February 2010
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239 Reads
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745 Citations
This book presents a new development of the famous Language of Thought hypothesis, which has since the 1970s been at the centre of interdisciplinary debate about how the mind works. The book defends and extends the groundbreaking idea that thinking is couched in a symbolic system realized in the brain. This idea is central to the representational theory of mind which has been established as a key reference point in modern philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. The foundation stone of our present cognitive science is Turing's suggestion that cognitive processes are not associations but computations; and computation requires a language of thought. This book offers a more cogent presentation and a fuller explication of a distinctive account of the mind, with various intriguing new features. The central role of compositionality in the representational theory of mind is revealed: most of what we know about concepts follows from the compositionality of thoughts. The book shows the necessity of a referentialist account of the content of intentional states, and of an atomistic account of the individuation of concepts. Not least among the new developments is the book's identification and persecution of pragmatism as the leading source of error in the study of the mind today.