ABSTRACT
According to the language-of-thought (LOT) hypothesis, conceptual thinking occurs in an internal language-like representational medium. The LOT program and the connectionist program are often viewed as competing theories of the format, or representational medium, of thought. The most important rationale for LOT derives from the following observation: any empirically adequate cognitive theory must hold that cognitive operations are sensitive to the constituent structure of complex sentence-like representations. LOT can be regarded as an innate cognitive capacity, because, according to the proponent of LOT, any sophisticated language-like computational system requires an internal language that has primitive vocabulary items obeying rules enabling the language to be systematic, productive, and compositional. Proponents of LOT should instead seek to provide detail concerning the nature of the central systems, in order to understand the nature of symbolic processing, including, especially, what the algorithms are that symbolic systems compute.
