@androcat I know that I don't use words to think -- but it was my understanding that most people do, or at least believe that they do, hence phrases like "thinking out loud", "that voice in your head", etc.

I'm thinking that it seems entirely possible that many or most people might, in fact, use words for most of their reasoning processes. Consider how closely LLMs can now replicate human reactions (even on quite complex subjects) merely by analyzing word-sequences across volumes of data... and especially consider how many people there are who really seem to have trouble with basic logic, the same way that LLMs often do...

@woozle Well, humans routinely perform tasks that they would never, ever, be able to put into words.

It's quite hard to investigate how people think about things without triggering their Thinking For Speaking : If we ask them, we've already gone too far.
That's a "leading question" by definition.

I believe most people are simply mistaken about how they think about things, and I am not alone in that.

Also, it needs to be borne in mind that whenever people are talking about how they think, they're exactly in the frame of mind where they are Thinking For Speaking - so by their very nature, reports of how people think will be skewed towards Thinking For Speaking, even if in fact people never think in language outside that frame of mind.

@androcat So maybe "translating" from thinking into speech just comes more naturally to some people? I know I always found it difficult to put some thoughts into words, especially new thoughts, but most people seem to expect that it's easy to "tell me what you're thinking".

There's also the thing in teaching language -- or at least there was when I was in grade school, back in the Neolithic Era -- where the teachers don't want to give you a translation because they want you to learn to "think in $language" rather than thinking in English and just translating. Perhaps that was a fallacy?

@woozle @androcat the idea is real when it comes to the language of the internal monologue. I'm saying this as someone for whom English is a second language and whose internal monologue is now around 80% in English and 20% in my mothertongue. If you don't have one (I'd like to know more about how you think), then the change wouldn't make sense to you, so I'm not sure how to explain this.

I know of a person who was deaf and whose ("main" layer of) thinking was in text and mental images of a SL

@Hrosts @woozle According to (I believe) linguistic consensus "inner monologue" is just "thinking for speaking" rather than actually how we think.

Language is representative.
They are sounds or shapes or gestures that Represent meanings. And "meanings" are ... thought.

So it doesn't really make sense that we would need to think in representations of thought, that's a chicken-egg problem that is only resolved if we can think in thoughts.