It is logically possible for one person to think using mental imagery, for another person to think using words whether or not they hear them in their mind, for another person to think by relying on abstract recognition of reason and concepts with no accompanying mental imagery or audio, and for still another person to alternate between all of these methods of cognition. Nothing about one person thinking in such a manner necessitates that anyone else does as well. People who think using language to help them focus on ideas, either routinely or on a selective basis, must avoid the erroneous stance that thinking requires language. Even a person who constantly thinks using words, whether a rationalist or not, is thinking using more than language itself.
Otherwise, a person could not even know what they mean by the words they are using in their mind as an aid or a springboard for thinking, for they would only be thinking about an arbitrary assortment of symbols and sounds and not the concept beyond them. In turn, they could not know logical truths, that is, the inherent necessary truths of reason, which do not depend on thought or language and can be known without any linguistic prompting or assistance. Indeed, no one could know what language is and is not or how to use it if it was not for already knowing or having the capacity to think. It would be impossible to assign words to any ideas if language was necessary to think. No one could have ever acquired or invented a language after being born if this was the case since they could never think prior to this in order to do so!
I do not mean that people, the vast majority of whom are not rationalists and thus not rational, can know anything apart from rationalism as long as the matter is basic or trivial enough, as if the typical person actually "knew" anything when they learned languages in their youth. To know, one cannot assume, and any belief not wholly rooted in necessary truths like logical axioms or other things which follow from other concepts in themselves is only an assumption. The non-rationalist masses have only the capacity for knowledge they have not yet obtained, for a person cannot know anything at all unless they have grasped the necessary truths of logical axioms that all other truths, knowable or unknowable, hinge on, so that they recognize the very foundations of reality and possess absolute certainty.
Nothing is known through the illusion of comprehension that assumptions can offer, though non-rationalists arbitrarily find miscellaneous ideas subjectively persuasive wholly aside from logical necessity and thus epistemological proof. Only a rationalist can know anything. It is just that language cannot be understood except in light of concepts, not the other way around, and concepts can only be truly understood through reason's necessary truths that dictate and govern the very nature of all things. Without thinking of some concept they have one way or another associated with the word, whether they say the word out aloud or merely think of its sound or phonetic structure in their mind, a person could not think any particular thing using words.
By habit, some people might come to think using language, though they are still relying on things other than words to engage in thought as it is. This could be a very normal and familiar phenomenon for them, though it is false that one person thinking in words, whatever the extent of their reliance on this, means another person does the same. It is an even graver error to confuse words for the ideas beyond the words or for the thoughts themselves by which a person grasps the concepts or, all the more asininely, for the necessary truths of reason themselves that transcend all besides themselves. Language is nothing more, as I love to emphasize to fools and rationalists alike, than an arbitrary construct used for precise communication and only, at most, in a secondary and unnecessary sense for introspection or philosophical contemplation.
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