scholarly journals What would it mean for natural language to be the language of thought?

Author(s):  
Gabe Dupre
1997 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 127-150
Author(s):  
L. Weiskrantz

Some philosophers have laid down rather severe strictures on whether there can be thought without language. Wittgenstein asserted that ‘the limits of language…mean the limits of my world’ (1922, §5.62). Davidson (1984, p. 157) has argued that ‘a creature cannot have thoughts unless it is an interpreter of the speech of another’. Dummett (1978, p. 458) has interpreted some pronouncements as meaning that ‘the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological processes of thinking and…the only proper method of analysing thought consists in the analysis of language’. And there is also the position that thought has its own language that might exist even prior to or in the absence of natural language. But here I am going to concentrate on what might be possible in the absence of natural language. I do not know what it would mean to consider thinking in the absence of its own intrinsic language, a language of thought, if the two always co-exist.


2011 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 33-41
Author(s):  
Vivian Ferreira Dias

The present study searches to investigate the notion of language as well linguistic aspects privileged by Fodor (important representative of Cognitive Science) as far as establishment of relationships between cognition and language is concerned. This investigation will be based on representative material of author’s studies focusing, mainly, on dichotomy natural language X language of thought.


Author(s):  
Georges Rey

The ‘language of thought’ is a formal language that is postulated to be encoded in the brains of intelligent creatures as a vehicle for their thought. It is an open question whether it resembles any ‘natural’ language spoken by anyone. Indeed, it could well be encoded in the brains of people who claim not to ‘think in words’, or even by intelligent creatures (for example, chimpanzees) incapable of speaking any language at all. Its chief function is to be a medium of representation over which the computations posited by cognitive psychologists are defined. Its language-like structure is thought to afford the best explanation of such facts about animals as the productivity, systematicity and (hyper-)intensionality of their thought, the promiscuity of their attitudes, and their ability to reason in familiar deductive, inductive and practical ways.


1987 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-34
Author(s):  
Greg N. Carlson
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