creators_name: Aydede, Murat
type: preprint
datestamp: 1998-07-14
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:53:51
metadata_visibility: show
title: Language of Thought Hypothesis: State of the Art
ispublished: unpub
subjects: cog-psy
subjects: comp-sci-art-intel
subjects: phil-lang
subjects: phil-mind
subjects: phil-mind
subjects: phil-sci
full_text_status: public
keywords: Thinking, computation, syntax, language of thought, representation, naturalism, intentionality, connectionism, systematiciy, productivity, folk psychology, nativism
abstract: The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking.
date: 1998-01
date_type: published
refereed: FALSE
citation:   Aydede, Murat  (1998) Language of Thought Hypothesis: State of the Art.  [Preprint]    (Unpublished)  
document_url: http://cogprints.org/353/1/LOTH.SEP.html