Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (6):657-674 (2002)
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Abstract |
This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is _de facto_ the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include the view that language is necessary for the acquisition of many human concepts, and the view that language can serve to scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that language may be the medium of _conscious_ propositional thinking, but argues that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then proposed that natural language is the medium for non-domain-specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive ‘quasi-modules’). Recent experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed, and the implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of the architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. The overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and elaborate the most plausible candidate
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Keywords | Cognitive evolution conceptual module consciousness domain-general inner speech language logical form (LF) thought |
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DOI | 10.1017/s0140525x02000122 |
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References found in this work BETA
Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment.Richard E. Nisbett & Lee Ross - 1980 - Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA: Prentice-Hall.
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Citations of this work BETA
Neural Reuse: A Fundamental Organizational Principle of the Brain.Michael L. Anderson - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):245.
Darwin's Mistake: Explaining the Discontinuity Between Human and Nonhuman Minds.Derek C. Penn, Keith J. Holyoak & Daniel J. Povinelli - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (2):109-130.
How We Know Our Own Minds: The Relationship Between Mindreading and Metacognition.Peter Carruthers - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2):121-138.
Could Evolution Explain Our Reliability About Logic.Joshua Schechter - 2013 - In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4. pp. 214.
View all 126 citations / Add more citations
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