Minds without Language

FAIN: FEL-289035-23

Jacob Beck
York University (Toronto M4N 3M6 Canada)

Research and writing leading to a book offering a pluralistic account of the processes of human thought informed by cognitive science.

Human beings think. We are, as Descartes remarked, “thinking things.” We also talk. Putting these two observations together has led philosophers to a powerful idea: that thoughts are mental sentences. But this linguistic model of mind faces a significant problem. It struggles to accommodate nonhuman animals, which are too sophisticated to be explained without thoughts yet not sophisticated enough to be explained with sentence-like thoughts. Drawing on research from the cognitive sciences, my project develops a detailed, philosophical account of the nonlinguistic mind that explains animal intelligence and reorients our understanding of human uniqueness.