Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought

Nature has recently published an article “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought” authored by a panel of bioscience experts of MIT (Evelina Fedorenko, etc.). The article elaborates, from the perspective of ontology, the dissociation between language and thought, arguing that language is not necessary or sufficient for thought and that all tested forms of thought are possible without language.

Thought, according to the article, encompasses all knowledge of the world and, more importantly, reasoning over these knowledge representations while language includes all kinds of features of linguistic structure and a large set of form-meaning mappings. The article argues with recent evidence from neuroscience that language and thought are dissociated in the human brain - language and reasoning ability function by different neuron-networks in individual brains.

The conclusion of the article is inspiring and groundbreaking not only to the bioscience which explores how human brains work but also to the artificial intelligence industry which is reshaping our daily life and business world. In the recent wave of large language models hogging the headlines, these questions haunting the AI industry must be surfacing: