It looks at the cases of people who are brought up without language and reflects on the issue of language as shaper or shaped by our thinking. One of the key insights, very nicely put, I think, is this:
"For the vast majority of us, our thought processes have been profoundly shaped by the introjection of language into our cognitive worlds, the taking on board of a massive intellectual prosthesis, the collective product of countless generations. Human thought, for the majority, is not simply the individual outcome of our evolved neural architecture, but also the result of our borrowing of the immense symbolic and intellectual resources available in language."
It's that image of an intellectual prosthetic which I find very interesting. It also helps us to make the connection with the insights of such as Marshall McLuhan about how our technologies extend and disable human abilities. In many ways this article is a reflection on how language both enables some things and disables others.
language has been knit into my neurological functioning to such a significant degree that words are my constant inner companion. Even when I find that I have not been engaged in an inner dialogue, it is like waking from a sleep, unable to recall a dream that fast slips away. Perhaps like Ildefonso, I cannot talk about a languageless ‘dark’ once in the linguistic ‘light,’ even though there is a rich potential for action and perception in the dark.
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