Language and self-awareness
A recent study published in Brain Research Bulletin investigates how closely connected language and self-awareness are, in undertaking different tasks. The researcher blogs about it at Science and Consciousness Review. The seven task areas studied were:
(1) agency (knowing that you are the cause of your own actions),
(2) self-face recognition (identifying a face seen on a screen as being yours),
(3) emotions (assessing how you currently feel),
(4) personality traits (determining if a trait adjective describes you),
(5) autobiographical memory (remembering a personal past episode),
(6) preference judgments
and the seventh was a resting state.
I’ll be interested to get into Habermas’ concept of communicative rationality and how he believes other forms of rationality rely upon this as a foundation. Surely language is implicated somehow in thinking, but as one commenter mentions (and I’ve blogged about here in relation to Peter Carruthers’ book, Language, Thought and Consciousness), it may only be required for conscious thought. There are background requirements to rationality that Habermas describes which may be pre-conscious or un-conscious.
Regardless, check out the link for some colorful fMRI scans and the thing I like the most: an actual scientist explaining his own work via a blog, for the benefit of those of us who may not be reading the primary sources in the journals.