Oct 10, 2023 06:27 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 10, 2023 07:27 PM by C C.)
https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/does-thoug...n-language
INTRO: How do our ideas, perceptions and emotions take form to produce a thought? To answer this question, researchers and philosophers are investigating the hypothesis of a specific language of thought. The psycholinguist Isabelle Dautriche offers a few explanations.
EXCERPTS: You participated in the LoT 2023 workshop devoted to the ‘Hypothesis of the language of thought’, held in Nantes, in western France, on 11-13 July. What exactly does this hypothesis entail?
Isabelle Dautriche: The theory emerged as a result of more fundamental research on thought: what is the format for thinking? How do our ideas connect and produce meaning? It is all the more difficult to answer these questions since our thoughts seem spontaneously evanescent and elusive.
In order to study them and conduct experiments, it’s important to have a better idea of their form and intrinsic nature. Researchers in philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences have postulated that thought has a structure analogous to that of language. Just as the latter uses words and sentences to express meaning, it would be a combinatory system based on symbols and rules to represent and manipulate mental content.
This is what is called the ‘language of thought’ (LoT) hypothesis. The challenge is to determine the strengths and limitations of this conjecture, and whether it sheds light on the workings of the human mind.
[...] Other than words, what kind of mental representations does our thinking process use?
I. D.: That remains a mystery. We can surmise that it deals with concepts, intuitions, images and other types of sensory representations (sounds, sensations, etc.). However, it is presumed that thought must use certain forms of categorisation.
If I think of ‘a house’, for example, the concept usually conjures up images of ‘roof’, ‘doors’, ‘windows’… And conversely, that of ‘dwelling’ can include the notion of ‘house’, but also ‘flat’, ‘rental’, ‘property’, etc. It appears that thought creates sets and subsets, with various levels of generality and specificity, in order to define the concepts that it wields. This aspect is the easiest to understand, because it corresponds to our use of language.
The ability to feel an emotional response while viewing an artwork or listening to music is a capacity that has yet to be explained.
Nevertheless, some brain activities seem to mobilise a different, ‘non-symbolic’ type of mental representation. This is the case, for example, with everything concerning spatial orientation: locating the top or the bottom, evaluating a distance, etc. Then there’s the question of sensations and emotions: when you look at a painting or listen to music, you feel something more than just perception.
Philosophers of mind call this ‘qualia’. A better understanding of the nature and role of these mental representations is one of the points to be explored... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: How do our ideas, perceptions and emotions take form to produce a thought? To answer this question, researchers and philosophers are investigating the hypothesis of a specific language of thought. The psycholinguist Isabelle Dautriche offers a few explanations.
EXCERPTS: You participated in the LoT 2023 workshop devoted to the ‘Hypothesis of the language of thought’, held in Nantes, in western France, on 11-13 July. What exactly does this hypothesis entail?
Isabelle Dautriche: The theory emerged as a result of more fundamental research on thought: what is the format for thinking? How do our ideas connect and produce meaning? It is all the more difficult to answer these questions since our thoughts seem spontaneously evanescent and elusive.
In order to study them and conduct experiments, it’s important to have a better idea of their form and intrinsic nature. Researchers in philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences have postulated that thought has a structure analogous to that of language. Just as the latter uses words and sentences to express meaning, it would be a combinatory system based on symbols and rules to represent and manipulate mental content.
This is what is called the ‘language of thought’ (LoT) hypothesis. The challenge is to determine the strengths and limitations of this conjecture, and whether it sheds light on the workings of the human mind.
[...] Other than words, what kind of mental representations does our thinking process use?
I. D.: That remains a mystery. We can surmise that it deals with concepts, intuitions, images and other types of sensory representations (sounds, sensations, etc.). However, it is presumed that thought must use certain forms of categorisation.
If I think of ‘a house’, for example, the concept usually conjures up images of ‘roof’, ‘doors’, ‘windows’… And conversely, that of ‘dwelling’ can include the notion of ‘house’, but also ‘flat’, ‘rental’, ‘property’, etc. It appears that thought creates sets and subsets, with various levels of generality and specificity, in order to define the concepts that it wields. This aspect is the easiest to understand, because it corresponds to our use of language.
The ability to feel an emotional response while viewing an artwork or listening to music is a capacity that has yet to be explained.
Nevertheless, some brain activities seem to mobilise a different, ‘non-symbolic’ type of mental representation. This is the case, for example, with everything concerning spatial orientation: locating the top or the bottom, evaluating a distance, etc. Then there’s the question of sensations and emotions: when you look at a painting or listen to music, you feel something more than just perception.
Philosophers of mind call this ‘qualia’. A better understanding of the nature and role of these mental representations is one of the points to be explored... (MORE - missing details)
