ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate a prima facie tension between our common sense conception of ourselves as thinkers and the connectionist programme for modeling cognitive processes. The language of thought hypothesis plays a pivotal role. The connectionist paradigm is opposed to the language of thought; and there is an argument for the language of thought that draws on features of the common sense scheme of thoughts, concepts, and inference. Most of the chapter is taken up with the argument for the language of thought hypothesis. The argument for an opposition between connectionism and the language of thought comes towards the end, along with some discussion of the potential eliminativist consequences.
