An essay on the language of thought

• Ano de defesa: 2018
• Autor(a) principal: Krempel, Raquel Albieri
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Conceitos; Concepts; Fodor; Language; Linguagem; Pensamento; Thought
• Link de acesso: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8133/tde-08102018-161307/

The general goal of this dissertation is to clarify and discuss several topics that are, in some way or other, related to the language of thought hypothesis, put forward most forcefully by Jerry Fodor. The language of thought hypothesis is a hypothesis about the nature of mental representations. It says that mental representations have a linguistic structure. This is the same as saying that, just like sentences in a natural language, mental representations have primitive constituents (with syntactic and semantic properties), which combine to form syntactically and semantically complex symbols. The language of thought hypothesis is closely related to the representational and computational theories of mind. I discuss them and compare them to some opposing philosophical views of the mind. I then discuss the productivity and the systematicity arguments for the language of thought. Finally, we will see different ways to conceive the relation between the language of thought and the natural languages.