27th
Do thoughts have a language of their own? The language of thought hypothesis
The language of thought drawing by Robert Horvitz
“The mind thinks its thoughts in ‘Mentalese,’ codes them in the local natural language, and then transmits them (say, by speaking them out loud) to the hearer. The hearer has a Cryptographer in his head too, of course, who thereupon proceeds to decode the ‘message.’ In this picture, natural language, far from being essential to thought, is merely a vehicle for the communication of thought.”
— Hilary Putnam, American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, Representation and reality, A Bradford Book, 1991, p. 10-11.“According to one school of philosophy, our thoughts have a language-like structure that is independent of natural language: this is what students of language call the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis. According to the LOT hypothesis, it is because human thoughts already have a linguistic structure that the emergence of common, natural languages was possible in the first place. (…)
Many - perhaps most - psychologists end up concluding that ordinary people do not use the rules of logic in everyday life.
There is an alternative way of seeing this: that there is a language of thought, and that it has a more logical form than ordinary natural language. This view has an added bonus: it tells us that, if you want to express yourself more clearly and more effectively in natural language, then you should express yourself in a form that is closer to computational logic - and therefore closer to the language of thought. Dry legalese never looked so good.”
— Robert Kowalski, British logician and computer scientist, Do thoughts have a language of their own?, New Scientist, 8 Dec 2011
“In philosophy of mind, the language of thought hypothesis (LOTH) put forward by American philosopher Jerry Fodor describes thoughts as represented in a “language” (sometimes known as mentalese) that allows complex thoughts to be built up by combining simpler thoughts in various ways. In its most basic form the theory states that thought follows the same rules as language: thought has syntax.
Using empirical data drawn from linguistics and cognitive science to describe mental representation from a philosophical vantage-point, the hypothesis states that thinking takes place in a language of thought (LOT): cognition and cognitive processes are only ‘remotely plausible’ when expressed as a system of representations that is “tokened” by a linguistic or semantic structure and operated upon by means of a combinatorial syntax. Linguistic tokens used in mental language describe elementary concepts which are operated upon by logical rules establishing causal connections to allow for complex thought. Syntax as well as semantics have a causal effect on the properties of this system of mental representations.
These mental representations are not present in the brain in the same way as symbols are present on paper; rather, the LOT is supposed to exist at the cognitive level, the level of thoughts and concepts. LOTH has wide-ranging significance for a number of domains in cognitive science. It relies on a version of functionalist materialism, which holds that mental representations are actualized and modified by the individual holding the propositional attitude, and it challenges eliminative materialism and connectionism. It implies a strongly rationalist model of cognition in which many of the fundamentals of cognition are innate. (…)
Some philosophers have argued that our public language is our mental language, that a person who speaks English thinks in English. Others contend that people who do not know a public language (e.g. babies, aphasics) can think, and that therefore some form of mentalese must be present innately. (…)
Tim Crane, in his book The Mechanical Mind, states that, while he agrees with Fodor, his reason is very different. A logical objection challenges LOTH’s explanation of how sentences in natural languages get their meaning. That is the view that “Snow is white” is TRUE if and only if P is TRUE in the LOT, where P means the same thing in LOT as “Snow is white” means in the natural language. Any symbol manipulation is in need of some way of deriving what those symbols mean. If the meaning of sentences is explained in terms of sentences in the LOT, then the meaning of sentences in LOT must get their meaning from somewhere else. There seems to be an infinite regress of sentences getting their meaning. Sentences in natural languages get their meaning from their users (speakers, writers). Therefore sentences in mentalese must get their meaning from the way in which they are used by thinkers and so on ad infinitum. This regress is often called the homunculus regress.
Daniel Dennett accepts that homunculi may be explained by other homunculi and denies that this would yield an infinite regress of homunculi. Each explanatory homunculus is “stupider” or more basic than the homunculus it explains but this regress is not infinite but bottoms out at a basic level that is so simple that it does not need interpretation. John Searle points out that it still follows that the bottom-level homunculi are manipulating some sorts of symbols.
LOTH implies that the mind has some tacit knowledge of the logical rules of inference and the linguistic rules of syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (concept or word meaning). If LOTH cannot show that the mind knows that it is following the particular set of rules in question then the mind is not computational because it is not governed by computational rules. Also, the apparent incompleteness of this set of rules in explaining behavior is pointed out. Many conscious beings behave in ways that are contrary to the rules of logic. Yet this irrational behavior is not accounted for by any rules, showing that there is at least some behavior that does not act in accordance with this set of rules.”
— Wiki
“LOTH is an hypothesis about the nature of thought and thinking with propositional content. As such, it may or may not be applicable to other aspects of mental life. Officially, it is silent about the nature of some mental phenomena such as experience, qualia, sensory processes, mental images, visual and auditory imagination, sensory memory, perceptual pattern-recognition capacities, dreaming, hallucinating, etc. To be sure, many LOT theorists hold views about these aspects of mental life that sometimes make it seem that they are also to be explained by something similar to LOTH.
For instance, Fodor (1983) seems to think that many modular input systems have their own LOT to the extent to which they can be explained in representational and computational terms. Indeed, many contemporary psychological models treat perceptual input systems in just these terms. There is indeed some evidence that this kind of treatment might be appropriate for many perceptual processes. But it is to be kept in mind that a system may employ representations and be computational without necessarily satisfying any or both of the clauses in (B) above in any full-fledged way. Just think of finite automata theory where there are plenty of examples of a computational process defined over states or symbols which lack full-blown syntactic and/or semantic structural complexity. (…)
Whether sensory or perceptual processes are to be treated within the framework of full-blown LOTH is again an open empirical question. It might be that the answer to this question is affirmative. If so, there may be more than one LOT realized in different subsystems or mechanisms in the mind/brain. So LOTH is not committed to there being a single representational system realized in the brain, nor is it committed to the claim that all mental representations are complex or language-like, nor would it be falsified if it turns out that most aspects of mental life other than the ones involving propositional attitudes don’t require a LOT.
Similarly, there is strong evidence that the mind also exploits an image-like representational medium for certain kinds of mental tasks. LOTH is non-committal about the existence of an image-like representational system for many mental tasks other than the ones involving propositional attitudes. But it is committed to the claim that propositional thought and thinking cannot be successfully accounted for in its entirety in purely imagistic terms. It claims that a combinatorial sentential syntax is necessary for propositional attitudes and a purely imagistic medium is not adequate for capturing that.”
— The Language of Thought Hypothesis, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
See also:
☞ The Language of Thought Hypothesis, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
☞ Private language argument, Wiki
☞ Private Language, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
☞ Jerry A. Fodor, Why there still has to be a language of thought?
☞ Robert Kowalski, British logician and computer scientist, Do thoughts have a language of their own?, New Scientist, 8 Dec 2011
☞ Jerry A. Fodor, The language of thought, Harvard University Press, 1975
☞ Ned Block, The Mind as the Software of the Brain, New York University
☞ Antony, Louise M, What are you thinking? Character and content in the language of thought (pdf)
☞ Ansgar Beckermann, Can there be a language of thought? (pdf) In G. White, B. Smith & R. Casati (eds.), Philosophy and the Cognitive Sciences. Proceedings of the 16th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky.
☞ Edouard Machery, You don’t know how you think: Introspection and language of thought, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (3): 469-485, (2005)
☞ Christopher Bartel, Musical Thought and Compositionality (pdf), King’s College London
☞ Psycholinguistics/Language and Thought, Wikiversity
☞ MindPapers: The Language of Thought - A Bibliography of the Philosophy of Mind and the Science of Consciousness, links Compiled by David Chalmers (Editor) & David Bourget (Assistant Editor), Australian National University
☞ Sue Savage-Rumbaugh on Human Language—Human Consciousness. A personal narrative arises through the vehicle of language, Lapidarium notes
