Wim Van Nieuwenhoven wrote:
> Gee, and I was thinking I had the big one on the hook :(
You do have at least =a= "big one" on the hook. The False proposition that
"language is everything" has tremendous inertia, never-the-less. Taking on such
a big, and so-widely-believed, error, and all of its ramifications within Human
interactive dynamics, is the work of a Life's time.
> Ken,
> can you give me a more detailed explanation of why language comes
> second (or wurse) to thought? Or is that not what you're trying to
> tell me?
For the necessary first insights, consider how adopted infants always acquire
the language dynamics of their adoptive environments. This exposes the fact
that the mechanism that converges upon the external manifestations of language
behavior takes its cue from something tremendously-more-fundamental. And when
one traces that fundamental stuff "all the way down", one sees clearly that the
fundamental stuff understands stuff that language cannot even "touch"...
language always trails far behind the fundamental neural information-processing
dynamics in this way... language gives an account of "yesterday's news".
Another very-productive way to explore your question is to look for
similarities within behavioral dynamics across widely-divergent cultures, each,
supposedly, possessing "unique" language (a somewhat Anthropological view).
When one does such (=really= does such), one finds that the contribution of
"language" is =Insignificant=, except for the force-recruitment, and
multiplication dynamics that I pointed to in my previous post. It goes on and
on, remaining the Same-Stuff, but doing so requires getting down to the
nitty-gritty Neuroscience stuff.
Everything necessary to grasp the fundamentals is contained in AoK, and the
refs cited in it (if you've caught my offers to send that doc to folks).
Cheers, Wim, ken collins