The Language of Thought

In a compelling defense of the speculative approach to the philosophy of mind, Jerry Fodor argues that, while our best current theories of cognitive psychology view many higher processes as computational, computation itself presupposes an internal medium of representation. Fodor’s prime concerns are to buttress the notion of internal representation from a philosophical viewpoint, and to determine those characteristics of this conceptual construct using the empirical data available from linguistics and cognitive psychology.

Jerry A. Fodor is State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of "The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology" (MIT Press) and other books.