Ikerbasque News

Ikerbasque researcher: Agustín Vicente

Our minds have a lot of innate structure that we use to learn our language

Your research is focused on the Philosophy of Mind, what does it exactly mean?

My main research area is Philosophy of Mind, although I also do some Philosophy of Language, some Philosophy of Science and even some Metaphysics. Philosophy of Mind has been more or less popular in the analytic tradition for more than half a century now, basically since Chomsky started the “cognitive revolution”. Until then, analytic philosophers were reluctant to speak about minds, mental properties, thought processes or whatever that had some “mental flavour”.

A very basic way to sum up the history of Philosophy is the following: ancient and medieval philosophers were devoted to studying reality, modern philosophers studied thought (or understanding) and contemporary philosophers have been studying language. This last period in the history of Philosophy is usually called “the linguistic turn”, and is fuelled by the idea that, while we cannot access thought or reality, we can access language. However, after the cognitive revolution, a majority of philosophers have forsaken this “linguistic turn” and have revitalized all those topics that modern philosophers were concerned with, such as the relations between the mind and the brain (whether the mind is identical to the brain or not), the problem of mental causation (whether mental properties such as beliefs, desires or sensations can bring about changes in the physical world), the question of how the mind gets to represent the world, or the always pressing issue of free will. At the same time, contemporary Philosophy of Mind is concerned with interpreting and clarifying the developments of the sciences of the mind, from psychology to neuroscience.

What could you tell us about the relationship between thought and language?

One of the current topics in Philosophy of Mind that I find more fascinating is the relationship between language and thought. Since the heyday of Romanticism till the last third of the last century it was simply assumed that language shaped, or even determined, thought. Until language was acquired, the mind was just an uncontrolled “theatre of sensations”. That is, language was regarded as the only source of our conceptual structure. If we add to this the idea that the different languages are really and deeply different, we have the thesis that speakers from different languages see the world in very different ways. This, without doubt, is still nowadays a very popular idea.
However, mainstream developmental and evolutionary psychology, as well as the study of animal behaviour, seem to falsify the assumption that we do not have any kind of conceptual structure before we learn our language. Quite to the contrary: our minds seem to have a lot of innate structure, structure which, on the other hand, we use to learn our language. But then, if language is not necessary in order to have and use concepts, some questions spring to mind, such as: Does language have a cognitive use at all? Doesn’t it shape our thought once we acquire it? What do we do when we talk to ourselves? Don’t we use language as a “vehicle” of thought?  These are the issues that I’m concerned with.

You have recently joined  the UPV/EHU as a professor of Ikerbasque. What has your new position provided to you scientific career?

I am really happy of having joined the Ikerbasque Foundation. On the one hand, becoming an Ikerbasque Research Professor is a big step in my professional career. On the other, I feel particularly well belonging to the Ikerbasque Foundation because, having been a PhD and post-doc fellow of the Basque Government, I always felt the urge of returning the investment on my community somehow. Now, I have the chance of doing it. I really wish all the best to the Ikerbasque enterprise.