Work · Analytic Philosophy
The Language of Thought
Cognitive psychology presupposes an internal system of representation with its own syntax – a “mentalese” in which thinking is computation.
Introduction
Jerry Fodor, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at MIT, published the book in 1975. He argues that the most successful theories of perception, learning and decision-making in cognitive psychology treat mental processes as computations over representations, and that these representations must form a language-like system with a combinatorial syntax and semantics. This language of thought cannot be a natural language such as English, since infants and animals think, and learning a language itself requires forming hypotheses in some prior system of representation. A much-disputed consequence is that a great many concepts must be innate. The book is a founding text of the computational theory of mind.
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