Susan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction” (MIT Press, 2011)
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What is the historical background of the Language of Thought hypothesis?
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, the podcast channel in the New Books Network that offers interviews with philosophers about their ideas as expressed in their newly published books. I'm Carrie Figdore and I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise. In nineteen seventy five, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought. which is considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last fifty years or so. This book helped launch what became known as the classical computational theory of the mind. in which thinking was theorized as the manipulation of symbols according to rules or algorithms. Computationalism was seen as an acceptably materialist alternative to the behavioristic psychology of John Watson and B.
F. Skinner. Fodor argued that certain features of human thought required that any human like computational cognitive system could had to have a structured format analogous to the structure of natural languages, as opposed to say the unstructured format of an image. Only if thoughts had a sentence like structure could we explain why we can all understand and produce sentences no one has ever used or spoken before. And why someone who can understand a sentence that has a particular syntactic structure and meaning can also understand a certain class of systematic transformations of that sentence. In short, it could explain the features of human thought known as productivity and systematicity. Thus, according to Fodor, we must think in a language of thought, sometimes called mental ease.
Classical computationalism has always had its critics, of course, most notably connectionist or neural network modelers such as Paul Smolensky or David Rummelhart, who defended a more brain like computing system consisting of simple nodes and their connections without any obvious internal structure at all. But strangely enough, since nineteen seventy five, Fodor himself has argued that the computational model couldn't explain key features and kinds of reasoning, like making plans for the future or making decisions quickly. And he has also argued against the idea that neuroscience had anything to do with understanding the mind. An idea that motivates a great deal of research in cognitive science today.
In short, Fodor himself helped undermine the dominance of the classical computational model that he played such an important role in founding. In today's interview, we'll be talking with Susan Schneider about her new book, The Language of Thought, A New Philosophical Direction just out from MIT Press. Professor Schneider was a doctoral student of voters and now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
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