Why There Still Has to be a Language of Thought

Abstract

“But why”, Auntie asked with perceptible asperity, “does it have to be a language?” Auntie speaks with the voice of the Establishment, and her intransigence is something awful. She is, however, prepared to make certain concessions in the present case. First, she concedes that there are beliefs and desires and that there is a matter of fact about their intentional contents; there’s a matter of fact, that is to say, about which proposition the intentional object of a belief or a desire is. Second, Auntie accepts the coherence of physicalism. It may be that believing and desiring will prove to be states of the brain, and if they do that’s OK with Auntie. Third, she is prepared to concede that beliefs and desires have causal roles, and that overt behavior is typically the effect of complex interactions among these mental causes. (That Auntie was raised as a strict behaviorist goes without saying. But she hasn’t been quite the same since the 60’s. Come to think of it, which of us has?) In short, Auntie recognizes that psychological explanations need to postulate a network of causally related intentional states. “But why”, she asks with perceptible asperity, “does it have to be a language?” Or, to put it more succinctly than Auntie often does, what — over and above mere Intentional Realism — does the Language of Thought Hypothesis buy? That is what this paper is about.¹