Language of Thought

Inspired by Bermúdez's notion of proto-logic, I would like to fathom what the true proto-logic could be like. But this will be approached only in a negative way of figuring out what it could not be. I shall argue that it could not be purely deductive by exploiting the recent researches in logic of maps. This will allow us to reorient the search for proto-logic, starting with animal abduction. I will also suggest that protologic won't get off the ground without proto-geometry. These negative results will shed some lights on some further conceptual and historical issues around the language of thought hypothesis to arrive at the true proto-logic.

The predictive coding model of motor control explains delusions of alien control in terms of loss of a "sense of agency" for intentional action. In this paper I argue that the same model can explain delusions of thought insertion in terms of loss of  a sense of agency for inner speech.  The essential idea is that inner speech is a form of imaginary action. I explain how imaginary actions in general and imaginary speech in particular can acquire and lose a sense of agency and apply the model to interpret the evidence from cognitive neuroscience about delusions of thought insertion. I consider a problem for the model deriving from the indirect connection between thought and language

Traditionally the two main paradigms for describing and explaining processes of thought and mental representation have been thought as image and thought as language. Whereas in present-day debates these paradigms are treated as mutually exclusive, in scholastic theories of cognition and mental language they were often amalgamated in various ways. By tracing pertinent discussions from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the article points to some consequences of this amalgamation both for the notions of image and of likeness and for approaches to thought as language.

Traditional accounts hold that reference consists in a relation between the mind and an object; the relation is effected by a mental act and mediated by internal mental contents (internal representations). Contemporary theories as diverse as Fodor's [Fodor, J.A., 1987. Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] language of thought hypothesis, Dretske's [Dretske, F., 1988. Explaining Behaviour: Reasons in a World of Causes. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] informational semantics and Millikan's [Millikan, R.G., 1984. Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] teleosemantics share this act–content–object picture (which was also held by several early modern philosophers, in particular Locke). The core of the traditional view is the thesis that reference and intentionality are relational (‘thesis RR’). Although deeply problematic, RR is entrenched also in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence. Using for the most part arguments employed by Wittgenstein, we mount a case against RR and advance a deflationary account of reference and intentionality according to which neither is relational.

Abundantes investigaciones sugieren que la cognición puede involucrar tanto representaciones lingüísticas como cartográficas. Estas investigaciones han favorecido una concepción pluralista de la cognición y han permitido clarificar cómo los mapas se diferencian de las representaciones lingüísticas. Sin embargo, aun no se ha explorado cuáles son los procesos computacionales que ponen en relación el contenido de ambos tipos de representaciones. En este trabajo, voy a argumentar que, pese a sus diferencias, las representaciones cartográficas pueden coexistir e interactuar con las representaciones lingüísticas de modos muy interesantes.

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the twentieth century, stimulated by the impetuous development of logical studies and taking inspiration from Leibniz's idea of a characteristica universalis, the three founding fathers of the analytic tradition in philosophy, i.e., Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, started to talk of a logically perfect language, as opposed to natural languages, all feeling that the latter were inadequate to their (different) philosophical purposes. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the very idea of a logically perfect language ceased for various reasons to seem attractive to analytic philosophers. Thus, it might appear that this idea could be classified together with the many other bizarre ideas that from time to time surface in the history of philosophy-an idea that perhaps had a beneficial impact on the development of twentieth century logic, but which can now be put to rest. In this brief note, I contend that this conclusion may be too hasty. Indeed, if a well-known empirical hypothesis advanced in 1975 by Jerry Fodor turns out to be true, then there is a logically perfect language, after all. More precisely, I argue that, if it exists, Fodor's language of thought possesses the main characteristics a logically perfect language is required to have.

This paper attempts to provide insight into the cultural and linguistic influences that form and inform my artistic practice. Inspired by my tri-cultural life journey, my research focuses on the effects of socialization and linguistics on the thought processes at the center of my creative pursuits

What light do current developments in computing shed on philosophical and psychological understanding of the human mind. A group of authors from philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics, psychology, and computing provide answers in one of the first texts to bring together a ...

The paper critically reviews Jerry Fodor's book In Critical Condition: Polemic Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind. It focuses on Fodor's compositionality arguments and their relevance to the following questions: (i) How should concepts be individuated? (ii) What has semantics to do with epistemology? (iii) Who is right in the debate over classical and connectionist theories of cognition? (iv) How can the semantic properties of a mental state be inherited from the semantic properties of the state's constituents? The paper finally argues that Fodor's opposition to functional role semantics might jeopardize his view that semantic compositionality requires appropriate constituent relations between complex and less complex concepts. If your research interests, in any respect, are about things with semantic properties, such as language, thought, brains, or computers, many books may concern your particular subject, but only few authors go after the big i...

ABSTRACT. The principal aim of this essay is to discuss some logical features of the so-called Classical model of cognitive architecture as it is advocated by J. Fodor and Z. Pylyshyn in their much discussed article 'Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis'. It ...

How do people make inferences from complex patterns of evidence across diverse situations? What does a computational model need in order to capture the abstract knowledge people use for everyday reasoning? In this paper, we explore a novel modeling framework based on the probabilistic language of thought (PLoT) hypothesis, which conceptualizes thinking in terms of probabilistic inference over compositionally structured representations. The core assumptions of the PLoT hypothesis are realized in the probabilistic programming language Church (Goodman, Mansinghka, Roy, Bonawitz, & Tenenbaum, 2008). Using “ping pong tournaments” as a case study, we show how a single Church program concisely represents the concepts required to specify inferences from diverse patterns of evidence. In two experiments, we demonstrate a very close fit between our model’s predictions and participants’ judgments. Our model accurately predicts how people reason with confounded and indirect evidence and how different sources of information are integrated.