mentalese
language of thought

Is there such a thing as mentalese?

Thus Mentalese is best expressed through predicate and propositional calculus.

Therefore sentences in mentalese must get their meaning from the way in which they are used by thinkers and so on ad infinitum.

Rather, we think in a meta-language that precedes natural language, which Pinker following Fodor calls "mentalese."

If the sentences of Mentalese require unique processes of elaboration then they require a computational mechanism of a certain type.

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.

Yet no one would suggest that the computer is actually thinking or believing somewhere inside its circuits the equivalent of the propositional attitude "I believe I can kick this guy's butt" in Mentalese.

His pointed new book, "Language and Human Behavior," argues that there is no such thing as mentalese: to think deep thoughts, we must first be able to manufacture sentences; without the inventiveness of language, abstract thinking is impossible.

Fodor's initial proposal is that what determines that the symbol for "water" in Mentalese expresses the property H2O is that the occurrences of that symbol are in certain causal relations with water.

The contents of thoughts are represented in symbolic structures (the formulas of Mentalese) which, analogously to natural languages but on a much more abstract level, possess a syntax and semantics very much like those of natural languages.

Deacon's first illustration shows four cartoon views of the theories used to explain language: the common-sense view, B. F. Skinner's associations, Noam Chomsky's innate grammatical knowledge and the "mentalese" instincts that Steven Pinker describes.

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.

The most arresting chapter in Steven Pinker's chatty, wide-ranging new book, "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language," is titled "Mentalese," after what the author calls the "silent medium of the brain" in which thoughts are couched before they are "clothed in words."

The other view is represented by those who subscribe to "a language of thought".

"Am I not pale" is simply not the language of thought.

According to Professor Chomsky, the language of thought is grammatical.

Further, this language of thought itself is codified in the brain, not just a useful explanatory tool.

The Language of Thought, is, for my money, the major text of the 'cognitive science' movement.

In the time-honoured language of thought experiments, the pointer moves across the scale to a mark saying "here".

If thought also has such a combinatorial semantics, then there must be a language of thought.

The notion of a language of thought has an extensive philosophical history, and also is studied in psychology.

The language of thought theory allows the mind to process more complex representations with the help of semantics.

Further, this view is closely associated with Jerry Fodor and his language of thought hypothesis.

In Fodor's original views, the computational theory of mind is also related to the language of thought.

The notion of such meaning atoms or primitives is basic to the language of thought hypothesis from the 1970s.

Famously, Fodor has attempted to ground such realist claims about intentionality in a language of thought.

The language of thought.

In psycholinguistics or cognitive linguistics, it is language of thought in vogue, or something like that.

The Language of Thought.

Language of Thought - By Larry Kaye.

An example of this is the language of thought hypothesis, which attributes a discrete, combinatorial syntax and other linguistic properties to these mental phenomena.

According to Fodor, the language of thought hypothesis explains the systematicity and productivity seen in both language and thought.

Computation models emphasize the notion of a representational language of thought and the logic-like, computational processing that the mind performs over them.

He maintains that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind.

For example, the language of thought hypothesis has been accused of either falling prey to an infinite regress or of being superfluous.

In fact, "people do not think in English or Chinese or Apache: they think in a language of thought."

Fodor, Jerry A., The Language Of Thought.

The Language of Thought Hypothesis at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.