I know and have known people who don’t think in words. My experience is kinda in-between-ish, with verbal fragments transiently appearing in my consciousness like words on scraps of paper carried by the wind, or sometimes short verbal comments. The exception is when I’m actually trying to put some rigid structure on my thinking: then I do something that feels more like “thinking in full sentences” (or sometimes formal notation).
It seems to me that high-internal-monologue (or something) people tend to assume that their experience is a human universal,[1] similarly to how aphantasia was only “discovered for real” a few decades ago, because aphantasiacs mostly thought that non-aphantasiacs were being metaphorical when they were talking about “seeing loved ones’ faces in their mind’s eye”, etc.
[ETA: Maybe I misunderstood how strong emphasis you’re putting on the role of words/language?]
If you’re not conceptualizing, you’re not doing philosophy, you’re experiencing things. Philosophy is about conceptualizing experience and thereby making sense of it. You can work with those concepts without putting linguistic labels on them, but even so such concepts are still “words” in the sense that “words” here is just a gloss of talking about symbolic referents of any kind.
I know and have known people who don’t think in words. My experience is kinda in-between-ish, with verbal fragments transiently appearing in my consciousness like words on scraps of paper carried by the wind, or sometimes short verbal comments. The exception is when I’m actually trying to put some rigid structure on my thinking: then I do something that feels more like “thinking in full sentences” (or sometimes formal notation).
It seems to me that high-internal-monologue (or something) people tend to assume that their experience is a human universal,[1] similarly to how aphantasia was only “discovered for real” a few decades ago, because aphantasiacs mostly thought that non-aphantasiacs were being metaphorical when they were talking about “seeing loved ones’ faces in their mind’s eye”, etc.
[ETA: Maybe I misunderstood how strong emphasis you’re putting on the role of words/language?]
cf https://www.lesswrong.com/w/typical-mind-fallacy and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/
If you’re not conceptualizing, you’re not doing philosophy, you’re experiencing things. Philosophy is about conceptualizing experience and thereby making sense of it. You can work with those concepts without putting linguistic labels on them, but even so such concepts are still “words” in the sense that “words” here is just a gloss of talking about symbolic referents of any kind.