Language, thought and the language of thought (Aunty's own argument revisited)

Abstract

Introduction 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' (1996a) book, 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. Orders of priority Should questions in the theory of thought – questions about intentionality, beliefs and concept possession, for example – be approached directly or, instead, indirectly via questions about language? Suppose that Kylie believes that kangaroos seldom kick, and expresses this thought in the English sentence: ‘Kangaroos seldom kick.’ Which takes priority, the meaning of the English sentence or the content of Kylie's thought? A claim of priority is the converse of a claim of one-way dependence: X enjoys priority over Y if Y depends on X but X does not depend on Y. So, any question of the relative priority of X and Y has four possible answers: (i) X has priority; (ii) Y has priority; (iii) X and Y are mutually dependent (inter-dependent); (iv) X and Y are independent. But the question of the relative priority of thought and language is unclear until the relevant kind of priority has been specified.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.