Reverse-engineering the language of thought: A new approach
Milica Denić, Jakub Szymanik
May 2022 

A foundational hypothesis in cognitive science is that some of human thinking happens in a 'language of thought' (LoT), which is universal across humans (Fodor, 1975). According to this hypothesis, words in different natural languages are labels for primitive concepts or their combinations in LoT. What are LoT's primitives? This is a major challenge because LoT is not directly observable, and thus needs to be inferred or 'reverse-engineered'. We put forward a novel approach to reverse-engineering LoT, capitalizing on the existing knowledge about the optimization of the trade-off between complexity and informativeness in natural languages.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006620 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Proceedings of CogSci 2022
keywords:	language of thought; numerals; number; complexity/informativeness trade-off, semantics
Downloaded:	728 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]