Abstract

Since Jerry Fodor's classic discussion in The Language of Thought, the notion of inner discourse has played an important role in debates about the philosophy of mind. Philosophers argue that in order to explain the productive, systematic nature of thought and to provide a naturalistic framework for the understanding of the subset of mental processes constituted by propositional attitudes, we need to postulate an inner system of mental representations. This system is characterized by a combinatorial syntax and semantics such that complex representations can be explained in terms of the semantic content of their constituents together with their syntactic structures. As Panaccio notes, the language of thought hypothesis helps to explain why we suppose that different spoken languages can capture the same thought, while introducing the counterintuitive notion of a language common to all which is not a language of communication, and whose parts are mental without being accessible to introspection.