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Single Idea 3170

[filed under theme 18. Thought / B. Mechanics of Thought / 4. Language of Thought ]

Full Idea

Very young children have been shown (Brown and Halon 1970) to be 'reinforced' not for their grammar but for the informational content of what they say.

Gist of Idea

We train children in truth, not in grammar

Source

Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.2.1)

Book Ref

Rey,Georges: 'Contemporary Philosophy of Mind' [Blackwell 1997], p.113


A Reaction

This is what you would expect. It doesn't follow that the grammar comes from innate mechanisms, because the pressure to get the information right could impose increasing accuracy in grammar.


The 19 ideas with the same theme [brains have an in-built private language ('Mentalese')]:

If everything uses mentalese, ALL concepts must be innate! [Putnam]
No machine language can express generalisations [Putnam]
Are there any meanings apart from in a language? [Harman]
Folk psychology doesn't say that there is a language of thought [Lewis]
A language of thought doesn't explain content [Dennett]
The predecessor and rival of the language of thought hypothesis is the picture theory of ideas [Dennett]
Language is ambiguous, but thought isn't [Fodor]
Mentalese may also incorporate some natural language [Fodor]
Mentalese doesn't require a theory of meaning [Fodor]
Since the language of thought is the same for all, it must be something like logical form [Fodor, by Devlin]
Ambiguities in English are the classic reason for claiming that we don't think in English [Fodor]
We must have expressive power BEFORE we learn language [Fodor]
Belief and desire are structured states, which need mentalese [Fodor]
Animals may also use a language of thought [Rey]
We train children in truth, not in grammar [Rey]
Mentalese isn't a language, because it isn't conventional, or a means of public communication [Lowe]
Information-processing views of the brain assume the existence of 'information', and dubious brain codes [Edelman/Tononi]
Language of thought has subject/predicate form and includes logical devices [Margolis/Laurence]
The alternative to a language of thought is map-like or diagram-like thought [Bayne]