CONCEPT
Language of Thought
Jerry Fodor's 1975 hypothesis that thinking is done in a mental language—Mentalese—with discrete symbols that carry meanings into combination by syntactic rules, whose absence from the architecture of large language models raises the hardest available question about what those systems are actually doing.
The Language of Thought hypothesis is the most rigorous attempt philosophy has produced to explain how a lump of matter could reason—and it is the standard against which the dominant AI architecture of our moment most conspicuously fails to measure up, or seems to. Jerry Fodor proposed in his 1975 book of that name that genuine thought requires a system of internal representations with two faces at once: a syntactic shape, a formal identity that a mechanical process can recognize and manipulate without understanding what it means, and a semantic content, a meaning, a thing in the world the symbol is about. A computer pushes the shapes around by their formal properties, and if the system is built right, the meanings are preserved—valid reasoning is mechanized because the syntax was designed to track the semantics. This is the insight that let Fodor hold the mind was a computer without saying it was
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