Language and Thinking

To summarise so far: what we think, what we doubt, what we are certain about and what might well be the case are all embedded in language. However, language is not the sum total of everything in the world; our world is not entirely formed by language, although language can play a major part in what we see and what we do. Objects in the world do exist external to our descriptions of them in language; we can bash our nose on a tree without having to describe it.

It should be fairly clear that objects of thought also exist. To use an already discussed example, a marriage is not an object in the world, it is an object of thought. To be sure, in order to be married two people go through a variety of rituals and public and legal declarations (I dare say there are some counterexamples to this, but in general what I say seems to be true). But none of those things constitutes the marriage, although they may be evidence to suggest that the marriage exists. The fact that X and Y are married is an object in the minds of the people concerned: X, Y, their friends and family, and anyone else who they might choose to tell. The system of records of marriages in the country provides evidence that the marriage exists but is not the marriage itself.

The marriage of X and Y, therefore, is an object of thought. It might not be a pure object of thought, in that being married has some consequences in the world of objects, but the concept ‘married’ is just that, a concept. I cannot view the marriage bond between X and Y, I can only accept the evidence that they are married.

There seems to be some sort of gradation of objects here. Firstly, we have the purely material object, such as the tree I have just walked in to and bashed my nose upon. As such, while I might now observe the tree (in a manner I did not before I walked into it (perhaps I was distracted by my mobile phone)) and hence it has become an object of my thought, in general, the tree does not stand for anything else. It is simply the tree which I walked into, and by doing that is responsible for the pain in my nose.

Secondly, there are objects which are both partially material and partially of thought, like marriage. Being married is a conceptual object, but it does have material processes and activities, mostly controlled by convention in society. Granted, some of the conventions have largely vanished over the years, such as the couple not living together before the marriage, but the general point is that we all know what constitutes a marriage, and that is something in the mind, not a physical object.

Thirdly, there are also objects of ‘pure’ thought. For example, you can think of a triangle, a planar figure with three connected straight sides. You do not have to think of a specific triangle (although you might) to be thinking about triangles as objects of thought. Triangles as objects of abstract thought have some properties: the angles add up to 180 degrees, for example. The point is that a triangle as this abstract idea is not a physical object, but an object of thought. There may be triangles such as the one you think about in the real world, but it is not necessary to your thinking about triangles, and might, in fact, inhibit your thinking about triangles.

Perhaps the point here is what Lonergan calls the ‘empirical residue’. To think about triangles and their geometric properties we do not need to know the colour of the triangle, or even precisely how long each side is, so long as they connect up. The colour and size of the triangle constitute part of the empirical residue, alongside such information as the time we are thinking about triangles and where we are. In our geometric analysis of triangles, these things are not relevant. If we were talking about triangles in a work of art, of course, the colour and size would probably be significant, but the geometric properties would be less so.

To think about triangles in general, but not a specific triangle, is to think at a more abstract level. As hinted at above, the more abstract is not necessarily better or worse (or more difficult, for that matter) it is simply to think in a different context than that of a specific object in the world. If you arrive at a result then, of course, you can then, as it were, concretize the result, and apply it to an object in the real world.

To think about God is to think at an entirely non-material level. We cannot apply our thoughts about God to an object in the world, because God is a unique being and is not an object in the world. There is a danger, then, in thinking too hard about God, and thus, as mentioned before, is to run a model to its extremes and find ourselves in a false position. There is no way of actually testing our thinking about God against an object in the world. We have to check our models against other concepts of God, and then, somehow, we have to choose between them. How we do this is a difficult question, of course.

If we consider that our thinking is on a continuum between the totally material, real-world objects, and the totally abstract, such as God, or triangles. Most of our thinking, and most of our concepts, are somewhere between the two, and, as with the triangles, slide between one and the other. What we cannot claim is that everything is material. Excluding non-material objects from our thinking obviously cripples our ability to think. Only being interested in things perhaps also cripples our ability to be human. Excluding totally abstract objects from thinking, such as triangles in general prevents us from developing mathematically. Excluding all abstract objects would, it seems, stop us thinking at all.