ABSTRACT
Research into artificial intelligence has been directed towards developing computer programs whose operations mimic intelligent behaviour. Jerry Fodor has been influential in developing the notion of a “language of thought”—a system of language-like internal representations on whose syntactic features the procedural mechanisms of the brain operate. The eliminativists hope that it will eventually develop from the painstaking and gradual application of the “bottom-up” approach to an understanding of the mind, which begins by studying the basic machinery of the brain. The famous dualism of Descartes affirms that it must; consciousness and voluntary action are held to bear testimony to the existence of a nonphysical realm somehow related to the physical order. The suggestion of the central state materialists was that such explanations have their force because the mental attribution actually refers to certain states of the brain that produce the sheltering behaviour.
