Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Karey L. Perkins" <karey AT charter.net>]

>>>what on earth gave you the notion we think without symbols, abstract
representations or words (they are all functionally equivalent are they
not?).  Or do you mean to suggest that neither animals nor humans think in
any but a mechanistic way?  Seems to me that when we think with pictures we
are still thinking symbolically.  After all we do not try to eat the image
of what we are imagining  -- we eat the actual object iself after our
thinking (model, planning and testing with symbols) has helped us to
actually achieve the food object itself. <<<<<

This relates to the Time magazine autism article I referred to earlier --
autistic people, with limited language capacity, think in pictures and have
to learn to use that to understand the world.  They also exhibit other
symptoms that may prove Percy's theory.