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Personal Identity

Language of Thought

(Text as at 06/07/2023 00:43:12)

*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***

Plug Note¹

• Thesis Text:
  1. According to "Dennett (Daniel) - Conditions of Personhood", Linguistic competence is one of the six essential features of personhood. It seems there are two reasons for this:-
     1. One is communication, as the formation of and participation in societies are essential to the flourishing of persons².
     2. The other is that the sort of self-reflection needed for personhood allegedly requires language.
        
  2. In response:-
     1. I believe there can be non-verbal communication between higher animals – especially those that are candidates for personhood (maybe of reduced degree³) – indeed, this must be the case for social beings.
     2. Also, cogitation doesn’t require the ability to verbalise if there’s such a thing as a language of Thought. Our conscious thoughts do seem to involve internalised spoken language, but maybe our unconscious ones don’t.
        
  3. So, the relevance of Jerry Fodor’s Language of Thought (LOT) hypothesis within the sphere of personal identity arises because of the alleged essentiality of language for personhood. As such, all non-human animals⁴ would be ruled out because even if certain Great Apes can be taught sign-language, this is not natural to them in the way language is to human beings.
  4. It is also often alleged (eg. by Donald Davidson) that animals cannot even think in the absence of language, because thinking requires concepts⁵, and concepts are only expressed in language.
  5. These (to me) unwanted conclusions might disappear if all animals whose minds appear to have intensional states should have a language of thought.
  6. I don’t know whether Fodor cares about animals in this context, or whether his theory was designed strictly with human beings⁶ in mind.
  7. I like the idea that a LOT – which initially only helps an individual – might explain how spoken language arose amongst human beings – given that a spoken language requires a pair of speakers before it becomes useful (even if grunts and other vocalisations don’t). If a language of thought spilled out into vocalisation, even though individual vocalisations might be initially mutually-unintelligible, a conventional speech (constrained only by universal grammar) might naturally arise with the co-operative behaviour germane to social animals.
  8. See "Rescorla (Michael) - The Language of Thought Hypothesis" for an overview.

• ---

  Further Remarks:
  1. I’ve been in two minds as to whether to make this Note cover both Language per se or Language of Thought in particular, and whether to include lots of references to the philosophy of Language in my Reading Lists.
  2. In the end – while I have an interest in Language and Languages – I’ve decided that this would take me too far out of the way as far as my Thesis on Personal Identity is concerned.
  3. There may be occasional references to Language, but in general this note will focus on Language of Thought, for the reasons below.
  4. A few connections to be followed up:-
     1. Baker - The Human Animal: Big-Tent Metaphysics⁷
     2. Brandom - Toward a Normative Pragmatics (Introduction)⁸
     3. Daniel Dennett – Conditions of Personhood⁹
     4. Implicit knowledge and language learning¹⁰
     5. Jen_071022 (Dennett)¹¹
     6. Jen_080204 (Brandom, Chisholm, Baillie)¹²
     7. Daniel Dennett has some interesting things to say about the LOT in "Dennett (Daniel) - Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking", Chapter 23 (“Trapped In the Robot Control Room”).
        
  5. Jerry Fodor’s Language of Thought (LOT) hypothesis features heavily in debates in the philosophy of mind – particularly in the debates between connectionists and computationalists – but cannot be followed up here.
  6. Currently, items I’ve read include some fairly random items that have missed the cut. I’ve not yet included any general items in the Philosophy of Language or Linguistics, but may do so in due course.