Evelina Fedorenko has been committing a quiet but persistent act of vandalism against one of modernity’s favourite assumptions: that thought and language are basically the same thing, or at least inseparable housemates who share a fridge and argue about milk. They’re not.
Her fMRI work shows something both banal and scandalous. Linguistic processing and high-level reasoning live in different neural neighbourhoods. When you switch language on, the ‘language network’ lights up. When you do hard thinking without words, it doesn’t. The brain, it turns out, is not secretly narrating your life in subtitles.
This matters because an entire philosophical industry has been built on the idea that language is thought. Or worse: that thought depends on language for its very existence. That if you can’t say it, you can’t think it. A comforting story, especially for people whose entire self-worth is tied up in saying things.
Now watch two chess players in deep play. No talking. No inner monologue helpfully whispering, ‘Ah yes, now I shall execute a queenside fork’. Just pattern recognition, spatial anticipation, constraint satisfaction, and forward simulation. If language turns up at all, it does so later, like a press officer arriving after the battle to explain what really happened.
Language here is not the engine. It’s the after-action report. The temptation is always to reverse the order. We notice that people can describe their reasoning, and we infer that the description must have caused the reasoning. This is the same mistake we make everywhere else: confusing narration with mechanism, explanation with origin, story with structure.
Fedorenko’s findings don’t tell us that language is useless. They tell us something more irritating: language is a post hoc technology. A powerful one, yes. Essential for coordination, teaching, justification, and institutional life. But not the thing doing the actual work when the work is being done. Thought happens. Language tidies up afterwards.
Which leaves us with an awkward conclusion modern philosophy has spent centuries trying to avoid. The mind is not a well-ordered library of propositions. It’s a workshop. Messy, embodied, improvisational. Language is the clipboard, not the hands. And the clipboard, however beautifully formatted, never lifted a chess piece in its life.
As for me, I’ve long noticed that when I play a game like Sudoku, I notice the number missing from the pattern before any counting or naming occurs. The ‘it must be a 3’ only happens after I make the move.
Philosophics 