When Thoughts Aren’t What Do the Work

A persistent trap in thinking about language is the assumption that thoughts pre-exist language — the classic conduit metaphor. Language, in this view, merely transmits ideas from one head to another. The problem is immediate: if language is only conveying pre-packaged ideas, who or what actually “has” those ideas? Enter the homunculus.

Assuming pre-linguistic thoughts as explanatory machinery doesn’t help. Nothing predictive improves. Analyses aren’t sharper. Distinctions still need to be explained in terms of wording, register, or histories of use. All the real work happens in system networks, choice relations, and context of situation — not inside some hidden inner mind.

This is where construal becomes powerful. By relocating meaning from representation to relation, construal aligns experience, meaning, and situation without invoking pre-existing thoughts. Interior cognition becomes unnecessary: it adds no explanatory value.

A simple way to put it, and one that often stops the conversation cold:

If thoughts existed independently of language, we wouldn’t need language to know what they were.

This isn’t a denial of experience — far from it. People do have experiences. But the distinctions we make, the meanings we negotiate, and the coordination that succeeds or fails, all occur in semiotic actualisation. The “thoughts” behind them are revealed, on closer inspection, to be idle wheels.

Language does the work. Construal shows us how. And the homunculus? It can finally retire.