failed to observe the presence of words or their equivalent in their
thinking. I think it far more likely, especially in view of the fact
that the persons concerned were highly educated, that we are concerned
with telescoped processes, in which habit has caused a great many
intermediate terms to be elided or to be passed over so quickly as to
escape observation.
* Titchener, op. cit., p. 79.
I am inclined to think that similar remarks apply to the general idea of
"imageless thinking," concerning which there has been much controversy.
The advocates of imageless thinking are not contending merely that there
can be thinking which is purely verbal; they are contending that there
can be thinking which proceeds neither in words nor in images. My own
feeling is that they have rashly assumed the presence of thinking in
cases where habit has rendered thinking unnecessary. When Thorndike
experimented with animals in cages, he found that the associations
established were between a sensory stimulus and a bodily movement (not
the idea of it), without the need of supposing any non-physiological
intermediary (op. cit., p. 100 ff.). The same thing, it seems to me,
applies to ourselves. A certain sensory situation produces in us a
certain bodily movement. Sometimes this movement consists in uttering
words. Prejudice leads us to suppose that between the sensory
stimulus and the utterance of the words a process of thought must have
intervened, but there seems no good reason for such a supposition. Any
habitual action, such as eating or dressing, may be performed on the
appropriate occasion, without any need of thought, and the same seems
to be true of a painfully large proportion of our talk. What applies to
uttered speech applies of course equally to the internal speech which is
not uttered. I remain, therefore, entirely unconvinced that there is
any such phenomenon as thinking which consists neither of images nor of
words, or that "ideas" have to be added to sensations and images as part
of the material out of which mental phenomena are built.
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