Thinking without Words

The humanist's plaintive cry, "I am not a machine" is in response to the mainstream cognitive science view that the human mind is similar to a computational machine, what scientist's call a formal system. In a series of three books, Dr. Lynch challenges these mainstream theories by showing how human cognition consists of two parts: a part inherited from the nonhuman primates that is not based on language, and a part that is based on human natural syntactic language. Natural language is therefore, not just a means of communication, as asserted by most cognitive scientists, but is essential to what is often referred to as human thought or reason. Humans can, of course, think without using language but only in a way that is also shared by our chimp cousins. Characterizing that languageless mode of cognition is the focus of this first book, Thinking Without Words.