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Language of thought hypothesis
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== Presentation == The hypothesis applies to thoughts that have propositional content, and is not meant to describe everything that goes on in the mind. It appeals to the representational theory of thought to explain what those tokens actually are and how they behave. There must be a mental representation that stands in some unique relationship with the subject of the representation and has specific content. Complex thoughts get their semantic content from the content of the basic thoughts and the relations that they hold to each other. Thoughts can only relate to each other in ways that do not violate the syntax of thought. The syntax by means of which these two sub-parts are combined can be expressed in [[first-order predicate calculus]]. The thought "John is tall" is clearly composed of two sub-parts, the concept of John and the concept of tallness, combined in a manner that may be expressed in first-order predicate calculus as a predicate 'T' ("is tall") that holds of the entity 'j' (John). A fully articulated proposal for what a LOT would have to take into account greater complexities such as [[Quantifier (linguistics)|quantification]] and [[propositional attitudes]] (the various attitudes people can have towards statements; for example I might ''believe'' or ''see'' or merely ''suspect'' that John is tall). ===Precepts=== # There can be no higher cognitive processes without mental representation. The only plausible psychological models represent higher cognitive processes as representational and computational thought needs a representational system as an object upon which to compute. We must therefore attribute a representational system to organisms for cognition and thought to occur. # There is causal relationship between our intentions and our actions. Because mental states are structured in a way that causes our intentions to manifest themselves by what we do, there is a connection between how we view the world and ourselves and what we do.
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