Consciousness without language

Question

It seems that consciousness can only be investigated through self-report, i.e. language/communication of some kind. Is it believed that consciousness could nonetheless exist without language?

Yes, it is assumed that non-human animals have varying degrees of consciousness - but this seems somewhat unverifiable without our capacity to ask them.

Conversely, has there ever been a human being to grow up without language for years and then learn a language sufficiently well to be questioned regarding their subjective experience prior to learning the language?

Answer 1

Yes, as Ray Jackendoff reports in chapter 16 of A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning, where he answers precisely this question:

A more promising source of evidence comes from congenitally deaf individuals who have had no exposure to a signed language. If they learn a signed language as adults, we can ask them what their thinking was like before. In a BBC documentary on the relatively new signed language of Nicaragua, one such person says (in the English transla-tion), “I didn’t even know what it meant to think. Thinking meant nothing to me.” Of course he must have been able to think before he learned to speak—after all, he wasn’t a robot or a zombie, he was func-tioning in society at least to some degree. But—as predicted by the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis—he wasn’t aware of it.

Another report presents the experience of a deaf individual who had never put together an English sentence until he was 9 or 10 years old, and was not exposed to sign language until college. He has memories of wondering how the world worked, but having no way to ask the questions. He recalls having a sense that other people could communicate with each other, but that he wasn’t able to. He describes saving up his questions until he had a way of asking them. For example, he reports having wondered at 5 or 6 years old how people communicated on the telephone. One day he wanted his mother to stop talking on the phone. He knew from observation that a hose could be crimped to stop the flow of water, so he applied this reason-ing to the telephone cord and tried to stop the sound by crimping the cord (to no avail, of course). According to this report, then, this deaf boy had questions in his mind without having a language to think in. What’s more, his story about the telephone shows that he was able to use analogical reasoning without talking his way through the logic in his head. The Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis leads us to ask: In what form did he experience these questions and this reasoning? Does this represent some form of “imageless thought”? From his description when asked about it, it sounds as though his experience was in terms of some kind of visual or kinesthetic imagery—the feel one has for “how things work”— accom-panied by a feeling of connection or of questioning a connection between observed actions.

Answer 2

Language is a means of expression and communication. It serves as a medium of expression. Consciousness is independent of language. One (human or any animal) can be conscious however to report and verify, as you said, we need a language or any medium of communication.

Consciousness could safely considered an axiom in psychology.

For the second question, you have bumped on to one of the canonical pairs. How do we explain nothing? Ideally we cannot. The same is with consciousness. It is a fundamental thing. A formal verification might require a revisit to the fundamentals of philosophy and psychology.

Reference: Thought without language: Thought without awareness? - L.Weiskrantz