Language and The Language of Thought- A linguistic perspective on the philosophy of Fodor

Sammanfattning: The status of folk psychology and its concepts has come under scrutiny in contemporary philosophy of mind and psychology (cf. Ryle 1949; Nisbett and Wilson 1977; Churchland 1986; Dennett 1987, 1991). In an attempt to unify a naturalized view of the mind with folk psychology, Fodor (1975) presented The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoT) ? a hypothesis stating that thought and thinking are carried out in a physically realized innate mental language: mentalese, which is said to serve as the basis of rational agency as well as natural language acquisition and comprehension. The assumed mental language consists of a compositional symbolic or representational system with semantic content (cf. Ibid: 200, Fodor 1987; Fodor 1990),1 governed in their composition by syntactic specifications, thus providing our cognition with a linguistic structure. According to Fodor, all research within relevant fields point towards the assumption of an innate mental language (Fodor 1975). The findings concerned suggest that rational agency has much in common with a language, these are amongst others the systematicity and productivity found both in thinking and in language. In conjunction with Fodor's aim to vindicate folk psychology, LoT is said to be the best explanation; "the only game in town" (Fodor 1975: 55). Thus, the theory states that by having representations bearing (narrow) semantic content, capable of facilitating intentionality, folk psychology is saved. The syntax of mentalese on the other hand forms the laws of psychology, which constitute the explanatory role of cognition in behaviour as well as the base upon which rational thinking and agency is founded (Fodor 1987).