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Topic: Mentalese

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	Revealing the Language of Thought
		Mentalese, like many of the brain's functions, is hidden from conscious awareness and the fact that we are only consciously aware of natural language does not have any impact on the existence (or not) of mentalese.
		Mentalese, after all, is supposed to be a high level language which is an abstraction away from the neurological events that underpin its workings, while at the same time remaining somewhere at the subpersonal level.
		Mentalese supporters could claim that the acquisition of symbolic representation occurs at a certain stage of cognitive development and it is at this time that an infant's innate language of thought mechanisms come `on-line'.
	www.def-logic.com /articles/RevealLanguageOfThought.html (18533 words)

	pinker 1 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		Pinker states that mentalese is the inner language that we as humans, as well as other thinking animals, use to form our thoughts and ideas.
		Mentalese is a mental language that every human being is born with and, it is that mental language and not spoken language, with which we think.
		Mentalese is very important to Pinker's main thesis because mentalese is the inherent mental language humans use to form spoken language.
	www.arches.uga.edu /~jhobson/pinker1.htm (125 words)

	Pinker on the Thinker - David Cole
		Mentalese doesn’t have Roman letters, and lacks rhyme, which is only a feature of phonology.
		Pinker’s very first reason for supposing mentalese exists is the common experience that we realize that something we said was not what we meant to say.
		They are the mentalese of the models, the medium in which the inferences are carried out.
	www.d.umn.edu /~dcole/pinker.htm (5504 words)

	generation5 - Does the Top-Down Approach or the Bottom-Up Approach Best Model the Human Brain?
		Mentalese is computational because ‘it invokes representations which are manipulated or processed according to formal rules.’ The syntax of Mentalese is just like the hierarchy of CR structures — with different, more complex structures derived from base structures.
		The brain receives sentences and turns them into Mentalese, just like a CR program would parse a stream of text, and conceptualize it into structures within the computer that do not resemble (and are independent of) the language that the text was in.
		Mentalese assumes that there is a language of the brain completely independent of the natural language (or languages) of the individual.
	www.generation5.org /content/1999/topdown.asp?Print=1 (5969 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		Although the applicability of mentalese terms is not determined by public conventions, there is an important difference between the LOT and a private language in Wittgenstein’s sense.
		For example, Fodor and Dell’utri say, respectively, as follows: [T]hough nothing requires that the language of thought should be construed as a sense datum language, it may seem, nevertheless, to fall in the scope of Wittgenstein’s argument and thus to be in peril of that argument being a good one.
		In his view, “Mentalese symbols mean what they do in virtue of their causal/nomic connections to things in the world.” (Fodor 1998, p.
	krcogsci.snu.ac.kr /conference/2003spring/p-43.doc (2599 words)

	[No title]
		Thinking takes place in the mind by means of symbolic representations that each correspond to an idea and a mental processor which reacts to pieces of representation and responds in a manner consistent with the rules of reasoning.
		Language is unsuited to operate as this internal mentalese because of its ambiguity, lack of explicitness, co-reference, deixis and synonymy.
		Mentalese must be both richer and simpler than language.
	www.willamette.edu /cla/ids/ids155/handouts/review-1.doc (410 words)

	[No title]
		So let 'Mentalese' stand for that neural language that is Jane's language of thought, and let us suppose that this language has the same infinite expressive power as Jane's public language (you might even suppose that it is a neural version of her public language).
		Mentalese itself is simply a function from sequences of neural states to propositions, and there is nothing in the notion of such a function which requires it to be finitely specifiable.
		Since the sentence's meaning-determining physical property is itself determined by the physical properties the theory assigns to the sentence's parts and structure, it follows that the reference of the Mentalese that-clause is determined by the physical properties the compositional supervenience theory assigns to the parts and structure of the sentence contained in the that-clause.
	www.nyu.edu /gsas/dept/philo/courses/concepts/paradox.html (19213 words)

	COPYRIGHT (C) 1995 THINKING ALLOWED PRODUCTIONS
		Certainly the contents of mentalese are supplied a lot by language, by learning about objects in faraway places and abstract concepts from conversations with other people and by reading.
		The actual sentences of mentalese often derive from language, although not directly, because we never remember the exact wording of what we hear; we remember the gist, and the gist is probably something like mentalese.
		I mean, the mechanism of mentalese, the way in which the subvocalizations and the words and the pictures all fit together and interact with our brain is a subject of great interest that we will explore together in future portions of this series.
	www.mrbauld.com /pinker1.html (4041 words)

	[No title]
		Because of the more recent ascendency of mentalese accounts of thought, on the one hand, and connectionism, with its focus on low-level subsymbolic neural activity and pattern recognition, on the other, appreciation of the role of natural language in thought is not currently duly appreciated, at least among philosophers.
		If mentalese were the language of thought, natural language would not play a role in thought.
		Since the representational power of mentalese is at least as great as natural langauge, and it is native, the machine langauge, the role of natural language would be the same as it typically is in a computer program -- confined to the interface with the external world.
	www.d.umn.edu /~dcole/hearthot.htm (3501 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		For some mentalese terms that we take to be natural kind terms, the following would seem to hold: there does not exist a nomic connection between the term in question and a single natural kind upon which depend all other nomic connections that cause the tokening of that term.
		Tokenings of given mentalese term t that occur during the learning period are type one tokenings and determine t’s extension: it consists of whatever is of the same kind as that about which the type one tokenings of t carried information.
		In explaining the fundamental basis of content, a naturalistic semantic theory for mentalese terms should not attempt to reduce reference-fixation to subjects’ dispositions to token mentalese terms under counterfactual circumstances; it is difficult to see how any such theory will avoid the disruptive effects of the cognitively holistic nature of dispositions.
	spot.colorado.edu /~rupertr/DispMiDe.doc (6519 words)

	Steven Pinker's "The language instinct"
		The first assertion is unsettling because mentalese lacks one of the defining properties of a language: it cannot be used for communication.
		Pinker does not mention it, but there is a vigorous debate over the status of mentalese (see the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy or this article by Larry Kaye).
		He treats concept determinism and linguistic relativity as if they were just as absurd as identicality, and presents mentalese as the long-awaited refutation of all of them.
	www.physics.wustl.edu /~alford/pinker.html (2262 words)

	Doing Without Mentalese
		Though "brain writing" (being something physical) would have to be detectable and perhaps readable by third persons (maybe by using some sort of futuristic EEG machine that reads and decodes mentalese), in practice we observe public utterances and inscriptions.
		Fodor and his followers' conspicuous lack of success in discovering (much less deciphering) any inscriptions of mentalese, after all, is, first and foremost, why the proprietary language of thought hypothesis is beleaguered.
		Besides the number of mentalese inscriptions thus far discovered being zero, there is the "not so well-kept secret that AI is internally in a paradigmatic mess" (Chandrasekaran 1990, p.14).
	members.aol.com /lshauser/dwment.html (2424 words)

	Blogs and Wiki: RussTallChief/Chap3
		If we assume that mentalese exists separate from [language] then we can only approach understanding the “gist” of the concept, which is typically what we remember, rather than the exact words, according to Pinker.
		Forming language that accurately expresses the concepts that may lack language, and then agreeing on the definitions of the concepts that we are attempting to harness via language illuminate even more the shortcomings of language.
		Mentalese doesn’t have Roman letters, and lacks rhyme, which is only a feature of phonology.” So in contrast to thought existing without language, I do support that language can augment thought, thereby creating new abstract concepts that may contribute to and/or coexist with innate mentalese.
	ferret.bemidjistate.edu /~morgan/cgi-bin/blogsandwiki.pl?RussTallChief/Chap3 (961 words)

	What, then, of the relationship between religion and science? - Page 2 - @forums
		I do think, Mentalese, that your point would have been more persuasive if you had written it in a more accessable manner.
		Personally, I don't have much difficulty with the tactic in this case, but the one-sided argument which follows it is simply a case of restrained perception.
		Mentalese, here's a hint: god is not religion; religion is not god.
	www.atforumz.com /showthread.php?t=94496&page=2 (1635 words)

	P S Y C H E
		First and foremost, Fodor's mentalese theory is not meant to be a theory about conscious thought -- Fodor has, to my knowledge, remained mute on the issue of whether or not occurrent thoughts are in mentalese.
		Lacking this, Carruthers must admit that mentalese may be required for semantic acquisition, thus making his account only a very weak alternative to Fodor's view, and hardly worth the communicative/cognitive contrast.
		But it seems consistent to endorse a mentalese view together with a conceptual role semantics (i.e., roles of mentalese elements) or to endorse a spoken language view together with a covariance semantics.
	psyche.cs.monash.edu.au /book_reviews/carruthers (5404 words)

	The Basic Concepts
		Conceived of abstractly, that is, functionally, each of these is like a file, into which tokens of sentences are read, in which they can be stored and manipulated in various ways, and from which they can be read.
		We shall further assume that mentalese is a lot like English; indeed, we shall assume that it is English.
		If Jerry believes that S, Jerry has a token of mentalese in his belief structure that has the content that S.'' The picture we have arrived at requires an account that is a bit more complicated, however.
	www-csli.stanford.edu /~john/israel/fodor/node4.html (2192 words)

	[No title]
		Adherents of Mentalese acknowledge the fact that most adult humans are able to speak and understand public languages.
		Therefore, adherents of Mentalese are committed to the claim that we can manipulate public symbols in thought to a certain, unspecified degree.
		In a passage quoted by Kaye, he adopts the assumption that tokens of Mentalese correspond one-to-one with the contents of the complements of attitude reports.
	csmaclab-www.uchicago.edu /philosophyProject/LOT/klotrep1.html (6027 words)

	Language vs. Thought: and the Oscar goes to (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		From this, I can conclude that thought makes use of mentalese in order to communicate its ideas in the form of language, and that this mentalese works based on the universal grammar.
		As concepts in our minds are also universal, translating is possible because humans, when born, have a set of rules already built into them that allows them to learn any language and exchange the tags of those ideas.
		Mentalese is the language spoken by thought, and the act of translating thoughts into words through mentalese is the refining of understanding.
	www.shakespeare.uk.net /journal/3_1/laporte3_1.html (1949 words)

	The Language of Thought: Entry
		In his (1975) Jerry Fodor offered a bold hypothesis: the medium of thought is an innate language that is distinct from all spoken languages and is semantically expressively complete.
		So-called "Mentalese" is supposed to be an inner language that contains all of the conceptual resources necessary for any of the propositions that humans can grasp, think or express--in short, the basis of thought and meaning.
		However, there is at least one alternative to the Mentalese hypothesis, and that is the view that linguistic thoughts occur in the languages that we speak, so that the medium for my linguistic thoughts (and perhaps yours as well) is English.
	host.uniroma3.it /progetti/kant/field/lot.html (5890 words)

	Book review of Steven Pinker
		And this mentalese is a genetic fact: we inherit it when we inherit human genes.
		Even if "how" we think is the same for everybody and is determined only by the genetic "mentalese", the "what" may very much depend on "what" we are communicated and we communicate, and the "what" is really our thought).
		Pinker notes that mentalese might actually be simpler than the languages we speak, because it doesn't have to deal with the oddities of spoken language (such sa pronouns and indexicals) or with pronunciation.
	www.thymos.com /mind/pinker4.html (1989 words)

	The Theory of Meaning by Russell Dale; Chapter 4
		A mental representation for Fodor, of course, is a Mentalese sentence.
		So, we should suppose, then, that the idea is that if notions of primitive denotation for Mentalese are explained in naturalistic terms, and a naturalistic explication is provided for the semantic contributions of the basic syntactic structures of Mentalese, the result will be a CMT for Mentalese.
		Given that the productivity and systematicity of Mentalese are explained by a compositional-supervenience theory, and I believe that they are, the question comes down to whether or not having a correct compositional-supervenience theory somehow entails having a CMT as well.
	russelldale.com /dissertation/c4.html (6793 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		Following Jerry Fodor (1975), (1981), (1987, Appendix) mentalese is often conceived as a language that, while closely related to natural languages in content, is distinct from all natural languages.
		The second claim may or may not be part of this view--if it is, then this suggests the view that mentalese is a universal language of content.
		So the mentalese theorist may appear to have a more accurate means of taxonomizing beliefs than the spoken language theorist has.
	sunsite.dcc.uchile.cl /~abassi/WWW/PsiPhi/Kaye.html (7749 words)

	diary_sarahe4.html (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		When you think about it, the idea of a mentalese, or a type of language that is used by the brain to convey ideas to us, makes a lot of sense because our thoughts are independent of the words we speak.
		Similarly, when thoughts do not depend on words, translation from one language to another becomes possible (i.e., only when there exists an abstract, or "mentalese" concept can that concept be translated from one language to another.
		What this means for neuroscience is that somewhere out there lie the clues for decoding this "mentalese" and discovering how our minds use images and ideas to help us think.
	www.macalester.edu /psychology/whathap/diaries/diariess98/sarahe/diary_sarahe4.html (314 words)

	The Language of Thought Hypothesis (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
		Put differently, the mental representations that are the direct "objects" of attitudes are structurally complex symbols whose complexity lends itself to a syntactic and semantic analysis.
		The Mentalese sentence can then be said to have the proposition as its semantic/intentional content.
		The standard reply to such objections is to draw a distinction between rules on the basis of which Mentalese data-structures are manipulated, and the data-structures themselves (intuitively, the program/data distinction).
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/language-thought (12150 words)

	The Language of Thought: Annotated Bibliography
		This "Mentalese" is supposed to be what we think in, and what we use to learn the semantics of spoken languages.
		He raises and briefly discusses a number of (seven) arguments that are supposed to undermine the former view(s), in favor of the latter, but, given the extreme lack of clarity in the delineation of a target, it's hard to make sense of any of the discussion.
		Cole discerns five arguments from Pinker in support of the claim that there must be a Mentalese, and five more arguments in defense of the view that Mentalese must be the exclusive medium of thought and provides strong critical responses to each argument.
	host.uniroma3.it /progetti/kant/field/lotbiblio.html (6713 words)

	Regarding abortion... - Page 2 - @forums
		While I'm not about to get dragged into another abortion debate (I stand clearly opposed to abortion though I believe a woman has the right to choose one, providing she is made fully aware she is terminating a human life), I would like to point something out:
		as a girl who loses her virginity often believes herself to be a seductive sex goddess, so does Mentalese seem to believe that reading a few college philosophy texts has given her the wisdom of Solomon.
		Mentalese - okay I've never studied philosophy so I don't fully understand what all your isms mean, although you've explained it a bit.
	www.atforumz.com /showthread.php?t=54288&page=2 (3307 words)

	[No title]
		For instance, this would type the beliefs we ascribe with 'John likes Mary' and 'Mary is liked by John' as the same and would also type the beliefs that we ascribe with 'snow is white' and those German speakers ascribe with 'Schnee ist weiss' as the same.
		But the hypothesis that there is a mentalese that is acquired prior to (or with) the acquisition of natural languages and that is nonetheless distinct from them is also wildly implausible--there's absolutely no evidence to support it, and no one has ever articulated even the crudest beginnings of a mentalese acquisition theory.
		Where mentalese hypotheses compete with this view, we should accept the natural language hypothesis.
	csmaclab-www.uchicago.edu /philosophyProject/LOT/KLOTREJ.html (2491 words)

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