People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that human thought transcends spoken languages, existing in a richer, more complex form termed 'mentalese'.
In this quote, Steven Pinker emphasizes that while humans express thoughts through various spoken languages such as English, Chinese, or Apache, the actual process of thinking occurs in a more intricate and universal form of cognition, referred to as 'mentalese'. This suggests that thought is not limited to the structures of any particular language but is instead a more fundamental and layered way of processing ideas and concepts.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of consciousness, this quote illustrates how our inner experiences are not confined to linguistic structures.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe.
The heavenly motions... are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, perceived not by the ear but by the intellect, a figured music which sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.
Oh, my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways, And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low, I'm at home and at ease on a track that I know not, And restless and lost on a road that I know.
We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
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