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The entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good summary of the Language of Thought Hypothesis. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/

by Jun8 2y ago

The entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good summary of the Language of Thought Hypothesis. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/ Jerry Fodor, who advocated an internal mental language, was seen as an old crank when I studied Linguistics in late 90s; I just looked him up and, god, he died recently in 2017. Here’s a New Yorker article from that time: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/jerry-fodors-enduring-critique-of-neo-darwinism https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/jerry-fodors-en....

lukasb 2y ago
Complaint not targeted at you personally but - why does thought have to take place in language at all? I sometimes reason using physical or kinesthetic metaphors that would be impossible to capture perfectly in language.
- strikelaserclaw 2y ago
  and why does thought have to have one form? I think in both language and visual representations and i switch between them depending on the task and i even pipe the input from one representation into the other representation.
foldr 2y ago
This is related but not really the same thing. The Language of Thought may or may not be closely related to human language. (Some animals may also have concepts and compositional mental representations.)
- cubefox 2y ago
  I didn't read the SEP article, but is the language of thought hypothesis perhaps already verified by our ability to do some sort of logic on neural network embeddings? E.g. queen-royal=woman.
  - foldr 2y ago
    Fundamentally LoT is a hypothesis about human (and possibly animal) cognition, not a hypothesis about what artificial neural network models can or can't do. But you can see Fodor and Pylyshyn's thoughts on 'connectionist' models (as they were known at the time) in this extensive article from 1988: https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/proseminars/Proseminar13/ConnectionistArchitecture.pdf https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/pro... The discussion on p. 14 is particularly relevant.

by Jun8 2y ago

lukasb 2y ago

Complaint not targeted at you personally but - why does thought have to take place in language at all? I sometimes reason using physical or kinesthetic metaphors that would be impossible to capture perfectly in language.

strikelaserclaw 2y ago
and why does thought have to have one form? I think in both language and visual representations and i switch between them depending on the task and i even pipe the input from one representation into the other representation.

foldr 2y ago

This is related but not really the same thing. The Language of Thought may or may not be closely related to human language. (Some animals may also have concepts and compositional mental representations.)

cubefox 2y ago
I didn't read the SEP article, but is the language of thought hypothesis perhaps already verified by our ability to do some sort of logic on neural network embeddings? E.g. queen-royal=woman.
- foldr 2y ago
  Fundamentally LoT is a hypothesis about human (and possibly animal) cognition, not a hypothesis about what artificial neural network models can or can't do. But you can see Fodor and Pylyshyn's thoughts on 'connectionist' models (as they were known at the time) in this extensive article from 1988: https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/proseminars/Proseminar13/ConnectionistArchitecture.pdf https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/pro... The discussion on p. 14 is particularly relevant.