> If you can't describe one of your thoughts with language, I would say that you must not understand that thought.

I've heard that before and it is definitely bullshit, thinking like that will just hold you and others back. It is true that if I can't describe it in words then I can't prove to others that I understand it, but it isn't true that I can't prove to myself that I understand it using my own minds language.

If you aren't fluent in your own minds language then you'll have a hard time understanding your own intuition, feelings etc, how can you learn to understand things like math and programming when you don't even understand your own intuition? My guess is that people don't understand themselves, they believe that the words made them understand math when in fact the thoughts they aren't hearing made them understand math. I see that clearly in my mind, but to people who rely so heavily on words it might be hard to see.

I’m not sure how it would hold you back. On the contrary, it should motivate you to seek further understanding of your thoughts.

To me, it just doesn’t make sense definitionally to say you understand anything if you can not describe it in language. It would be like saying you understand an algorithm but you can’t express it as a computer program.

But this isn’t to say that you cannot act in accordance with your thoughts even if you don’t understand them! It can be useful to make decisions based on intuition even if you can’t describe in words what motivated the decision. Surely we all do that quite often. But it’s even better to be able to understand those thoughts and account for them using words!

To me it doesn't make sense to say definitionally that you can't understand without expressing in an external language.

First, my understanding even of English is nuanced and not entirely shared. There are lots of times where I capture something in prose but feel and even explicitly state that the the words don't really completely capture the meaning and I'm relying on a shared understanding of the connotations of the words to convey what they do not. This implies that we have a strong grasp of our intended meaning that supercedes the meaning captured in language.

Also, there have been many times where I'll learn a new word, especially words borrowed from other languages, and think, "Ah! Now I can more exactly express what I'm thinking!" My understanding hasn't changed at all, I'm just better able to express it in language.

Another example: there are a lot of concepts, geo-spatial relationships between dimensional objects for example, that I never consciously verbalize, even internally, yet I can clearly hold in my head.

It does seem plausible that this is another difference in mental models between people.

Perhaps thoughts is the wrong word, since they as a concept often are associated with words, but the things that go through my mind are concepts, and I often have a word label for them, sometimes it's right there, sometimes it's not. Sometimes I have concepts in my head that have no label, and that I can express, but the concept which I can imagine in a few seconds often requires a couple paragraphs to describe directly.

Another argument for OPs view (with the caveat above) is that these concepts must predate speech. We have an imagination before we have speech, and that obviously doesn't require words.