I have studied philosophy of mind at university and psychology and I often had a problem with peoples definitions of mental states and I couldn't recognise or agree with their depiction of them.

In the study of memory it has gone from their being one continuous memory store to finding out that there are a large range of types of memory and brain abnormalities/lesions etc have shown that one type of memory is independent from another.

These findings cast doubt on our ability to define mental states unless we practise careful phenomenology and look at data on brain disorders etc. And overall this should encourage serious caution in making wide-sweeping claims or naive intuitions.

On a YouTube video Stephen Pinker claimed we think in images. I know I think in words and live with a constant stream of language. How could Pinker know what I thought in? Considering he has no direct access to my mental states? Is he just going by analogy to his experience. — Andrew4Handel

He could ask you, and you could tell him.

Wittgenstein is the man for this conundrum. It's the beetle in the box. If you only have your beetle, and I only have my beetle, we cannot even disagree about what beetles are like. Pinker says thoughts are like pictures, and you say beetles are like words, and I say they are like flies buzzing. But there is no way of telling whether we are all looking at the same thing, and describing different aspects, or talking about completely different things, because we each only have our own case to look at.

But here we are, you, me, Pinker, and Wittgenstein, expressing our thoughts in words and perhaps in pictures too sometimes, maybe in bricks and mortar as well, why not? So thoughts are not private in that radical sense after all.

I am talking about comparing mental states not comparing verbal reports of mental states. I agree that you can talk about mental states and clarify some issues. But people like Pinker and Dennet don't seem interested in this, especially with Dennet's Hetero-phenomenology (incoherent skeptical method) and The Churchland's (incoherent) Eliminative materialism.

In a trivial case we could both agree that the car is red but I could be perceiving as blue and that is my red. I may perceive the colour as jarring and garish and you may experience it as soothing.

But in trivial cases like this not much is at stake but in the diagnosis of mental illness or in pursuit of accurate psychology the differences become crucial and that is where a direct comparison would help otherwise we end up in endless unverifiable disputes about the phenomenon.

I was interested on what a young woman said in a philosophy podcast. She said she had never experienced sadness until her mothers premature death.

Did she know what sadness was before then? As someone from a troubled background I have always experienced anxiety and sadness and I can't put myself in her shoes.

People who suddenly experience mental distress are often surprised because it was nothing like they imagined including skeptics of depression who have apologised profusely after for doubting the condition.

So these people seem to be failing to know mental states until they finally experience them.

I am not claiming we can't talk about mental states but that we can never compare them to know if we are referring to the same thing. It is the problem of subjectivity and I think we need to explore the ramifications of this privacy and try harder at accurate phenomenology.

(Especially for the sake of developing better mental health support)

On a YouTube video Stephen Pinker claimed we think in images. I know I think in words and live with a constant stream of language. How could Pinker know what I thought in? Considering he has no direct access to my mental states? Is he just going by analogy to his experience. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, but what are words except visual scribbles and sounds? If you say you think in your language, then you are essentially saying that you think in visual scribbles and sounds. How did you even learn a language without already thinking in visual imagery? How did you see the scribbles and the pictures associated with them without having the ability to see? How did your mind know that these scribbles represented the object in the picture next to them if your mind didn't already engage in representations - of understanding that what you see is a representation of what is external to your body? It seems that we delude ourselves into thinking that what we see is real, or how the world really is.

In a trivial case we could both agree that the car is red but I could be perceiving as blue and that is my red. I may perceive the colour as jarring and garish and you may experience it as soothing. — Andrew4Handel

Everyone that poses this question seems to ignore the fact that we all live in a shared world and the shared world is where the consistency comes from. We may both experience different colors than each other but we always experience the same color when the same wavelength of EM energy interacts with our eyes. This is why we can still communicate about what it is we experience and understand each other. We couldn't understand each other if we didn't consistently experience the same thing when looking at the same thing every time. I believe that we do see the same colors because we share so much of our DNA. We are members of the same species. Geneticists haven't found a part of our genetic code that creates color in our minds that could be different from individual to individual, like the color of our eyes are.

The fact that we can talk about colors at all and understand what we mean must mean something, right? What about the fact that people that can see can't talk about colors with a congenitally blind person and the fact that sighted people can say that blind people don't see colors at all despite the fact that it may be hard for a sighted person to imagine what it would be like not seeing colors?

Yes, but what are words except visual scribbles and sounds? — Harry Hindu

They are neither. When I am thinking I have no sound waves hitting my ear. Blind and deaf people learn language. The only thing that creates language is semantic content.

Image is a visual metaphor and vision is only one type of experience.

You have done what I was saying and misrepresented experience. I don't have pictures or sounds in my head when I am thinking. I can bring up a visual image like "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" which is bereft of meaning but I am not usually envisioning orthography.

Visual images rarely come to me. If they do I am trying to remember a place or event or dreaming. But even in the case of memory words have a more powerful effect than the images and I have a narrative about the image I have recalled.

You can't simply assert what someone else's experience is in any kind of valid way. That is not science or philosophy or phenomenological analysis.

If I was lying about the nature of my mental states how would you know anyway?

I said the case of colour was trivial. It was an example however of how people respond differently and/or their brain behaves differently to the same stimuli. If the brain models perceptions then it is likely to be different for everyone in the context of prior experiences etc.

But in the cases of issues like anxiety, dreams beliefs we have no shared access to these states.
There is also plenty of room to be skeptical of the external world even if you are a realist (see physics). It is always possible to be deceived. But that isn't the issue here.

You could create an unconscious robot that was able to "perceive" the external; world and agree with you about what it contained. You don't have to commit yourself to a belief in other minds to be a realist about the external world because it is not hidden subjective data.

I believe we need experiences of things to talk about them in many cases, however that establishes the centrality of personal experience not that an external world exists. However we are not discussing any of that here but about access to mental states.

It is puzzling that we can have shared experiences of an external world but cannot share our mental states in the same way like we are living in two worlds simultaneously.

Subjective differences may have an external/neural cause like different neural circuitry but that does not support realism because it reinforces the fact that we have different perceptions. As Thomas Nagel said "Objectivity is a view from nowhere" There is no external fact that can be experienced objectively.

The relationship between mental states and language is interesting and puzzling.I think language is limited in conveying internal experience not because thought can't be language but because it is representing subjective states.

Words like "Tree" will have their meaning largely influenced by a shared external perception. But words applied to internal states are informed by private experience and a network of beliefs an so on.

People who suddenly experience mental distress are often surprised because it was nothing like they imagined including skeptics of depression who have apologised profusely after for doubting the condition.

So these people seem to be failing to know mental states until they finally experience them. — Andrew4Handel

This is kind of straightforward. I know what a car crash is without having experienced one, but experiencing one is very different from knowing what it is.

But suppose I really have no idea what depression is, and then I get depressed. How do I even know that this feeling is depression and not something else? How do I even recognise my own beetle as a beetle?

If X is totally private, then it cannot be talked about at all, not even by its owner. But depression is not totally private. To the extent that we can talk about it, it is public, it is feelings and experiences, sure, but also characteristic behaviours and ways of talking. If you try to separate out the experiential aspect from the behavioural, then you cannot say anything about it at all.

Now this is not to say that people cannot hide their feelings rather than show them; tears of a clown and all that. But it is a bad habit to get into because in the end, you lose access to your own feelings and those of others, and live in an unreal emotional world.

I had social anxiety for years before I had a name for it. So I didn't know what was happening to me or whether I was normal. The word is not required for access to a mental state. However when you discover a word you can label yourself and tell other people. But this isn't sufficient. It is not enough to have a vague idea about what depression is.

Just because someone uses a word does not mean they are using it to its fullest dimension. The problem in philosophy is using words then giving them a weak or contestable or even inaccurate definition. Words cannot replace experience (which is multifaceted and phenomenologically rich.

I am not talking about the privacy of mental states here in the sense that they might be ineffable but I am talking about the failure of language to do them justice and the lack of ability to compare these states.

Lots of people with mental health problems face minimisation and skepticism. You might say "I can't sleep" And then someone (even a GP) will give an anecdote about how they can't sleep.

Now I know several people who have no problem falling a sleep (two of my sisters and my mother) So I know that there is a sleeping spectrum with extremes at each end and not being able to fall asleep is not trivial. So with a spectrum of conditions under one word there is the issue of the word not being sufficient.

The problem I am getting at is not whether words can capture mental states but the degree to which we can know other peoples mental states. It is also not about what might exist in the external world.

If someone talks about a car you can see a car but if they talk about their mind you can never see it. How can disputes about the nature of thought and memory etc ever be resolved?

Someone told me that they didn't dream in images where as I dream in glorious technicolor so I was surprised. I couldn't have a safe theory of dreams without knowing this. I dream like everyday life the only difference being few sounds and textures and I flip between locations instantaneously. If Myself and X dream differently with little in common how can we safely define a dream.

I am a big believer in very detailed phenomenological and qualitative analysis rather than seeking generalisations.

I had social anxiety for years before I had a name for it. So I didn't know what was happening to me or whether I was normal. — Andrew4Handel

So how did you find out that was the name for it?

I'm chronically shy and misanthropic; Have I got it?

You are quite right that we can not actually experience other people's mental states. One might debate whether we can even "experience" our own mental states, since our mental states are 'what we are'. But let's not go there.

People with shared language (which presupposed a great deal of cultural sharing) can communicate a great deal about what they are experiencing to each other, and from these communications we have built up the concept of what constitutes the usual human mental repertoire. We also know that some people's experience deviates from that averaged repertoire in fortunate and unfortunate ways.

Maybe you can meet someone briefly and remember their name and face for years afterward. Names and faces tend to fly out of my memory like alarmed pigeons (unless they are really hot, or something). You and I might both be totally crazy, and our craziness will be totally dissimilar. Or we may be geniuses, but not at all in the same way.

Words can effectively communicate what our mental states are like, but it takes a lot of words to do the job well. Just saying "he's manic depressive" doesn't tell us much. Labels are too short, usually. "Paranoid schizophrenic" just doesn't tell us enough about somebody's mental state, if we really want to know what that person is experiencing.

"You seem happy today." "Yes, I feel happy, but let me explain how and why. Have you got an hour?"

Someone told me that they didn't dream in images — Andrew4Handel

Don't believe everything people tell you.

But let's not go there. — Bitter Crank

No, let's go there.

I think they dreamt in words.. and.. how can a blind person dream in images.

I think consciousness and characterising the mind is of utmost importance and relevant to everything including physics I don't think it can be reduced or subsumed to another paradigm or ignored. Because consciousness is our only access to reality. That has led to skepticism about reality a la Descartes

It would be puzzling if reality could be explained without an explanation of consciousness. That would be a reality explained but the realities observer remaining unexplained (as if outside reality).

So many issues arise from subjectivity and one I have begun to ponder is whether energy is a subjective notion. It strikes me that we describe something as energy when it is useful to us. The problem for us is not a shortage of energy but a shortage of useful energy,, grass is energy to a herbivore. The same could be said for the perception of entropy. So I don't see physics or at least physics concepts as independent of us creating this relentless mechanical reality.

So I think we need to incorporate the mental into our data and perspective and not go down the eliminatavist or reductionist routes which I believe are dishonest time wasting or delusion.

For example if didn't have minds would the internet exist? I think human inventions cause a great and swift reduction of entropy by putting matter in implausible functional states which arose because of will and desire etc.

Here's the word and the image:



Sacks writes about language and the deaf, and how lacking and then receiving sign language changed their experience. I don't know if anything similar has been written about the blind. If someone had been blind since birth, they would not, could not, dream or think in visual images. How could they? For one thing, they wouldn't have any visual images, and much of the visual cortex would have been taken over for non-visual processing.

But, the blind would utilize other senses -- touch, taste, smell, and sound in their dreams. They might dream about a passage they read in braille and feel the braille words. It would be difficult for them to describe these dreams to a sighted - visual image dreamer, and visa versa. To each other, it would make sense quicker, better.

Because consciousness is our only access to reality. — Andrew4Handel

I wonder. I have lately been thinking that our consciousness, which we tend to think is like the pinnacle of the pyramid with the all seeing eye (image on the dollar bill reverse side). I've been thinking that maybe it is just one facility among numerous facilities that the brain operates. It seems like the pinnacle because what we hear and see, do, say, and think seems to be housed in the conscious mind. But maybe it isn't. (I'm not suggesting that mind transcends the brain; I don't think it does--at all.)

We know we have very Important, even critical, brain functions that we are not conscious of:

Memory; (we remember things, but we have no idea how memory is arranged; we have no way of auditing the contents of the memory.)
Movement; we have no conscious control--(except in a very difficult way, and then limited) over how to make our muscles move to produce coordinated and useful actions--like typing on a keyboard.
Vision; we have no knowledge and generally little control over how signals from the retina are interpreted and then integrated into a cohesive view.
Thinking; as I sit here writing this too you, the words are being fed to my fingers from a non-conscious source. I don't know how this happens.
Emotions; very important; we do not get to decide how we are going to feel about something a good share of the time. You meet somebody for the first time; you don't just like them, you fall for them head over heals. They turn you on every which way. You didn't intend this to happen, you didn't (perhaps) want this to happen, but it did. Or, try as you might, there are people that just strike you as disgusting.

and so on. I'm not saying our brains are not plastic; I'm not saying we are robots under the control of mysterious forces. I'm only saying that the Individual person has many systems between his ears not only keeping him alive but make him who he is, enable him to make his way forcefully in the world, and only SOME parts are accessible to, or part of, the conscious facility.

The motor cortex which moves us around, has to be aware of the world around it, has to know how the body is arranged in space from moment to moment, has to take directions from some other part of the brain (the way finding unit) and does this outside of our conscious mind. It receives information, makes decisions, and issues all sorts of instructions second by second--without telling us anything about it. We don't know and we don't need to know what is going on there.

A good share of our brain's always-on activity is not "un-conscious" -- it's just mostly not accessible to "THE consciousness where we live.

Take the "enteric brain" -- the nervous system that operates the gut. Do you really want to know, minute by minute, what it is dealing with? Probably not. Messages from the enteric brain to the cerebral brain are usually bad news: Alarm bell sounds, bright light blinks... Incoming message, red alert... "Contents of your gut are going to be expelled in 9 seconds, whether it is convenient or socially acceptable to you or not." and then it is expelled. Unless you were paying really close attention, you had no idea what was coming down the pipe, so to speak.

When I was unconscious under general anesthetic I had no experiences and there was nothing it was like.There was no way I could know anything in that state. We can posit a wide range of subconscious and unconscious things but we have to be conscious to reflect on them.

So I am invoking a state of non consciousness. How could we know anything and yet be non-conscious or non existent? It is not a case of being skeptical about reality or the external world. I am just talking about access here. How we only know anything through consciousness initially before theorising starts.

People talk about brain imaging to read mental states but that requires the consciousness and subjectivity of the scientist. Psychoanalysis and theory about mental processing require a conscious theorist..

Most theories of perception accept that there is an external reality but claim with evidence that it must be represented to us in the brain. So on this picture What we are perceiving is a construct. I don't know how naive realism could explain the idea we could have direct unmediated access to an objective reality. In this sense reality might be hidden from us. At the same time I do feel I have immediate access to reality.

So I think we need to work out what consciousness does in relation to reality.

The Churchland's scheme of replacing words like anger with Adrenalin etc is obviously misguided to me.

Changing the word you use to refer to a mental state doesn't change the mental state or get rid of it. They seemed to think that using scientific language is somehow avoiding mysterious mental state words but when people say they feel angry they are referring to the feeling and not making a claim at possible biochemical influences.

Words can be a short cut or pragmatic access to a topic. A true reduction to the natural sciences would be immensely complex if you wanted to claim we didn't need to invoke folk psychology.

I can't even see how you would reduce semantic statements of motivations like "I divorced my wife because she cheated." A crude reductionist might say you divorced your wife because certain neurons fired at time B but that would be speculative and not a true verifiable causal account.

So-called reason giving explanations are very effective, explanatory and don't need replacing. It is actually surprising how effective words are sparing us many headaches. But also this ease can be misleading. I do believe in the Power relations analysis that words are utilised like tools and weapons not in unbiased, transparent way.

I came across the word social anxiety on a poster in the central library. Below the words Social Anxiety Support Group was a description of the symptoms I shared. That way I was able to then apply the label to myself.

Now I am waiting to be tested for Asperger's Syndrome. The words pull together strands of experience into a recognisable entity.

Most theories of perception accept that there is an external reality but claim with evidence that it must be represented to us in the brain. So on this picture What we are perceiving is a construct. I don't know how naive realism could explain the idea we could have direct unmediated access to an objective reality. In this sense reality might be hidden from us. At the same time I do feel I have immediate access to reality. — Andrew4Handel

So, this is one issue. I agree with this view. There is a real world (the cosmos on down to your room) which has real properties. We are immersed in this reality, but we can not apprehend it first hand. The "apprehender" is locked inside the skull and all it knows is what its senses tell it. We are always at least one step removed from 'raw reality'. We have a construct of this "real world" which works, most of the time. All life in the cosmos has to deal with this real world, and since animal sensory systems are a lot like ours, we can assume that senses work pretty well for creatures that are not, apparently, building 'constructs'.

I too think in terms of "my consciousness". We clearly have something called consciousness. It is self-aware. It is one facility in the brain, perhaps "first among equals" or maybe just an equal among other equals.

I am not suggesting that we have more than one conscious facility. It would be very confusing if there was more than one Speaker of the House. But other facilities in the brain (like memory) must have a direct tap into what the Speaker of the House is up to. Otherwise, it could not furnish information when needed. It would not be able to recall what the Speaker of the House heard yesterday while I was eavesdropping on the worker in the neighboring cubicle.

So, again:

Where do you suppose "thinking" is done in the brain?

How does the memory bring to the fore information that has not been requested for about for 30 years? And how does the memory manage to forget a meeting you (somewhere in there) didn't really want to go to in the first place?

The motor cortex has to receive a feed from the visual cortex to be able to move you through the world. It needs to know where the holes, curbs, bumps, and big cracks are--pretty much in a continual stream. If it doesn't have this information (and It has to receive other information too, like information about how slippery the side walk is. This doesn't come from the visual cortex, it's picked up by the sensory system in the feet and legs which detects surface texture (hard, smooth, and slippery).

We aren't aware of all the things that are going on, live, in our brains because (PERHAPS) we have a deficient construct of how the mind works. Maybe we have put way to much emphasis on the conscious mind (one part out of 100 parts) and not enough importance on those other parts which are neither un nor sub conscious. They just do their thing apart from the conscious mind, They may even share awareness and consciousness among themselves which the Speaker of the House (THE consciousness) just doesn't have access to.

I don't happen to have an fMRI machine or a high end EEG in the kitchen, so I can't test this theory.

how can a blind person dream in images — Andrew4Handel

It transpires only someth9ing like 3% of the blind were never able to see at all, so most do definitely dream in images, and it remains possible that the others do have other parts of the visual system. But it is an interesting question, philosophically not really possible to resolve entirely.

... a description of the symptoms I shared. [...] The words pull together strands of experience into a recognisable entity. — Andrew4Handel

Well I was hoping for some of the actual words. But still, the point can be made, I think. What you get is some words that describe a feeling that leads to described symptoms. All these words must be shared words, in order to be understandable.

The feelings that accompany social anxiety include anxiety, high levels of fear, nervousness, automatic negative emotional cycles, racing heart, blushing, excessive sweating, dry throat and mouth, trembling, and muscle twitches. In severe situations, people can develop a dysmorphia concerning part of their body (usually the face) in which they perceive themselves irrationally and negatively.
Constant, intense anxiety (fear) is the most common symptom.

http://socialphobia.org/social-anxiety-disorder-definition-symptoms-treatment-therapy-medications-insight-prognosis

So the feelings are described as physical reactions, very generalised feeling words like 'fear', 'nervousness', and forms of thought. These things are not private and inaccessible, and that is why one can recognise them in oneself. And the context in which these feelings are aroused distinguish social anxiety from arachnophobia or OCD.

http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/oldsite/pom/pom_behaviourism_wittgenstein.htm

I have studied philosophy of mind at university and psychology and I often had a problem with peoples definitions of mental states and I couldn't recognise or agree with their depiction of them.

In the study of memory it has gone from their being one continuous memory store to finding out that there are a large range of types of memory and brain abnormalities/lesions etc have shown that one type of memory is independent from another.

These findings cast doubt on our ability to define mental states unless we practise careful phenomenology and look at data on brain disorders etc. And overall this should encourage serious caution in making wide-sweeping claims or naive intuitions. — Andrew4Handel

Here's the problem A4H. A "state" is a describable condition, and as such it is "static", unchanging according to whatever fulfills that description. The brain is active, and what is studied in the brain is its activities. So if you are one to believe that there really is such a thing as a "mental state", then you have a fundamental incompatibility, an irreconcilable difference, between "mental state" and "brain activity", one being passive, the other active. You can reconcile brain activity with thinking, but thinking is not the same as a mental state. What I think is that "mental state" is a useful assumption for some theoretical purposes but it doesn't really refer to anything real.

Yes, but what are words except visual scribbles and sounds? If you say you think in your language, then you are essentially saying that you think in visual scribbles and sounds. — Harry Hindu

They are neither. When I am thinking I have no sound waves hitting my ear. Blind and deaf people learn language. The only thing that creates language is semantic content. — Andrew4Handel

Read the second sentence - the one that came after the one you quoted, but you omitted. I said that you think in visual scribbles and sounds, not hear them. You can only think in the same forms that your experiences of the world take, and it is a fact that the only way you could have learned a language is by having some kind of sensory experience and then store those experiences, or qualia as some call them, for recalling later. You must have also had some prior understanding of association - of being able to associate certain sounds and scribbles with other things - other visuals, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells.

Here is a case where a man never learned a language until he was an adult. How did he understand how to dress and feed himself without a language? How could he have organized his thoughts? When he finally understood what language was and how to use it, his surprise wasn't that he could suddenly think. It was the knowledge that there are shared symbols for other things that may be used to communicate with others. This is no surprise to us because language's primary use is communication, not for thinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words

https://vimeo.com/76386718

Could blind people learn a language if they couldn't hear and feel (braille)? What about deaf people that are also blind and can't feel?

Image is a visual metaphor and vision is only one type of experience.

You have done what I was saying and misrepresented experience. I don't have pictures or sounds in my head when I am thinking. I can bring up a visual image like "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" which is bereft of meaning but I am not usually envisioning orthography. — Andrew4Handel

What visual image of "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" could you have other than of the scribbles themselves? You seem to be confusing "visual image" with meaning itself. The scribbles don't mean anything because they don't refer to anything. You can imagine words in meaningless patterns just as you can imagine colors and sounds in meaningless patterns inside your mind. But we still can't think in anything other than colors, shapes, sounds, feelings, etc. Sometimes a few of us assemble certain things in meaningful, new patterns and come up with some really great ideas. The theory of evolution by natural selection is one of those ideas. But Darwin could have never come up with that theory without exploring the world and observing nature closely.

Visual images rarely come to me. If they do I am trying to remember a place or event or dreaming. But even in the case of memory words have a more powerful effect than the images and I have a narrative about the image I have recalled.

You can't simply assert what someone else's experience is in any kind of valid way. That is not science or philosophy or phenomenological analysis.

If I was lying about the nature of my mental states how would you know anyway? — Andrew4Handel

Science is based on observation and I am observing your own use of language. So yes, I can make an assessment about how you think. If you aren't thinking about what the words you use mean when you use them, then how is it that you are able to communicate with me at all? What is it you mean, or are referring to, when you type a particular string of symbols? What is it you want me to think when I look at your scribbles? Just more scribbles - or actual things and processes and states that exist apart from ourselves, out in the world that we can experience, if they were right next to us?

I can't tell you what words were on the flyer because I can't remember as it was over a decade ago.
Is your question how can words about subjective mental states get meaning?

The mental states just "are" before they are labelled. I think there is a transition process where someone sees some external references to a mental state and makes an analogy. So for example fear has a lot of external cues. Once you have language you can internalise it and create analogies. This doesn't give other people direct access to your mind though.

Social anxiety has a lot of external markers so it is not a difficult case, but things like thought, dreams and memory are different. Memory has been shown to include a wide range of phenomena so it is unlikely that the word can be used to a capture a unitary thing. In these cases there is a big possibility of very diverse private mental states that cannot be compared by analogy.

Temple Grandin has talked about thinking in Images and I know it is not how I think. She needs to imagine pictures to have concepts such as seeing different cars in her mind to capture the general concept "car" or seeing red in different images for that concept. That is just one incident of evidence of how people think very differently. I have no images in my thoughts usually just a constant stream of language in an internal dialogue just like how I am writing here.
I am writing in the manner I think.

Temple Grandin has talked about thinking in Images and I know it is not how I think. She needs to imagine pictures to have concepts such as seeing different cars in her mind to capture the general concept "car" or seeing red in different images for that concept. — Andrew4Handel

Ok, let's go into that a bit, though it seems like a non-issue to me. Suppose Temple or you or anyone is walking down the street and meets a friend, George. How does one know it is George, unless either he has a name badge, or one has an image of George in mind? And conversely, how does one know that it is George unless one has the word "George" in one's mind? Come to that, how does one even know it is a street or that one is walking, unless one has both the word and some kind of image, or visceral schema with which the word is associated?

Now some folks are quite astounding in the way that they can recognise faces and put names to them having met them only once. I on the other hand regularly walk past people I know quite well and cannot recall either the face or the name. I have learned to bluff in such situations because people can get upset when you don't know them and they think you ought to. " Oh high there, how are you (total stranger), how's the family?" My wife, on the other hand, regularly stops someone on the street to remind them that they were in primary school together 40 years ago having not seen them since. I can neither recognise nor name anyone I was at school with.

So we think differently. And the difference is apparent in our behaviour. If there was no difference in behaviour, then there would be no difference we could talk about. Anyway, the main point is that words alone can have no meaning unless they are associated with experiences in some way, and experiences can have no meaning unless they are grouped under concepts in some way, so there is no real issue, but one of emphasis. Personally, where my thinking functions best is in abstract relations - neither words nor pictures as such, but what one might call schematics. Individual facts are difficult, but ordered relations are easy. So physics rather than chemistry, political theory rather than politics.

One can see that autistic people think differently. So their thinking is not private. If it was private one could not see it. You can see that I think differently... Do have a read of Wittgenstein, he is quite helpful in getting out of the private world and into the shared world, or rather, realising one was never in a private world after all.

Anyway, the main point is that words alone can have no meaning unless they are associated with experiences in some way, and experiences can have no meaning unless they are grouped under concepts in some way — unenlightened

Yes but the problem is that some experiences are public (have an external referent) and some are private so that the words referring to our mental states are not open for comparison.

Temple Grandin does a good job of explaining how she thinks but I am not convinced that what someone tells us is all there is to the phenomenon of thought.

I am not arguing that we are completely cut off from other peoples mental states but that there is not going to be a point where we can compare them to validate our theories about them.

Yes but the problem is that some experiences are public (have an external referent) and some are private so that the words referring to our mental states are not open for comparison. — Andrew4Handel

Well I disagree. I have tried to indicate why. Words for things that are not open for comparison fail to have content.