The fourth lecture briefly reviewed the role of language in the perception of pain (language, and swearing in particular, can alleviate pain by distracting our attention) and in the perception of color (an aphasic patient with color anomia continues to perceive the boundaries between color categories, e.g. red/brown). This work confirms that perception is not directly altered by language: it is only the late stages of linguistic recoding and access to consciousness that are affected.
But what about the conceptual levels ? What are aphasic patients thinking about ? Does their ability to think diminish with the loss of articulated language ? Or does it remain unchanged, as art critic Tom Lubbock, himself an aphasic, believes: " My language for describing things in the world is very small, limited, [but] my thoughts when I look at the world are vast, boundless, and normal - the same as they've always been. My experience of the world is not reduced by the absence of language, but is essentially unchanged. " Lubbock's introspection is totally at odds with the ideas developed in 1973 by philosopher Donald Davidson, who sets out an extreme version of Sapir-Whorf's thesis : " Speaking a language is not something a man can lose while retaining the ability to think ". Who's right ?
