Thinking and Language
The reason thinking and language phenomenon are viewed together is that simple fact that the most of people’s conscious thinking is carried out through grammatical constructions and certain lexis. The latter constitutes and explains some variety of our thinking principles such as framing decisions, for instance.
Although this and analogous principles and schemes of cognition are described as faulty ones or biases, they carry out the evolutionary justified function. Simply, their function is to increase the reliability and decrease the energy costs of our thinking process. Having the stable concept of a class of certain objects or an expectation frame for certain events proves to be very efficient in terms of saving time and effort even though their use may and often does result in mistakes because of inconsistency between our schemes and reality.
But in a long-run perspective, our benefits still outweigh losses as it takes dozens of implications to develop a bias toward a certain event. By using the information that is contained in our stereotype which describes the decision that is proven to work in the majority of cases we win time.
And the difference in time between quick actions based on stereotype and slower but more rational ones based on the complex analysis the situation may result in whether we survive or not. The language provides our abstract thinking with categories, names and meaning of our certain mental operations that are not based on processing images or spatial thinking. It would seem that the kind of the rules of using and creating grammatical constructions and lexis, which is basically the language, is the key factor that determines our ability to think. It is true to some measure, but it also works vice versa as there are numerous kinds of tasks that do not require operating with words to be solved.
By learning the ways to solve typical non-verbal tasks we develop a certain style or attitude of problem-solving or simply the set of the general approaches to problem-solving which have proven themselves to be the best. In this way, thinking and language can reciprocally affect each …
