#language of thought

[tonreihe]

Vladimir Nabokov on the language of thought. (From a 1959 interview in L’Express.)

[josephfrancisclark-blog]

Is it just me, or are Language of Thought theorists hand-wavy about where exactly in the brain the LOT is supposed to be computed?

[blankmediation138]

Being Mediatized: 3+8 (introduction to the first book)

In the work of German author Niklas Luhmann,  a spectrum of social systems can be traced that never exceeds the he amount of eight dimensions. According to Luhmann, society comprised approximately eight systems (politics, economy, law, education, science, religion, media and art).

Similarly, in his most-read book The Concept of Society, Luhmann talks about eight epistemological cognates as the basis for his theoretical approach to society as a whole. This recurring eight in his work, as grounding society, communication, and thus basically everything, had been a result of our deeply functionally differentiated – not yet mediatized - world. 

With media encroaching all other dimensions since the last 20 or so years, one would have seven dimensions left. But what about these seven?

It was only after writing this book that I became conscious of the fact that one computer byte comprises eight bits, and that Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness is suspiciously similar to Luhmann's epistemology.

I started to foreshadow a life in which ‘beings’ – the ‘bare’ biochemical pieces of living that are both here and in media – give out to and rediscover (Ent-Decken) seven electricity forms (frictioinal, faradic, galvanic, magneto-electrical, thermal, animal and magnetic).

Jakob Boehme (1923: 158) talked of a threefold structure coupled with seven 'forces'. He named the totality of it the 'Outer Mystery' and it goes a little like: “Divine Will, Inner Mystery, or Eternal Unity (Parabrahman), splitting into their Seven Forces – 'God'”. It is an out-birth of the Seven Forces, and this Outer Mystery equals the Cosmic Spirit.

Through an awareness of how each three underpins its own eights I thought I saw a possibility to scratch at the surface of a being’s grammar or its 'Language of Thought'. Of course, I was wrong.

[syntactician]

What did you read the title of this post as? A noun, or a verb? I've written both the plural form of the noun analysis and the 3rd person singular form of the verb analyse squillions of times, and only last week did I realise they are spelt exactly the same way. Call me a doofus, if you like, but it's true. In my mind they are two totally distinct lexical items, though obviously related, and I knew how to spell both. Because they can never be confused in context, I've never once thought one when I meant the other, and so never noticed the spelling was the same. Just shows, there is no ambiguity in the language of thought.

[cerbear]

HELP: PHILOSOPHY GEEKS

I have to read Fodor's LOT, chapter 3 ("LOT Meets Frege's Problem (Among Others)") and write a page about it.

Trouble is, I do not understand a single goddamned sentence this man writes. I have been trying to decipher it since Tuesday and I'm pretty sure it's not written in standard English. I have reason to believe that he has some strange dialect known only to analytic philosophers. It goes something like this:

"I [JARGON] the [JARGON] with [JARGON] because [JARGON JARGON]."

What the hell is this guy talking about? The only words in this chapter that make any goddamned sense are the conjunctions and prepositions.

WHAT IS AIR

CAN I JUST DROP OUT AGAIN PLEASE

[outthereorbitingaround]

According to one school of philosophy, our thoughts have a language-like structure that is independent of natural language: this is what students of language call the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis. According to the LOT hypothesis, it is because human thoughts already have a linguistic structure that the emergence of common, natural languages was possible in the first place.

The LOT hypothesis contrasts with the mildly contrary view that human thinking is actually conducted in natural language, and thus we could not think intelligently without it. It also contradicts the ultra-contrary view that human thinking does not have a language-like structure at all, implying that our ability to communicate in natural language is nothing short of a miracle.

Research in AI lends little support to the first view, and some support to the second. But if we want to improve how we communicate in natural language, the AI version of the LOT hypothesis comes into its own, offering us a detailed analysis we can use as a guide.

Using this guide we can then try to express ourselves in a form of natural language that is closer to the LOT. This will make it easier for others to understand our communications because they will require less effort to translate them into thoughts of their own. But to fully exploit the guide, we need to understand the nature of the LOT and the relationship between it and natural language.

- Robert Kowalski, Do thoughts have a language of their own?