---
abstract: 'The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking.'
altloc:
- http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/aydede/LOTH.SEP.html
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creators_name:
- family: Aydede
given: Murat
honourific: ''
lineage: ''
date: 1998-01
date_type: published
datestamp: 1998-07-14
department: ~
dir: disk0/00/00/03/53
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eprint_status: archive
eprintid: 353
fileinfo: /style/images/fileicons/text_html.png;/353/1/LOTH.SEP.html
full_text_status: public
importid: ~
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isbn: ~
ispublished: unpub
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item_issues_comment: []
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keywords: 'Thinking, computation, syntax, language of thought, representation, naturalism, intentionality, connectionism, systematiciy, productivity, folk psychology, nativism'
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:53:51
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longitude: ~
metadata_visibility: show
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pubdom: FALSE
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reportno: ~
rev_number: 8
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status_changed: 2007-09-12 16:26:53
subjects:
- cog-psy
- comp-sci-art-intel
- phil-lang
- phil-mind
- phil-mind
- phil-sci
succeeds: ~
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thesistype: ~
title: 'Language of Thought Hypothesis: State of the Art'
type: preprint
userid: 369
volume: ~