The Language of Thought

By Jerry A. Fodor. 1975

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In Philosophy

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What can the brain teach us about building artificial intelligence? (2016, background): “set of primitives, just as the mind can think an innite number of thoughts, utter or understand an innite number of sentences, or learn new concepts from a seemingly innite space of possibilities (Fodor, 1975; Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Marcus, 2001; Piantadosi, 2011). Compositionality has been bro”
Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds (2008, unknown): “…school of thought in cognitive psychology has insisted for more than three decades that both human and nonhuman minds are the product of a physical symbol system (Fodor 1975; 1997; Fodor & McLaughlin 1990; Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988; Newell 1980; 1990; Newell & Simon 1976; Pinker & Prince 1988).”
What is the human language faculty?: Two views (2011, background): “In particular, it has been distinguished quite clearly from Fodor's (”
Thinking in Words: Language as an Embodied Medium of Thought (2014, background): “Classical non-embodied cognitive science has tended to view the symbolic nature of language as reflective of the computational properties of an underlying amodal representational system (Fodor, 1975).”
Bridging emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems modeling (2005, background): “The causality connecting these information processes can be characterized as cognitivist or computationalist, whereby a sequence of symbol manipulations computes an output for a predesignated problem (Fodor 1975; Putnam 1975).”
Discourse metaphors: The link between figurative language and habitual analogies (2007, background): “These bodies of encyclopaedic knowledge are broadly termed cognitive models, but they should not be thought of as representations written in a symbolic code, as a symbolic 'language of thought' (Fodor 1975).”
Integrating psychology and neuroscience: functional analyses as mechanism sketches (2011, background): “Why…should notthekindpredicates ofthespecial sciences cross-classify thephysicalnaturalkinds? ( Fodor 1975 , p . 25; see alsoFodor 1997, pp. 161‐162) We could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter (Putnam 1975, p. 291).”
Compositional Few-Shot Recognition with Primitive Discovery and Enhancing (2020, background): “vel to select and enhance the most effective ones, leading to a better interpretability. Compositional recognition is the recognition by primitives, and has been well studied in the cognitive science [6, 15, 26]. This concept has been applied to some domains: [40] points that the model will benefit ”
How to do things with slurs: Studies in the way of derogatory words (2013, background): “Expressive terms 4 Note that the terms concept and term are often used synonymously across the literature in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science, with “conceptual thought” being largely characterized as “language-like thought” (Schneider and Katz, 2011; see also Harman, 1973; Fodor, 1975)”
Grounding adaptive language games in robotic agents (2006, background): “Figure 3: The graph shows the evolution of the discriminatory capacities of a single agent. The total number of objects ( 10 ) is fixed.”
Predicting the Past from Minimal Traces: Episodic Memory and its Distinction from Imagination and Preservation (2020, background): “For an elaborate treatment of the semantics of remember see Liefke and Werning (2018, 2019). a Language-of-Thought (Fodor 1975) – concatenations of content bearing syntactic symbols (“Mentalese words”) – or even symbolic in a more abstract sense, as e.g. proposed by Vector Symbolic Architectures…”