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In this chapter, I shall be examining an argument for the language of thought hypothesis.

One of Ockham's fundamental tenets about the human intellect is that its acts constitute a mental language. Although this language of thought shares some of the features of conventional language, thought is commonly considered as prior to conventional language. This paper tries to show that this consensus is seriously challenged in Ockham's early writings. I shall argue that, in claiming the priority of conventional language over mental language, Ockham established a novel explanation of the systematicity of thought—an explanation which anticipates the idea that thought becomes systematic through the acquisition of conventional language.

The Language of Thought Hypothesis is often taken to have the fatal flaw that it generates an explanatory regress. The language of thought is invoked to explain certain features of natural language (e.g., that it is learned, understood, and is meaningful), but, according to the regress argument, the language of thought itself has these same features and hence no explanatory progress has been made. We argue that such arguments rely on the tacit assumption that the entire motivation for the language of thought consists in explaining the explanandum that allegedly generates the regress. But this tacit assumption is simply false. The Language of Thought Hypothesis is a cogent view and one with considerable explanatory advantages.

The sceptical problem of Kripkenstein pertains to both the notions of content of thought and linguistic meaning in such a way that if the sceptical solution allowed us to conclude that language is essentially public, then we should also be able to conclude that thought is essentially public. But, when addressing the question of the way in which one could, under this hypothesis, reach the conclusion that thought is essentially public, there would seem to be two possible types of answers. The first one is that this follows from the fact that language is a necessary condition of thought, thus: there is no thought without language, but there can be no language without there being more than one speaker, hence there can be no thought without there being more than one thinker. The second answer (which does not exclude the first) is that we should then be able to formulate a version of the sceptical solution which applies directly to the question of knowing under which conditions one is justified in judging that someone has a certain thought, and that that thought is correct. But if an answer of this second type were possible, it would perhaps no longer be necessary to rely on the sceptical solution in order to conclude that language is public, for in all likelihood, this conclusion would follow from the fact that thought is public, together with the idea that thought is a necessary condition of language, thus: there is no language without thought, but there can be no thought without there being more than one thinker, hence there can be no language without there being more than one speaker. Hence, there seems to be at least three different ways in which one could try to reach the two desired conclusions. However, the foregoing remarks hide a few difficulties that can partly be disclosed by stating more precisely what the publicity of language and thought is supposed to consists in.

I offer a synoptic account of some chief parameters of language and its relationship to communication and to thought, distinguishing in the process between semantical and pragmatic dimensions of utterance.

I clarify in what sense one might want to claim that thought or language are public. I distinguish among four forms that each of these claims might take, and two general ways of establishing them that might be contemplated. The first infers the public character of thought from the public character of language, and the second infers the latter from the former. I show that neither of these stategies seems to be able to dispense with the claim that thought and language are interdependent, and that the second strategy raises more difficulties than the first. I then examine the reasoning by which Davidson means to establish that thought depends on language. I claim that this reasoning is not conclusive, and that it can be adapted in such a way as to establish aversion of the thesis that thought is public which does not presuppose that language is public, and aversion of the thesis that language is public which does not imply that thought depends on language. I conclude with the suggestion that despite appearances to the contrary Davidson’s doctrine is defensible only if it implies at least the conceivability of intentional systems that would lack language altogether.

This paper discusses an "expressive constraint" on accounts of thought and language which requires that when a speaker expresses a belief by sincerely uttering a sentence, the utterance and the belief have the same content. It will be argued that this constraint should be viewed as expressing a conceptual connection between thought and language rather than a mere empirical generalization about the two. However, the most obvious accounts of the relation between thought and language compatible with the constraint (giving an independent account of one of either linguistic meaning or thought content and understanding the other in terms of it) both face serious difficulties. Because of this, the following will suggest an alternative picture of the relation between thought and language that remains compatible with the constraint.

This third Companion To Ancient Thought is devoted to ancient theories of language. The chapters range over more than eight hundred years of philosophical enquiry, and provide critical analyses of all the principal accounts of how it is that language can have meaning and how we can come to acquire linguistic understanding. The discussions move from the naturalism examined in Plato's Cratylus to the sophisticated theories of the Hellenistic schools and the work of St Augustine. The relations between thought about language and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and the development of grammar are also explored.