ABSTRACT
The question of the relationship between language and thinking is as old as philosophy — indeed, probably older: it is among the earliest problems that forced themselves on the human spirit. A glance at certain findings in developmental psychology will show us that the organization of the world according to things and properties is by no means “self-evident” and that it is not necessarily inherent in every form of the “lived-experience” of reality. Likewise, in the development of the child, it is unmistakable that the intuition of the thing-world does not exist from the beginning but must in a sense be wrested from the world of language. The direction of “ideation” forces the purely “optical” phenomenon into specific pathways: in one case, the optical appearance is used as a presentation of a thing-property-interconnection and, in the other case, as a presentation of a causal-interconnection.
