

I don’t have time to look it up, and it’s been over 30 years since I did that research. If you’re interested, a Google search might yield her writing on this.

 

[Wesrock]

A form in a hylemorphic sense (which is what St. Thomas means here) isn’t a picture or shape, it’s the formal cause of a thing, what it formally is. Non-rational animals would have the external and internal senses referred to above (post# 10) but only rational animals have the active intellect to abstract the form, receive it into the impressed intellect, and express it as a concept.

 

[po18guy]

Interesting question. It is clear, from observing human behavior, that the converse is true.

 

[Wesrock]

Wesrock:

A form in a hylemorphic sense (which is what St. Thomas means here) isn’t a picture or shape, it’s the formal cause of a thing, what it formally is.

And what can one contemplate about a thing apart from those things that formalize what that thing is? One can only contemplate a thing that is not oneself, either by perception of formal differences or assumptions of formal similarities. Regardless of this being externally apparent or internally inferred. Formulating thoughts on what things formally are is impossible without these other considerations. One might even say what a thing formally is, is the thing it interpretively presents itself realistically to be. Does it make sense to think about what a cat formally is without contemplating a feline image? What a man or woman formally is without imagining a bipedal human shape? Now does one expect that ALL that a cat is is its apparent shape? I would say after interacting with cats we would determine no. But could we conclude that a cat is something without the addition of a feline shape? I would also say no. I would go the other way and conclude that the feline shape is what gives the cat its formal cause not the formal cause of a cat its feline shape.

What about a human that has lost both legs? Is he no longer human? Or a cat born without a tail? The form of a thing certainly informs (heh) the properties (including shape) we expect (and vice versa: we learn about the form by observing those properties across a wide spectrum). A circle of course must necessarily have a certain shape. But the (hylemorphic) form as such is not just a reference to a physical shape as such. We might learn and know that all things of a certain form have (or under what-we-call-normal conditions will develop) a certain shape, but the technical term “form” isn’t a direct reference to shape, just the principle of what a thing formally is.

And that’s a lot of words for me to say it’s not that we disregard shape as irrelevant, it’s that people mistakenly confuse the technical term and principle of “form” as directly meaning shape.

Anyway, while I often have a mental picture of a circle when discussing a circle, it does not seem I at all times need that picture in order to contemplate or discuss “what is circularity”. And my picture of a cat might be orange and of a certain size, or my picture of a circle today might be a white shape bordered by a black line, but my formal concept (in a technical sense) of a cat (even while I have the picture while considering the concept) does not include these “material” conditions. It is abstracted from them. When I talk of a cat and picture a twenty pound, orange cat and hear me and picture a ten pound, gray tabby cat, we are entertaining the same intelligible concept, we are just creating different particular pictures as we do so.

 

[BornInMarch]

Yes: musical cords are neither language nor imagery yet they can easily be imagined.

 

[Gyro]

This discussion might be a bit too heady for me but I think there are many “thoughts” that occur without language. And the issue of “mental imagery” is a notion so broad that it confounds me. How can anyone have an image that is not “mental”? Our minds work both consciously and unconsciously and our minds are at work all the time. This mental “work” is not always something under our control - and I’m not just speaking of dreams ('though that is well worth a deeper examination).

For instance, what is memory? It’s not always a just a mental image. Sometimes it’s something far more complex. Sometimes memory is a sensory response that links one thing with another to produce something else that has great symbolic value.

I remember, for instance, the smell of my mother’s house when I have a cup of her favorite tea. The memory however is not just the house nor the aroma of tea that is triggered, rather, what I actually think of is “Home” with a capital “H.” It’s a comforting thought filled with a depth of experience, a curious nostalgia that has sounds of children playing and the rattle of dinnerware, and light streaming through sheer curtains on an autumn day that captures the sparkle of dust motes hanging in the air, quietude, conflict, life and love. This memorial “thought” is filled with incredibly complex “imagery” that can be described with language but is actually lacking in words because, in the end, words would be inadequate.

Sometimes, if we are particularly blessed, we can be tooling down the road with our radios playing some absolutely fetching music and suddenly the passing landscape, however banal it may be, can be transformed into something far greater than it actually is. A transcendence of beauty occurs and our hearts are overwhelmed. Mental imagery? Language? No, much more.

At Mass, we can suddenly be lifted up in our hearts and spirit, and all the symbolism of word and action, music and the appointments and arrangements of space and light, and the mix of colors of the world that we experience with our senses will (somehow!) coalesce, and we are overcome with an even greater reality. All of a sudden, everything makes sense! Love is real, truth is understood, wisdom exists in the full, and God, who is greater than all the mental imagery and language we can imagine, is real - a living, loving reality. Think about it!