Language or idea? Which comes first? (language of thought hypothesis)

Question

I'm a physicist, but I do like philosophy, so I was arguing with a friend about what comes first: Ideas or the language/symbolism?

More Precisely:

If we define thinking process as: a kind of abstract process that enables some object to deduct results or solve problems, but not as specific usual biological/machine process, anyway we assuming this object has the ability to understand or has concessions.

Language of thought hypothesis supposes that there should be kind of syntax, but I was arguing that it's not required, because some times even we are humans (this is just example of thinking process) getting some splash of ideas/solution without really "thinking" about it (in the seance that defined above) and without using symbolism (I we can't say that unconscious using symbolism anyway because the splash happens mush faster than our brain ability to interpretate or manipulate symbols .

Answer 1

There is current research on the topic, which so far indicates that language is just one module of thought, and many others can operate independently. But it's an active area of research in cognitive science now, and if you doubt that experiments yield insight into it, first review some of the research. (In particular the PNAS paper.)

Anyway, I think it's CogSci's turn to work on this problem for a bit--it's really quite a new area, and we've yet to find out whether it fundamentally upends our intuitive understanding that informed philosophical approaches (as has been the case for the nature of perception), or whether it's a morass of messy facts and data that can be cut through with principled reasoning (i.e. philosophy). Right now my bet's on the former.

Edit: more nails in the coffin of the conscious-language-first hypothesis. Turns out you subconsciously do arithmetic and parse short sentences. Whatever is going on in there is pretty complex and nonobvious.

Answer 2

Working purely introspectively, it seems clear we think first then make language. In my own case I stare at problems and intuit solutions, and the cast about with pencil and paper to elucidate why I think the thing that I think. Sometimes working on paper causes me to abandon an idea, it doesn't stand up to symbolic manipulation. More usually, working with paper causes me to become conscious of plenty of good and interesting reasons for thinking the thing I was thinking.