Essay About Propositional Attitudes And Representational Theory Of Mind

What Is the Language of Thought Hypothesis?
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What is the Language of Thought Hypothesis?
LOTH is an empirical thesis about the nature of thought and thinking.
According to LOTH, thought and thinking are done in a mental language,
i.e. in a symbolic system physically realized in the brain of the relevant
organisms. In formulating LOTH, philosophers have in mind primarily the
variety of thoughts known as propositional attitudes. Propositional
attitudes are the thoughts described by such sentence forms as S believes
that P, S hopes that P, S desires that P, etc., where S refers to
the subject of the attitude, P is any sentence, and that P refers to
the proposition that is the object of the attitude. If we let A stand
for such attitude verbs as believe, desire, hope, intend, think,
etc., then the propositional attitude statements all have the form: S As
that P.
LOTH can now be formulated more exactly as a hypothesis about the nature
of propositional attitudes. It can be characterized as the conjunction of
the following three theses (A), (B) and (C):
(A) Representational Theory of Mind (RTM): (cf. Field 1978: 37, Fodor
1987: 17)
(1) Representational Theory of Thought: For each propositional attitude A,
there is a unique and distinct (i.e. dedicated)[1] psychological relation
R, and for all propositions P and subjects S, S As that P if and only if
there is a mental representation #P# such that
(a) S bears R to #P#, and
(b) #P# means that P.
(2) Representational Theory of Thinking: Mental processes, thinking in
particular, consists of causal sequences of tokenings of mental
representations.
(B) Mental representations, which, as per (A1), constitute the direct
“objects” of propositional attitudes, belong to a representational or
symbolic system which is such that (cf. Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988:12-3)
(1) representations of the system have a combinatorial syntax and
semantics: structurally complex (molecular) representations are
systematically built up out of structurally simple (atomic) constituents,
and the semantic content of a molecular representation is a function of
the semantic content of its atomic constituents together with its
syntactic/formal structure, and
(2) the operations on representations (constituting, as per (A2), the
domain of mental processes, thinking) are causally sensitive to the
syntactic/formal structure of representations defined by this
combinatorial syntax.
(C) Functionalist Materialism. Mental representations so characterized
are, at some suitable level, functionally characterizable entities that
are realized by the physical properties of the subject having
propositional attitudes (if the subject is an organism, then the realizing
properties are presumably the neurophysiological properties in the brain
or the central nervous system of the organism).
The relation R in (A1), when RTM is combined with (B), is meant to be
understood as a computational/functional relation. The idea is that each
attitude is identified with a characteristic computational/functional role
played by the mental sentence that is the direct “object” of that kind of
attitude. (Scare quotes are necessary because it is more appropriate to
reserve object for a proposition as we have done above, but as long as
we keep this in mind, it is harmless to use it in this way for LOT
sentences.) For instance, what makes a certain mental sentence an
(occurrent) belief might be that it is characteristically the output of
perceptual output systems and input to an inferential system that
interacts decision-theoretically with desires to produce further sentences
or actions. Or equivalently, we may think of belief sentences as those
that are accessible only to certain sorts of computational operations
appropriate for beliefs, but not to others. Similarly, desire-sentences
(and sentences for other attitudes) may be characterized by a different
set of operations that define a characteristic computational role for
them. In the literature it is customary to use the metaphor of a
“belief-box” (cf.