Language
What is the Language of Thought Hypothesis?
LOTH is an empirical thesis about the nature of thought and thinking. According to LOTH, thought and thinking are done in a mental language, i.e. in a symbolic system physically realized in the brain of the relevant organisms. In formulating LOTH, philosophers have in mind primarily the variety of thoughts known as ‘propositional attitudes’. Propositional attitudes are the thoughts described by such sentence forms as ‘S believes …
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…the relation between belief-talk and psychological talk will be any more direct. (Dennett 1981: 107)
The objection, as Fodor (1987: 22) points out, isn't that the program has a dispositional, or potential, belief that it will get its queen out early. Rather, the program actually operates on this belief. There appear to be lots of other examples: e.g. in reasoning we pretty often follow certain inference rules like modus ponens, disjunctive syllogism, etc. without necessarily explicitly representing them.
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