The Flowering of Thought in Language

Summary

Our first mental endowment was instinct. Then came thought, and later language. Thanks to language, thought then proceeded to flourish. Such was our phylogeny. Ontogeny, then, true to form, recapitulates the sequence in the development of each child. By instinct a child a few days old will show anxiety when an object moving steadily to a screen and behind it fails to emerge on schedule at the far edge. Also new-borns are said to respond emotionally to emotional facial expressions and even to imitate them.

A further innate endowment, and an elaborate one, is manifest in one's standards of perceptual similarity. This relation is basic to all learning, so some of it has to be innate. We are born with standards of perceptual similarity, which then develop and change in the course of experience.

I treat perceptual similarity as a relation between stimulations, or sensory intakes. The similarity is subjective, each individual having his own standards, but it is objectively testable for each individual by reinforcement and extinction of responses. It does not match up with receptual similarity, that is, mere identity or proximity of the nerve endings that were triggered on the two occasions. Perceptual similarity is illustrated rather by our readiness to equate the various perspectives of an object, prior even to probing it. It is a striking case of innate knowledge, however inarticulate.