Interesting point. I certainly agree that concepts/words are not actually atomic, or Platonic ideals, or anything like that. Concrete concepts, in particular, seem to correspond to "empirical clusters in thing-space", or probability distributions over classes of objects in the real world (though of course, even objects in the real world aren't really atomic).
Despite this, most people still view themselves as thinking symbolically, and many people believe themselves to be logical reasoning agents. After reading the first couple chapters of Jaynes, I am very convinced that the mind works probabilistically and does not actually deal with absolutes. Yet at the level of conscious reasoning, we seem to perceive the world in terms of symbolic absolutes. It seems like this could be either verbal or visual, but either way I have difficulty imagining conscious reasoning without symbols, even if more complicated clusters or probability distributions underly those symbols at a subconscious level. I wonder why this is.
Before language, people must have thought without words. I often have the impression that I have a thought fully-formed in my head, yet I wait to listen to it unfold in words before moving on to the next thought. Perhaps I could think much faster if I weren't addicted to words.
Has anyone developed techniques for thinking without words?
This would have a little in common with Buddhist practices of emptying your mind, but wouldn't be the same thing. For one thing, Buddhists also try to empty their minds of images. More importantly, they are trying not to think, while I'm trying to think - just not unpack everything into words.