Eddie Fung, De Saussure

De Saussure states on page 6 that “Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition” which implies that concepts, and the manipulation of concepts within our mind is inherently a disorderly and abstract process where the role of having a system of sounds is so that concepts are tangible and manageable. But I find it not wholly convincing that thought is the chaotic process to be remedied by language.

Consider ourselves as biological machines receiving input from the world around us. We gather information from various stimuli and hope to process it so that we can avoid danger and continue functioning. There is no randomness or chaos stemming from within our machinery, but rather that the information we receive is chaotic. Thought, I would argue, works towards the other direction of chaos: to help us make better sense of the information we gather, and is a natural mechanism – the very basic function – that allows the processing and sorting og information and concepts. Thought seeks order.

Next consider everyday thinking. Unless a person is solving geometrical problems, he or she thinks in more or less coherent sentences, which I will refer to as mind-speech. It is conceivably hard to process abstract ideas and concepts without first illustrating them with language. I would propose that for thought to be useful in even mildly complex processing, there must be some system that breaks our world down in a predictable, recognizable and learnable fashion. That is, we naturally form a system of thought that describes concept because it is the only way our minds function. Could anyone conceive the idea of sweet or the idea of fast without first outlining them in some linguistic form? And with sweet being a taste and fast being an observable measure of the physical world, could we ever even hope to bring the two concepts together to draw ourselves a useful portrait of the world? We outline the shapeless and define the super-material parts of reality by having one common system that could describe anything.

While we are born into established societies and are given premade, time-tested and quite functional language systems, I theorize that any person in isolation would still move to form his or her own pseudo-language system to sort thoughts – not out of necessity but because there can simply be no thought or idea if we are unable to first describe it.

So, what I argue is that there can be unsorted, raw (i.e chaotic) information, but not unsorted and raw thought.