Explaining and Critical Analysis of Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis

Morvarid, Jafar; Salari, Morteza

doi:10.22096/ek.2020.35994.1005

Explaining and Critical Analysis of Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

Jafar Morvarid ¹

Morteza Salari ²

¹ Assistant Professor, Faculty of Theology and Islamic Studies, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran. (Corresponding author)

² Master of Philosophy, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

10.22096/ek.2020.35994.1005

Abstract

Factionalists claimed that the mental states must be defined through specific functional roles that they play in explaining the behavior of organism in different positions.
Fodor the contemporary American philosopher believes in some sort of functionalism which is known as psycho- functionalism.
He also believes in intentional realism with respect to mental states and a form of non-reduction physicalism. He creates a hypothesis called the language of thought, which is a combination of realistic reading of mental state and computational explanation of the process of reasoning that both are based on aforementioned beliefs, in order to provide a physicalistic response for the old ambiguities of the philosophy of mind. According to this hypothesis, thinking and reasoning occur in one mental language. The mental language has syntax and semantic and reasoning includes a syntax process on mental representations. The main aims of this study firstly is to provide the theoretical explanation of this hypothesis as well as explaining the most important features of the language of thought and secondly to provide a critical study of that hypothesis by the means of examining the arguments posed against or in favor of that hypothesis.

Keywords

the Language of Thought

Functionalism

Physicalism

the Cartesian Problem

the Brentano's Problem

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