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Propositional Attitudes and the Language of Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Frances Egan
Frances Egan*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 08903, USA
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Extract

In the appendix to Psychosemantics, entitled ‘Why There Still has to be a Language of Thought,’ Jerry Fodor offers several arguments for the language of thought thesis. The LOT, as articulated by Fodor, is a thesis about propositional attitudes. It comprises the following two claims: (1) propositional attitudes are relations to meaning-bearing tokens — for example, to believe that P is to bear a certain relation to a token of a symbol which means that P; and (2) the representational tokens in question are quasi-linguistic — in particular, they have the constituent structure appropriate to a language.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 379 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1991

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References

1 Fodor, J.A. Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Ibid., 135-6

3 Each attitude type is construed as a computational relation to a symbol token; so believing will be one computational relation, and desiring another.

4 See especially Fodor, Representations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1981) and ch. 1 of Psychosemantics.

5 Schiffer, Stephen ‘Truth and the Theory of Content,’ in Parrett, H. and Bouverese, J. eds., Meaning and Understanding (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1981) 205-24Google Scholar

6 Fodor, Psychosemantics, 142

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., 166-7

9 Ibid., 143-4

10 Marr, David Vision (New York: Freeman 1982)Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 272

12 Ibid., 275

13 I would like to thank Susan Brison, Robert Matthews, and William Seager for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.