ABSTRACT
The “Language of Thought” (“LOT”) hypothesis (“LOTH”) is the hypothesis that thinking involves states that have (semantically valuable) logico-syntactic constituents that are causally available to the thinker. 1 It has been advanced in recent decades largely as an empirical hypothesis about the character of much human cognition. While this kind of defense of that hypothesis is perfectly reasonable and, I think, very promising, it has the unfortunate side-effect of inviting philosophers to regard the hypothesis as “merely empirical,” a kind of Rube-Goldberg conjecture showing (perhaps contrary to Descartes) how a material mind conceivably might work, but not a serious hypothesis about how one actually does (much less must) work. Questions of this latter sort are the business of (“mere”) psychologists and computer scientists, not philosophers.
