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The Language of Thought

Critica 10 (28):140-143 (1978)

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  1. Reasons and Entailment.Bart Streumer - 2007 - Erkenntnis 66 (3):353-374.
    What is the relation between entailment and reasons for belief? In this paper, I discuss several answers to this question, and I argue that these answers all face problems. I then propose the following answer: for all propositions p1,...,pn and q, if the conjunction of p1,..., and pn entails q, then there is a reason against a person's both believing that p1,..., and that pn and believing the negation of q. I argue that this answer avoids the problems that the (...)
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  • Organisations as Computing Systems.David Strohmaier - 2020 - Journal of Social Ontology 6 (2):211-236.
    Organisations are computing systems. The university’s sports centre is a computing system for managing sports teams and facilities. The tenure committee is a computing system for assigning tenure status. Despite an increasing number of publications in group ontology, the computational nature of organisations has not been recognised. The present paper is the first in this debate to propose a theory of organisations as groups structured for computing. I begin by describing the current situation in group ontology and by spelling out (...)
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  • Folk psychology: Simulation or tacit theory?Stephen Stich & Shaun Nichols - 1992 - Mind and Language 7 (1-2):35-71.
    A central goal of contemporary cognitive science is the explanation of cognitive abilities or capacities. [Cummins 1983] During the last three decades a wide range of cognitive capacities have been subjected to careful empirical scrutiny. The adult's ability to produce and comprehend natural language sentences and the child's capacity to acquire a natural language were among the first to be explored. [Chomsky 1965, Fodor, Bever & Garrett 1974, Pinker 1989] There is also a rich literature on the ability to solve (...)
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  • Folk Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory?Stephen Stich & Shaun Nichols - 1992 - Mind and Language 7 (1-2):35-71.
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  • Why reason? Hugo Mercier's and Dan Sperber's The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.Kim Sterelny - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (5):502-512.
    The standard view of the function of reason is that it emerged to enable individuals to make better judgements and choices. Once individuals could think better, and once we had suitable communicative tools, individual reasoning acquired a public face; we reasoned together as well as privately, in our own mind. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that this gets the story the wrong way around: reasoning evolved for public purposes: to persuade, negotiate, assess. Once it was established publically, perhaps it (...)
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  • Untangling the Knot of Intentionality: Between Directedness, Reference, and Content.Pierre Steiner - 2019 - Studia Semiotyczne 33 (1):83-104.
    The notion of “intentionality” is much invoked in various foundational theories of meaning, being very often equated with “meaning”, “content” and “reference”. In this paper, I propose and develop a basic distinction between two concepts and, more fundamentally, properties of intentionality: intentionality-T and intentionality-C. Representationalism is then defined as the position according to which intentionality-T can be reduced to intentionality-C, in the form of representational states. Nonrepresentationalism is rejecting this reduction, and argues that intentionality-T is more fundamental than intentionality-C. Non-representationalism (...)
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  • The imagery debate.Kim Sterelny - 1986 - Philosophy of Science 53 (December):560-83.
    One central debate in cognitive science is over imagery. Do images constitute, or constitute evidence for, a distinctive, depictive form of mental representation? The most sophisticated advocacy of this view has been developed by Kosslyn and his coworkers. This paper focuses on his position and argues (i) that though Kosslyn has not developed a satisfactory account of depiction, there is nothing in principle unintelligible about the idea of depictive neural representation, but (ii) Kosslyn's model of imagery rescues the intelligibility of (...)
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  • Stage models of mental processing and the additive-factor method.Saul Sternberg - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (1):82-84.
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  • Supermachines and superminds.Eric Steinhart - 2003 - Minds and Machines 13 (1):155-186.
    If the computational theory of mind is right, then minds are realized by machines. There is an ordered complexity hierarchy of machines. Some finite machines realize finitely complex minds; some Turing machines realize potentially infinitely complex minds. There are many logically possible machines whose powers exceed the Church–Turing limit (e.g. accelerating Turing machines). Some of these supermachines realize superminds. Superminds perform cognitive supertasks. Their thoughts are formed in infinitary languages. They perceive and manipulate the infinite detail of fractal objects. They (...)
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  • Radical constructivism in biology and cognitive science.John Stewart - 2001 - Foundations of Science 6 (1-3):99-124.
    This article addresses the issue of objectivism vs constructivism in two areas,biology and cognitive science, which areintermediate between the natural sciences suchas physics (where objectivism is dominant) andthe human and social sciences (whereconstructivism is widespread). The issues inbiology and in cognitive science are intimatelyrelated; in each of these twin areas, the objectivism vs constructivism issue isinterestingly and rather evenly balanced; as aresult, this issue engenders two contrastingparadigms, each of which has substantialspecific scientific content. The neo-Darwinianparadigm in biology is closely resonant (...)
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  • Quel Arrière-plan pour l'esprit?Pierre Steiner - 2006 - Dialogue 45 (3):419-444.
    This article analyzes the notion of background capacities as developed by John Searle during the last twenty years in philosophy of mind. Broadly construed, this notion designates non-representational mental capacities as the means by which mental representations are given a precise semantic content and thus are able to be expressed. Though novel and relevant, I intend to show that, according to Searle's description, this notion proves inadequate to attain its descriptive and explicative goals. I go on to regard background capacities (...)
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  • Operant analysis of problem solving: Answers to questions you probably don't want to ask.Robert J. Sternberg - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):605-605.
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  • Mental representation: What language is brainese?Kim Sterelny - 1983 - Philosophical Studies 43 (May):365-82.
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  • Models of memory: Wittgenstein and cognitive science.David G. Stern - 1991 - Philosophical Psychology 4 (2):203-18.
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  • Fodor's nativism.Kim Sterelny - 1989 - Philosophical Studies 55 (February):119-41.
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  • From folk psychology to cognitive science.Kim Sterelny - 1985 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63 (4):510 – 519.
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  • Davidson on truth and reference.Kim Sterelny - 1981 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 19 (1):95-116.
    Davidson argues against the view that a theory of truth consists of two parts (a) a (reductive) theory of reference for the primitive terms of the language, And (b) a theory of how the semantics of complex expressions depends on the semantics of simple expressions. In this paper I argue that 1) davidson's case against reductive theories of reference fails: theories of reference of the sort defended by (e.G.,) causal theorists are possible, And 2) davidson's attempts to defend the centrality (...)
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  • Davidson on Truth and Reference.Kim Sterelny - 1981 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 19 (1):95-116.
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  • Connectionist Sentence Processing in Perspective.Mark Steedman - 1999 - Cognitive Science 23 (4):615-634.
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  • Can a reductionist be a pluralist?Daniel Steel - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (1):55-73.
    Pluralism is often put forth as a counter-position to reductionism. In this essay, I argue that reductionism and pluralism are in fact consistent. I propose that there are several potential goals for reductions and that the proper form of a reduction should be considered in tandem with the goal that it aims to achieve. This insight provides a basis for clarifying what version of reductionism are currently defended, for explicating the notion of a fundamental level of explanation, and for showing (...)
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  • Species, languages, and the horizontal/vertical distinction.David N. Stamos - 2002 - Biology and Philosophy 17 (2):171-198.
    In addition to the distinction between species as a category and speciesas a taxon, the word species is ambiguous in a very different butequally important way, namely the temporal distinction between horizontal andvertical species. Although often found in the relevant literature, thisdistinction has thus far remained vague and undefined. In this paper the use ofthe distinction is explored, an attempt is made to clarify and define it, andthen the relation between the two dimensions and the implications of thatrelation are examined. (...)
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  • Rule-governed behavior in computational psychology.Edward P. Stabler - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):604-605.
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  • Can affordances be reasons?Tobias Starzak & Tobias Schlicht - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    We discuss whether affordances can be reasons, against the background of two interlocked considerations: (1) While the problematic degree of idealization in accounts of reasons that treat them as mental states speaks in favor of the alternative view which treats them as facts, a cognitive consideration relationship is still required to account for the motivating role of reasons. (2) While recent enactive accounts of cognition hold promise to avoid over-intellectualization of acting for reasons, these are so far either underdeveloped or (...)
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  • Buffon, Darwin, and the non-individuality of species – a reply to Jean Gayon.David N. Stamos - 1998 - Biology and Philosophy 13 (3):443-470.
    Gayon's recent claim that Buffon developed a concept of species as physical individuals is critically examined and rejected. Also critically examined and rejected is Gayon's more central thesis that as a consequence of his analysis of Buffon's species concept, and also of Darwin's species concept, it is clear that modern evolutionary theory does not require species to be physical individuals. While I agree with Gayon's conclusion that modern evolutionary theory does not require species to be physical individuals, I disagree with (...)
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  • The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction, by Susan Schneider.Mark Sprevak - 2019 - Mind 128 (510):555-564.
    The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction, by SchneiderSusan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 259.
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  • Chinese Rooms and Program Portability.Mark D. Sprevak - 2007 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (4):755-776.
    I argue in this article that there is a mistake in Searle's Chinese room argument that has not received sufficient attention. The mistake stems from Searle's use of the Church-Turing thesis. Searle assumes that the Church-Turing thesis licences the assumption that the Chinese room can run any program. I argue that it does not, and that this assumption is false. A number of possible objections are considered and rejected. My conclusion is that it is consistent with Searle's argument to hold (...)
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  • Core knowledge, language learning, and the origins of morality and pedagogy: Reply to reviews of What babies know.Elizabeth S. Spelke - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (5):1336-1350.
    The astute reviews by Hamlin and by Revencu and Csibra provide compelling arguments and evidence for the early emergence of moral evaluation, communication, and pedagogical learning. I accept these conclusions but not the reviewers' claims that infants' talents in these domains depend on core systems of moral evaluation or pedagogical communication. Instead, I suggest that core knowledge of people as agents and as social beings, together with infants' emerging understanding of their native language, support learning about people as moral agents, (...)
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  • Seizing the Hedgehog by the Tail: Taylor on the Self and Agency.Ronald De Sousa - 1988 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (3):421 - 432.
    For those of us who are sympathetic to the research program of cognitive science, it is especially useful to face the deepest and sharpest critic of that program. Charles Taylor, who defines himself as a ‘hedgehog’ whose ‘single rather tightly related agenda’ fits into a very ancient and rather elusive debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism, may well be that critic. My ambition in this paper is to distill Taylor’s central objection to the cognitive science approach to agency and the self (...)
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  • In Defence of a Structural Account of Indirect Realism.Michael Sollberger - 2013 - European Journal of Philosophy 23 (4):815-837.
    Current orthodoxy in the philosophy of perception views indirect realism as misguided, wrongheaded or simply outdated. The reasons for its pariah status are variegated. Although it is surely not unreasonable to speculate that philosophical fashion is one factor that contributes to this situation, there are also solid philosophical arguments which put pressure on the indirect realist position. In this paper, I will discuss one such main objection and show how the indirect realist can face it. The upshot will be a (...)
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  • Evidence for the embodiment of the automatic approach bias.Johannes Solzbacher, Artur Czeszumski, Sven Walter & Peter König - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    Tendencies of approach and avoidance seem to be a universal characteristic of humans. Specifically, individuals are faster in avoiding than in approaching negative stimuli and they are faster in approaching than in avoiding positive stimuli. The existence of this automatic approach-avoidance bias has been demonstrated in many studies. Furthermore, this bias is thought to play a key role in psychiatric disorders like drug addiction and phobias. However, its mechanisms are far from clear. Theories of embodied cognition postulate that the nature (...)
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  • The multiple realizability argument against reductionism.Elliott Sober - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (4):542-564.
    Reductionism is often understood to include two theses: (1) every singular occurrence that the special sciences can explain also can be explained by physics; (2) every law in a higher-level science can be explained by physics. These claims are widely supposed to have been refuted by the multiple realizability argument, formulated by Putnam (1967, 1975) and Fodor (1968, 1975). The present paper criticizes the argument and identifies a reductionistic thesis that follows from one of the argument's premises.
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  • Two outbreaks of lawlessness in recent philosophy of biology.Elliott Sober - 1997 - Philosophy of Science 64 (4):467.
    John Beatty (1995) and Alexander Rosenberg (1994) have argued against the claim that there are laws in biology. Beatty's main reason is that evolution is a process full of contingency, but he also takes the existence of relative significance controversies in biology and the popularity of pluralistic approaches to a variety of evolutionary questions to be evidence for biology's lawlessness. Rosenberg's main argument appeals to the idea that biological properties supervene on large numbers of physical properties, but he also develops (...)
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  • The evolution of rationality.Elliott Sober - 1981 - Synthese 46 (January):95-120.
    How could the fundamental mental operations which facilitate scientific theorizing be the product of natural selection, since it appears that such theoretical methods were neither used nor useful "in the cave"-i.e., in the sequence of environments in which selection took place? And if these wired-in information processing techniques were not selected for, how can we view rationality as an adaptation? It will be the purpose of this paper to address such questions as these, and in the process to sketch some (...)
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  • Parsimony and predictive equivalence.Elliott Sober - 1996 - Erkenntnis 44 (2):167 - 197.
    If a parsimony criterion may be used to choose between theories that make different predictions, may the same criterion be used to choose between theories that are predictively equivalent? The work of the statistician H. Akaike (1973) is discussed in connection with this question. The results are applied to two examples in which parsimony has been invoked to choose between philosophical theories-Shoemaker's (1969) discussion of the possibility of time without change and the discussion by Smart (1959) and Brandt and Kim (...)
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  • Panglossian functionalism and the philosophy of mind.Elliott Sober - 1985 - Synthese 64 (August):165-93.
    I want to explore what happens to two philosophical issues when we assume that the mind, a functional device, is to be understood by the same sort of functional analysis that guides biological investigation of other organismic systems and characteristics. The first problem area concerns the concept of rationality, its connection with reliability and reproductive success, and the status of rationality hypotheses in attribution of beliefs. It has been argued that ascribing beliefs to someone requires the assumption that that person (...)
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  • Physicalism from a Probabilistic Point of View.Elliott Sober - 1999 - Philosophical Studies 95 (1-2):135-174.
    In what follows, I’ll discuss both the metaphysics and the epistemology of supervenience from a probabilistic point of view. The first half of this paper will explore how supervenience claims are related to other issues; these will include the thesis that physics is causally complete, the claim that there are emergent properties, the idea that mental properties are causally efficacious, and the notion that there are scientific laws about supervenient properties that generalize over systems that deploy different physical realizations of (...)
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  • Language and psychological reality: Some reflections on Chomsky's rules and representations. [REVIEW]Elliott Sober - 1979 - Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (3):395 - 405.
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  • Fodor’s B ubbe Meise Against Darwinism.Elliott Sober - 2008 - Mind and Language 23 (1):42-49.
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  • Linguistics and psychology.Scott Soames - 1984 - Linguistics and Philosophy 7 (2):155 - 179.
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  • The remembered present: A biological theory of consciousness.Stephen W. Smoliar - 1991 - Artificial Intelligence 52 (3):295-318.
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  • On the proper treatment of connectionism.Paul Smolensky - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1):1-23.
    A set of hypotheses is formulated for a connectionist approach to cognitive modeling. These hypotheses are shown to be incompatible with the hypotheses underlying traditional cognitive models. The connectionist models considered are massively parallel numerical computational systems that are a kind of continuous dynamical system. The numerical variables in the system correspond semantically to fine-grained features below the level of the concepts consciously used to describe the task domain. The level of analysis is intermediate between those of symbolic cognitive models (...)
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  • Three facets of consciousness.David Woodruff Smith - 2001 - Axiomathes 12 (1-2):55-85.
    Over the past century phenomenology has ably analyzed the basic structuresof consciousness as we experience it. Yet recent philosophy of mind, lookingto brain activity and computational function, has found it difficult to makeroom for the structures of subjectivity and intentionality that phenomenologyhas appraised. In order to understand consciousness as something that is bothsubjective and grounded in neural activity, we need to delve into phenomenologyand ontology. I draw a fundamental distinction in ontology among the form,appearance, and substrate of any entity. Applying (...)
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  • Representation and knowledge are not the same thing.Leslie Smith - 1999 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5):784-785.
    Two standard epistemological accounts are conflated in Dienes & Perner's account of knowledge, and this conflation requires the rejection of their four conditions of knowledge. Because their four metarepresentations applied to the explicit-implicit distinction are paired with these conditions, it follows by modus tollens that if the latter are inadequate, then so are the former. Quite simply, their account misses the link between true reasoning and knowledge.
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  • Rethinking folk-psychology: Alternatives to theories of mind.Marc Slors & Cynthia Macdonald - 2008 - Philosophical Explorations 11 (3):153 – 161.
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  • The tripartite model of representation.Peter Slezak - 2002 - Philosophical Psychology 15 (3):239-270.
    Robert Cummins [(1996) Representations, targets and attitudes, Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT, p. 1] has characterized the vexed problem of mental representation as "the topic in the philosophy of mind for some time now." This remark is something of an understatement. The same topic was central to the famous controversy between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld in the 17th century and remained central to the entire philosophical tradition of "ideas" in the writings of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid and Kant. However, the scholarly, (...)
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  • Language and psychological reality: A discussion of Rudolf Botha's study.Peter Slezak - 1981 - Synthese 49 (December):427-439.
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  • Descartes's diagonal deduction.Peter Slezak - 1983 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 34 (March):13-36.
    I OFFER AN ANALYSIS OF DESCARTES'S COGITO WHICH IS RADICALLY NOVEL WHILE INCORPORATING MUCH AVAILABLE INSIGHT. BY ENLARGING FOCUS FROM THE DICTUM ITSELF TO THE REASONING OF DOUBT, DREAMING AND DEMON, I DEMONSTRATE A CLOSE PARALLEL TO THE LOGIC OF THE LIAR PARADOX. THIS HELPS TO EXPLAIN FAMILIAR PARADOXICAL FEATURES OF DESCARTES'S ARGUMENT. THE ACCOUNT PROVES TO BE TEXTUALLY ELEGANT AND, MOREOVER, HAS CONSIDERABLE INDEPENDENT PHILOSOPHICAL PLAUSIBILITY AS AN ACCOUNT OF MIND AND SELF.
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  • Embodied targets, or the origins of mind-tools.Jan Slaby, Graham Katz, Kai-Uwe Kühnberger & Achim Stephan - 2006 - Philosophical Psychology 19 (1):103 – 118.
    Philosophy of Mental Representation Hugh Clapin (Ed.)Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002332 pages, ISBN: 0198250525 (pbk); $35.00In the cognitive science era, in which philosophers frequ...
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  • On Content Uniformity for Beliefs and Desires.Daniel Skibra - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (2):279-309.
    The view that dominates the literature on intentional attitudes holds that beliefs and desires both have propositional content. A commitment to what I call “content uniformity” underlies this view. According to content uniformity, beliefs and desires are but different psychological modes having a uniform kind of content. Prima facie, the modes don’t place any constraint on the kinds of content the attitude can have. I challenge this consensus by pointing out an asymmetry between belief contents and desire contents which shows (...)
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  • La versión débil de la hipótesis del pensamiento en lenguaje natural.Liza Skidelsky - 2009 - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 24 (1):83-104.
    Entre los filósofos que consideran que pensamos utilizando representaciones simbólicas, P. Carruthers ha defendido, versus la hipótesis del ‘lenguaje del pensamiento’ (LDP), una versión débil de la hipótesis del ‘pensamiento en lenguaje natural’ (PLN). En este trabajo, me ocuparé, en primer lugar, de mostrar las razones por las cuales Carruthers, en su defensa de la hipótesis débil del PLN, siembra cierta confusión en la polémica entre el LDP y PLN. En segundo lugar, intentaré esbozar una salida de esta confusión, ofreciendo (...)
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