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Intentionality :: Propositional attitudes :: The language of thought

• Murat Aydede, Language of thought hypothesis: State of the art.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/maydede/LOTH.SEP.html
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:353
  
• Murat Aydede (2000). On the type/token relation of mental representations.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: According to the Computational/Representational Theory of Thought (CRTT ≈ Language of Thought Hypothesis, or LOTH), propositional attitudes, such as belief, desire, and the like, are triadic relations among subjects, propositions, and internal mental representations. These representations form a representational _system_ physically realized in the brain of sufficiently sophisticated cognitive organisms. Further, this system of representations has a combinatorial syntax and semantics, but the processes that operate on the representations are causally sensitive only to their syntax, not to their semantics. On this approach, a first pass account of propositional attitudes is the following (cf. Field 1978: 37 and Fodor 1987: 17)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/maydede/Typing.pdf
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/aydede00typetoken.html
  http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/aydede/Typing.pdf
  
• Murat Aydede (online). The language of thought hypothesis.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 1 *Common Sense Conception of Beliefs and Other Propositional Attitudes 2 What is the Language of Thought Hypothesis? 3 Status of LOTH 4 Scope of LOTH 5 *Natural Language as Mentalese? 6 *Nativism and LOTH 7 Naturalism and LOTH
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/maydede/LOTH.SoA.pdf
  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:353
  
• Ansgar Beckermann (1994). Can there be a language of thought?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 1. Cognitive sciences in a broad sense are simply all those sciences which concern themselves with the analysis and explanation of cognitive capacities and achievements. If one speaks of _cognitive science_ in the singular, however, usually something more is meant. Cognitive science is not only characterized by a specific object of research, but also through a particular kind of explanatory paradigm, i.e. the information processing paradigm. Stillings _et. al. _for example begin their book _Cognitive Science _as follows:

  Cognitive scientists view the human mind as a complex system that receives, stores,
  retrieves, transforms, and transmits information. (Stillings 1987: 1)

  The information processing paradigm however, leads directly to the paradigm of symbol processing, because a system can, as it seems, only receive, store and process information if it has at its disposal a system of internal representations or _symbols_, i.e. an internal language in which this information is encoded. At least this appears to be an idea which suggests itself and which Peter Hacker expresses as follows
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/(de)/philosophie/personen/beckermann/lot_we.pdf
  
• Ben Blumson (online). Mental maps.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It’s often hypothesized that the structure of mental representation is map-like rather than language-like. The possibility arises as a counterexample to the argument from the best explanation of productivity and systematicity for the Language of Thought Hypothesis – the hypothesis that mental structure is language-like. In this paper, I argue that the Map Hypothesis does not undermine the argument, because it is not in fact a genuine alternative to the Language of Thought Hypothesis
• Reinhard Blutner, Petra Hendriks, Helen de Hoop & Oren Schwartz (2004). When compositionality fails to predict systematicity.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: has to do with the acquisition of encyclopedic knowledge
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/aaai04.pdf
  http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/aaai04.pdf
  http://www.blutner.de/compositionality_systematicity.pdf
  http://www.blutner.de/NeuralNets/Texts/FS304BlutnerR.pdf
  http://www.blutner.de/compositionality_systematicity.pdf
  http://www.blutner.de/NeuralNets/Texts/FS304BlutnerR.pdf
  http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0998dgh/NeuralNets/Texts/FS304BlutnerR.pdf
  http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0998dgh/compositionality_systematicity.pdf
  http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0998dgh/compositionality_systematicity.pdf
  http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0998dgh/NeuralNets/Texts/FS304BlutnerR.pdf
  http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h0998dgh/NeuralNets/Texts/FS304BlutnerR.pdf
  http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h0998dgh/NeuralNets/Texts/FS304BlutnerR.pdf
  
• Peter Carruthers (2003). On Fodor's problem.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   This paper sketches a solution to a problem which has been emphasized by Fodor. This is the problem of how to explain distinctively–human flexible cognition in modular terms. There are three aspects to the proposed account. First, it is suggested that natural language sentences might serve to integrate the outputs of a number of conceptual modules. Second, a creative sentence–generator, or supposer, is postulated. And third, it is argued that a set of principles of inference to the best explanation can be constructed from already–extant aspects of linguistic testimony and discourse interpretation. Most importantly, it is suggested that the resulting architecture should be implementable in ways that are computationally tractable
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00240/enhancedabs/
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2003/00000018/00000005/art00004
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00240
  
• Peter Carruthers (1998). Thinking in language?: Evolution and a modularist possibility.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This chapter argues that our language faculty can both be a peripheral module of the mind and be crucially implicated in a variety of central cognitive functions, including conscious propositional thinking and reasoning. I also sketch arguments for the view that natural language representations (e.g. of Chomsky's Logical Form, or LF) might serve as a lingua franca for interactions (both conscious and non-conscious) between a number of quasi-modular central systems. The ideas presented are compared and contrasted with the evolutionary proposals made by Derek Bickerton (1990, 1995), who has also argued for the involvement of language in thought. Finally, I propose that it was the evolution of a mechanism responsible for pretend play, circa 40,000 years ago, which led to the explosion of creative culture visible in the fossil record from that time onwards
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/1202/0/Module~1.htm
  http://cogprints.org/1202/00/Module~1.htm
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001202/
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001202/00/Module~1.htm
  http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/Thinking-in-language.htm
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:1202
  
• David Chalmers (1999). Is there synonymy in ockham's mental language.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: William of Ockham's semantic theory was founded on the idea that thought takes place in a language not unlike the languages in which spoken and written communication occur. This mental language was held to have a number of features in common with everyday languages. For example, mental language has simple terms, not unlike words, out of which complex expressions can be constructed. As with words, each of these terms has some meaning, or signification; in fact Ockham held that the signification of everyday words derives precisely from the signification of mental terms. Furthermore, the meaning of a mental expression depends directly on the meaning of its constituent terms, as is the case with expressions in more familiar languages
• David Cole (ms). Hearing yourself think: Natural language, inner speech, and thought.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: "Mantras were not viewed as the only means of expressing truth, however. Thought, which was defined as internalized speech, offered yet another aspect of truth. And if words and thoughts designated different aspects of truth, or reality, then there had to be an underlying unity behind all phenomena" (S. A. Nigosian 1994: World Faiths, p. 84)
• David Cole (ms). Pinker on the thinker: Against mentalese monopoly.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: thought and problem solving in persons lacking natural language altogether would be a decisive challenge, but there is no clear evidence of any abstract thinking capabilities similar to those evinced by the scientists. Pinker cites languageless persons rebuilding broken locks - this is evidence of perhaps visual imagery, but not mentalese (at least not without quite a bit more detail and argument than we are given). Spiders, e.g., build marvelous things, but no inference to spiderese appears to be warranted. There simply is much we don’t understand about how even unintelligent organisms accomplish what they do, and while there must be some physical basis underlying the complex behaviors, there is not evidence that propositional representation systems are involved. The same considerations would apply to similar manifestations in humans. It could even turn out that some mathematical ability may have a basis in a facility that is closer to image processing or a mechanical calculator than it is to a proposition manipulator
• Martin Davies (2004). Aunty's argument and armchair knowledge.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In my contribution to the Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on Cognitive Science, held in Donostia (San Sebastián) in 1989, I advanced what I called ‘Aunty’s own argument for the language of thought’.¹ The Aunty in question is Jerry Fodor’s. He represents her as a conservative figure who is more likely to favour connectionism than to accept that there are good reasons to adopt the language of thought hypothesis.² As I envisaged her, she has some sympathy for the views of the later Wittgenstein but is fundamentally a neo-Fregean. I claimed that the neo-Fregean framework offers Aunty the resources to construct her own argument for the language of thought hypothesis, an argument that is relatively non-empirical in character.³
• Martin Davies (online). In the armchair, down and out.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Sitting in the philosopher’s armchair, I am not engaged in any detailed empirical investigation of the world. But, as I pursue philosophy’s distinctive armchair methodology, I sometimes come upon arguments that appear to disclose requirements for thought. According to some of these arguments, being a thinking person requires having the right kind of history, or having the right kind of cognitive architecture. According to other arguments, being able to think about particular topics requires being a member of a community of speakers, or being in contact with the right kinds of stuff. These arguments have the potential to raise an epistemological problem. For, suppose that armchair philosophical arguments such as these can yield knowledge about requirements for thought, and suppose too that I can know from the armchair that I am a thinking being who has thoughts about various particular topics. Then I seem to have a route to armchair knowledge about my history, my cognitive architecture, my community, and my material environment – knowledge about these things that does not depend on detailed empirical investigation of the world
• Martin Davies (1998). Language, thought, and the language of thought (aunty's own argument revisited).   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this chapter, I shall be examining an argument for the language of thought hypothesis – an argument which, in earlier work (Davies, 1992; see also 1991), I have called ‘Aunty’s own argument for the language of thought’. That will be the business of Sections 2-5. In the final section, I shall briefly mention some points of contact between this argument for the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis and the hypothesis that is the topic of Peter Carruthers’s book, Language, Thought and Consciousness, which I shall call the thinking in natural language (TNL) hypothesis. Before beginning on Aunty’s own argument, however, I shall briefly present a framework for organising questions about the relative priority of thought and language
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=NUtObnV0zJsC&oi=fnd&pg=PA226&dq=Language,+thought,+and+the+language+of+thought+(Aunty's+own+argument+revisited)+Davies&ots=nrCXm2Kpxn&sig=2SU9WXQfS_axxEsQ3WbiCd2BRRI
  
• Daniel Dennett (1990). Granny's campaign for safe science.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What do these various heresies have in common? From Fodor's point of view, two things, obviously: (1) they are all wrong, wrong, wrong! and (2) they are endorsed by people who are otherwise quite decent company. That would be thread enough to tie Fodor's targets together if he were right, but as one who finds more than a morsel of truth in each of the derided doctrines, I must seek elsewhere for a uniting principle, and I think I have found it: they are all doctrines that make Fodor's Granny exclaim "Well I never!" and lurch alarmingly in her rocker. The cat is out of the bag. Jerry Fodor is a Granny's boy, a romantic conservative whose slogan might well be
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/granny.htm
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000260/
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000260/00/granny.htm
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:260
  
• Richard DeWitt (1995). Vagueness, semantics, and the language of thought.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/volume1/psyche-93-1-1-vagueness-1-dewitt.html
  
• Jerry Fodor (1987). Why there still has to be a language of thought.   (More)
• Larry Hauser (1995). Natural language and thought: Doing without mentalese.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Hauser defends the proposition that our languages of thought are public languages. One group of arguments points to the coincidence of clearly productive (novel, unbounded) cognitive competence with overt possession of recursive symbol systems. Another group relies on phenomenological experience. A third group cites practical and methodological considerations: Occam's razor and the "streetlight principle" (other things being equal, look under the lamp) that motivate looking for instantiations of outer languages in thought first
• Kent Johnson (2004). On the systematicity of the language of thought.   (More)
• Stephen Laurence & Eric Margolis (1999). Where the regress argument still goes wrong: Reply to Knowles.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOT) is at the centre of a number of the most fundamental debates about the mind. Yet many philosophers want to reject LOT out of hand on the grounds that it is essentially a recid- ivistic doctrine, one that has long since been refuted. According to these philosophers, LOT is subject to a devastating regress argument. There are several versions of the argument, but the basic idea is as follows. (1) Natu- ral language has some important feature, X.¹ (2) Defenders of LOT appeal to an internal system of representation in order to explain this feature of natural language. (3) Yet the hypothesized language of thought also has X. (4) This raises the following dilemma: If we offer an analogous explanation of the language of thought’s having X, we are off on a regress. If we offer some other explanation, then the alternative explanation should have been given for natural language in the first place, avoiding the detour through the language of thought
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/anal/1999/00000059/00000264/art00015
  
• Joseph Levine (1988). Demonstrating in mentalese.   (More)
• Edouard Machery (2005). You don't know how you think: Introspection and language of thought.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: recent cognitive theories into two antagonistic groups. Sententialists claim that we think in some language, while advocates of non-linguistic views of cognition deny this claim. The Introspective Argument for Sententialism is one of the most appealing arguments for sententialism. In substance, it claims that the introspective fact of inner speech provides strong evidence that our thoughts are linguistic. This article challenges this argument. I claim that the Introspective Argument for Sententialism confuses the content of our thoughts with their vehicles: while sententialism is a thesis about the vehicles of our thoughts, inner speech sentences are the content of auditory or articulatory images. The rebuttal of the introspective argument for sententialism is shown to have a general significance in cognitive science: introspection does not tell us how we think. The problem The introspective argument for sententialism The argument for the blindness of introspection thesis Objections and replies Conclusion
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://hal.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/05/35/20/PDF/ijn_00000446_00.pdf
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/05/35/20/PDF/ijn_00000446_00.pdf
  http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/05/35/20/PDF/ijn_00000446_00.pdf
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001954/01/BJPS_Instrospection.pdf
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/04/46/ijn_00000446_00/ijn_00000446_00.pdf
  http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/56/3/469?ijkey=uDjjrRt1XJAIbaF&keytype=ref
  http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/56/3/469?ijkey=0W190KJ1t6SNyL6&keytype=ref
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oup/phisci/2005/00000056/00000003/art00469
  http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/56/3/469
  http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/56/3/469
  
• Robert Matthews (1989). The alleged evidence for representationalism.   (More)
• Susan Schneider (online). The nature of primitive symbols in the language of thought.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper provides a theory of the nature of symbols in the language of thought (LOT). My discussion consists in three parts. In part one, I provide three arguments for the individuation of primitive symbols in terms of total computational role. The first of these arguments claims that Classicism requires that primitive symbols be typed in this manner; no other theory of typing will suffice. The second argument contends that without this manner of symbol individuation, there will be computational processes that fail to supervene on syntax, together with the rules of composition and the computational algorithms. The third argument says that cognitive science needs a natural kind that is typed by total computational role. Otherwise, either cognitive science will be incomplete, or its laws will have counterexamples. Then, part two defends this view from a criticism, offered by both Jerry Fodor and Jesse Prinz, who respond to my view with the charge that because the types themselves are individuated “holistically”, different individuals will not be subsumed under the same psychological generalizations. Finally, part three briefly explores the notion of computational role that is involved in the three arguments and suggests an individuation condition that meets the demands of the arguments
• Brent Silby (online). Revealing the language of thought.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.geocities.com/brent_silby/RevealLanguageOfThought.html
  

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