A deranged speculation ...

What would it be like to be unable to talk? Can we imagine this?

I don't mean here an acquired dysphasia, or a specific neurological damage, but a profound inability - to have never learned, but to be otherwise human.

Given the plasticity of the brain, we would be neurologically different in significant ways. For the sake of the experiment, I'll assume that the language deficiency is the result of an otherwise benign event (hard as this is to imagine) so that there are not other residual neurological effects of trauma.

There have been plenty of cases of children brought up in circumstances where they failed to acquire language, usually for otherwise traumatic reasons; so this thought experiment has some concrete correlatives. They may not serve to settle the speculation I'm going to suggest, though - and perhaps there is no available evidence that could.

The speculation is that the phenomenology of such a person may be almost unrecognisable to a language user; and that certain 'obvious', and even physical categories and preconceptions may be missing.

For instance: without the self-reflection and concept construction capacities that language brings with it, could a person with this deficiency be said to have concepts of time and mortality? They might well show (through their behaviour) the capacity to predict, and to feel fear. Animals do this as well. But what would their fear be of? And could their capacity to predict encompass a picture of their whole life as a sequence of events that form part of a larger partly causal or rational network? Would they even have a recognisable perception of the passage of time?

Our earliest memories are often of events that happen about the time we learn to speak. Is this because we don't have the capacity to organise or reflect on what happens to us in a self-conscious way until we can talk about it?

And if these aspects - time, space, causality etc. - of our phenomenological frameworks depend upon language acquisition, and are absent or seriously impaired in a person who never acquires language, what should we make of questions about their material underpinnings, or their 'reality'?

If my cat doesn't think it's going to die, and doesn't think anything when it does, does it feel as though it lives forever?

[Eipcurus (?) seems to have thought so: "If death is, I am not; If I am, death is not."]