Words in Their Place

Abstract

Although language helps thinking, it is not indispensable to thought and its structure or perceptual dimensions as a medium of thought are severely limited. What makes language valuable for thinking is our use of words to refer to other though media, such as visual imagery. Not being restricted as language is to linearity, the visual medium offers structural equivalences to all characteristics of objects, events, relationships—in two and three dimensions. A literary image grows through accretion by amendment; a pictorial image presents itself whole, in simultaneity