When I experience conscious thought, it is mostly in words (I am making a big exception for the type of conscious thought that accompanies hitting my thumb accidentally with a hammer). When I remember my dreams, for the most part, it seems to me that those remembered dreams included words. There is an old French movie L’Enfant Sauvage, directed by Francois Truffaut about a child who somehow survives in the wild to grow up without words. In the movie, the child clearly thinks. There is good scientific evidence that the Great Apes think without words. I believe my dogs think…without words. And yet, I can’t imagine my own conscious experience without the internal narrative of language. Why is that? Is it just our own species-specific experience of conscious thought that requires language?
Do I need words to think?
Jim