[dark_lord]

Is imagining thinking? Can you remember a tree from your childhood and imagine climbing it? Can you do so without narrating your imagined actions with words, just climb it in your mind? Would you then be thinking?

What goes through your head can be roughly defined as remembering, or imagining, or symbol manipulating. Imagining includes "imaging" which is just viewing pictures in your head. And remembering covers all aspects of memory - which can include remembering sense experiences, or remembering previous sessions of imagining (including imaging), or rememberings previous sessions of symbol manipulation.

For the author to go on at length to say -- hey, other stuff happens in your head besides symbol manipulation (which includes language) is rather obvious. But he then asserts that much thinking does not involve symbol manipulation. Now, of the 3 categories identified, one can admit that imagining is also thinking, and it may not involve symbol manipulation. Thus I can visually rearrange the furniture in my living room, or visualize a painting before I create it; and I will concede this is "thought". But to then assert as this author does that all thinking occurs without language is rather a step. For often much of my personal thinking is along the lines of "if I do this, then will that happen? And if so, and I do this other thing, will that follow? Okay, lets try this strategy..." etc.

To state that this thinking does not involve language is merely to push it up a level and say that something is happening in the brain (or somewhere) before putting together these logic strings. And of course in the brain we are talking about some kind of neuronic functioning which happens before these verbal thought strings get created. But to assert I could rationally analyze some logical alternatives without using symbols (language) is unproved. Try to do a math problem without "language" (for mathematics is expressed in language.)

[unspun]

To state that this thinking does not involve language is merely to push it up a level and say that something is happening in the brain (or somewhere) before putting together these logic strings. And of course in the brain we are talking about some kind of neuronic functioning which happens before these verbal thought strings get created.

First you say "in the brain (or somewhere)" and then you return to the brain only (presumably because you can see a brain and manipulate one physically).

The author is simply stating that thinking the process of mind which manipulates any symbols we decide to conceptualize. Furthermore, the concepts themselves and other elements of congnition (feelings, conceptual causes and effects) may exist without resorting to specific symbols.