What is it for?

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    [Note: this is my personal take, not Chomsky’s]

    We can recognise colours and things even without properly labelling them. (Colour example: I have no clue on how to call the colour of my cat’s fur, but I’m fairly certain to remember thus recognise it.) However, it’s hard to handle them logically this way.

    • if you are outside and it is raining, then you get wet
    • if you get wet, you might get sick
    • so if you are outside and it is raining, you might get sick

    And at least for me this is the main role of the internal monologue. It isn’t just about repeating the state of the things, it’s about connecting pieces of info together, as if I was explaining the link to another person.

    Perhaps those without verbal internal monologue/dialogue have a more persistent innate language, that is not overwritten by common external language?

    Possible; I don’t know, really. It’s also possible that the “innate language” doesn’t really exist, only the innate ability to learn a language; but that ability is already enough to structure simple reasoning.