Fodor's language of thought (LOT) hypothesis states that cognition is a process of computation over compositional mental representations. This means that thoughts are represented in a "language" (sometimes known as mentalese) which allows complex thoughts to be built up by combining simpler thoughts in various ways. It is clear from the biology of the brain that these mental representations are not present in the same way as symbols written on paper; rather, the LOT is supposed to exist at the cognitive level, the level of thoughts and concepts. For example the thought that "John is tall" is clearly composed of at least two sub-parts: the concept of John (the person), and the concept of tallness. The manner in which these two sub-parts are combined could be expressed in first-order predicate calculus: Jerry Alan Fodor (born 1935) is a philosopher at Rutgers University, New Jersey. ... Look up Cognition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Italic text // ahh addiing sum spiice iin hurr`` For other uses, see Brain (disambiguation). ... First-order predicate calculus or first-order logic (FOL) permits the formulation of quantified statements such as there exists an x such that. ...

T(j)

This expression states that the predicate 'T' ("is tall") holds of the entity 'j' (John). A fully articulated proposal for what a language of thought might look like would have to be more complex than than a simple extensional logical representation such as this, since it would have to take into account complex aspects of human thought such as quantification and propositional attitudes (the various attitudes people can have towards statements; for example I might believe that John is tall, but on the other hand I could merely suspect that John is tall). In language and logic, quantification is a construct that specifies the extent of validity of a predicate, that is the extent to which a predicate holds over a range of things. ... A propositional attitude is a relational mental state connecting a person to a proposition. ...

The LOT hypothesis has wide-ranging significance for a number of domains in cognitive science. It implies a strongly rationalist model of cognition in which many of the fundamentals of cognition are innate, and challenges eliminative materialism and connectionism. Cognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e. ... In epistemology and in its broadest sense, rationalism is any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification (Lacey 286). ... Eliminativists argue that our modern belief in the existence of mental phenomena is analogous to our ancient belief in obsolete theories such as the geocentric model of the universe. ... Connectionism is an approach in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of mind. ...

Other philosophers, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, have argued that our public language is used as 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. Wittgenstein and Hitler in school photograph taken at the Linz Realschule in 1903. ... Look up aphasia in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

See also

Private language argument The private language argument is a philosophical argument said to be found in Ludwig Wittgensteins later work, especially in Philosophical Investigations. ...

References

• Ravenscroft, Ian, Philosophy of mind. Oxford University press, 2005. pp 91.

External links

• The Language of Thought Hypothesis at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Language of Thought - by Larry Kaye.