ABSTRACT
The idea that there is a LOT was developed by Jerry Fodor, who defended this hypothesis in an inuential book, The Language of Thought (1975). As Fodor has emphasized, the LOT hypothesis was inspired by the ideas of Alan Turing, who dened computation in terms of the formal manipulation of uninterpreted symbols according to algorithms (Turing 1950; Fodor 1994). In his “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing had introduced the idea that symbol-processing devices can think, a view which many in cognitive science are sympathetic to, yet which has also been the focus of great controversy (e.g., Searle 1980; Dreyfus 1992). The symbolprocessing view of cognition was very much in the air during the time in which the LOT hypothesis was developed. Around the same time that The Language of Thought came out, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon suggested that psychological states could be understood in terms of an internal architecture that was like a digital computer (Newell and Simon 1972). Human psychological processes were said to consist of a system of discrete inner states (symbols) which are manipulated by a central processing unit (or CPU). Sensory states served as inputs to the system, providing the “data” for processing according to the rules, and motor operations served as outputs. This view, called “classicism,” was the paradigm in the elds of articial intelligence, computer science, and information-processing psychology until the 1980s, when the competing connectionist view also gained support. LOT, as a species of classicism, grew out of this general trend in information-processing psychology to see the mind as a symbolprocessing device. Now let us turn to a more detailed discussion of the LOT hypothesis. In essence, the LOT position consists in the following claims:
1. Cognitive processes consist in causal sequences of tokenings of internal representations in the brain.
