Language of thought hypothesis

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_thought_hypothesis

The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), sometimes known as thought ordered mental expression (TOME), is a view in linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, put forward by American philosopher Jerry Fodor. It describes the nature of thought as possessing "language-like" or compositional structure (sometimes known as mentalese). On this view, simple concepts combine in systematic ways (akin to the rules of grammar in language) to build thoughts. In its most basic form, the theory states that thought, like language, has syntax.

Using empirical evidence drawn from linguistics and cognitive science to describe mental representation from a philosophical vantage-point, the hypothesis states that thinking takes place in a language of thought (LOT): cognition and cognitive processes are only 'remotely plausible' when expressed as a system of representations that is "tokened" by a linguistic or semantic structure and operated upon by means of a combinatorial syntax. Linguistic tokens used in mental language describe elementary concepts which are operated upon by logical rules establishing causal connections to allow for complex thought. Syntax as well as semantics have a causal effect on the properties of this system of mental representations.

These mental representations are not present in the brain in the same way as symbols are present on paper; rather, the LOT is supposed to exist at the cognitive level, the level of thoughts and concepts. The LOTH has wide-ranging significance for a number of domains in cognitive science. It relies on a version of functionalist materialism, which holds that mental representations are actualized and modified by the individual holding the propositional attitude, and it challenges eliminative materialism and connectionism. It implies a strongly rationalist model of cognition in which many of the fundamentals of cognition are innate.

Presentation

The hypothesis applies to thoughts that have propositional content, and is not meant to describe everything that goes on in the mind. It appeals to the representational theory of thought to explain what those tokens actually are and how they behave. There must be a mental representation that stands in some unique relationship with the subject of the representation and has specific content. Complex thoughts get their semantic content from the content of the basic thoughts and the relations that they hold to each other. Thoughts can only relate to each other in ways that do not violate the syntax of thought. The syntax by means of which these two sub-parts are combined can be expressed in first-order predicate calculus.

The thought "John is tall" is clearly composed of two sub-parts, the concept of John and the concept of tallness, combined in a manner that may be expressed in first-order predicate calculus as a predicate 'T' ("is tall") that holds of the entity 'j' (John). A fully articulated proposal for what a LOT would have to take into account greater complexities such as quantification and propositional attitudes (the various attitudes people can have towards statements; for example I might believe or see or merely suspect that John is tall).

Precepts

1. There can be no higher cognitive processes without mental representation. The only plausible psychological models represent higher cognitive processes as representational and computational thought needs a representational system as an object upon which to compute. We must therefore attribute a representational system to organisms for cognition and thought to occur.
2. There is causal relationship between our intentions and our actions. Because mental states are structured in a way that causes our intentions to manifest themselves by what we do, there is a connection between how we view the world and ourselves and what we do.

Reception

The language of thought hypothesis has been both controversial and groundbreaking. Some philosophers reject the LOTH, arguing that our public language is our mental language—a person who speaks English thinks in English. But others contend that complex thought is present even in those who do not possess a public language (e.g. babies, aphasics, and even higher-order primates), and therefore some form of mentalese must be innate. ^{[citation needed]}

The notion that mental states are causally efficacious diverges from behaviorists like Gilbert Ryle, who held that there is no break between mental state and behavior (as cause and effect). Rather, Ryle proposed that people act in some way because they are in a disposition to act in that way, that these causal mental states are representational. An objection to this point comes from John Searle in the form of biological naturalism, a non-representational theory of mind that accepts the causal efficacy of mental states. Searle divides intentional states into low-level brain activity and high-level mental activity. The lower-level, nonrepresentational neurophysiological processes have causal power in intention and behavior rather than some higher-level mental representation.

Tim Crane, in his book The Mechanical Mind, states that, while he agrees with Fodor, his reason is very different. A logical objection challenges LOTH’s explanation of how sentences in natural languages get their meaning. That is the view that “Snow is white” is TRUE if and only if P is TRUE in the LOT, where P means the same thing in LOT as “Snow is white” means in the natural language. Any symbol manipulation is in need of some way of deriving what those symbols mean. If the meaning of sentences is explained regarding sentences in the LOT, then the meaning of sentences in LOT must get their meaning from somewhere else. Thus there seems to be an infinite regress of sentences getting their meaning. Sentences in natural languages get their meaning from their users (speakers, writers). Therefore, sentences in mentalese must get their meaning from the way in which they are used by thinkers and so on ad infinitum. This regress is often called the homunculus regress.

Daniel Dennett accepts that homunculi may be explained by other homunculi and denies that this would yield an infinite regress of homunculi. Each explanatory homunculus is “stupider” or more basic than the homunculus it explains, but this regress is not infinite but bottoms out at a basic level that is so simple that it does not need interpretation. John Searle points out that it still follows that the bottom-level homunculi are manipulating some sorts of symbols.

LOTH implies that the mind has some tacit knowledge of the logical rules of inference and the linguistic rules of syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (concept or word meaning). If LOTH cannot show that the mind knows that it is following the particular set of rules in question, then the mind is not computational because it is not governed by computational rules. Also, the apparent incompleteness of this set of rules in explaining behavior is pointed out. Many conscious beings behave in ways that are contrary to the rules of logic. Yet this irrational behavior is not accounted for by any rules, showing that there is at least some behavior that does not act by this set of rules.

Another objection within representational theory of mind has to do with the relationship between propositional attitudes and representation. Dennett points out that a chess program can have the attitude of “wanting to get its queen out early,” without having representation or rule that explicitly states this. A multiplication program on a computer computes in the computer language of 1’s and 0’s, yielding representations that do not correspond with any propositional attitude.

Susan Schneider has recently developed a version of LOT that departs from Fodor's approach in numerous ways. In her book, The Language of Thought: a New Philosophical Direction, Schneider argues that Fodor's pessimism about the success of cognitive science is misguided, and she outlines an approach to LOT that integrates LOT with neuroscience. She also stresses that LOT is not wedded to the extreme view that all concepts are innate. She fashions a new theory of mental symbols, and a related two-tiered theory of concepts, in which a concept's nature is determined by its LOT symbol type and its meaning.

Connection to connectionism

Connectionism is an approach to artificial intelligence that often accepts a lot of the same theoretical framework that LOTH accepts, namely that mental states are computational and causally efficacious and very often that they are representational. However, connectionism stresses the possibility of thinking machines, most often realized as artificial neural networks, an inter-connectional set of nodes, and describes mental states as able to create memory by modifying the strength of these connections over time. Some popular types of neural networks are interpretations of units, and learning algorithm. "Units" can be interpreted as neurons or groups of neurons. A learning algorithm is such that, over time, a change in connection weight is possible, allowing networks to modify their connections. Connectionist neural networks are able to change over time via their activation. An activation is a numerical value that represents any aspect of a unit that a neural network has at any time. Activation spreading is the spreading or taking over of other over time of the activation to all other units connected to the activated unit.

Since connectionist models can change over time, supporters of connectionism claim that it can solve the problems that LOTH brings to classical AI. These problems are those that show that machines with a LOT syntactical framework very often are much better at solving problems and storing data than human minds, yet much worse at things that the human mind is quite adept at such as recognizing facial expressions and objects in photographs and understanding nuanced gestures. Fodor defends LOTH by arguing that a connectionist model is just some realization or implementation of the classical computational theory of mind and therein necessarily employs a symbol-manipulating LOT.

Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn use the notion of cognitive architecture in their defense. Cognitive architecture is the set of basic functions of an organism with representational input and output. They argue that it is a law of nature that cognitive capacities are productive, systematic and inferentially coherent—they have the ability to produce and understand sentences of a certain structure if they can understand one sentence of that structure. A cognitive model must have a cognitive architecture that explains these laws and properties in some way that is compatible with the scientific method. Fodor and Pylyshyn say that cognitive architecture can only explain the property of systematicity by appealing to a system of representations and that connectionism either employs a cognitive architecture of representations or else does not. If it does, then connectionism uses LOT. If it does not then it is empirically false.

Connectionists have responded to Fodor and Pylyshyn by denying that connectionism uses LOT, by denying that cognition is essentially a function that uses representational input and output or denying that systematicity is a law of nature that rests on representation. Some connectionists have developed implementational connectionist models that can generalize in a symbolic fashion by incorporating variables.

Empirical testing

Since LOTH came to be it has been empirically tested. Not all experiments have confirmed the hypothesis;

• In 1971, Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler tested Pylyshyn's particular hypothesis that all symbols are understood by the mind in virtue of their fundamental mathematical descriptions. Shepard and Metzler's experiment consisted of showing a group of subjects a 2-D line drawing of a 3-D object, and then that same object at some rotation. According to Shepard and Metzler, if Pylyshyn were correct, then the amount of time it took to identify the object as the same object would not depend on the degree of rotation of the object. Their finding that the time taken to recognize the object was proportional to its rotation contradicts this hypothesis.
• There may be a connection between prior knowledge of what relations hold between objects in the world and the time it takes subjects to recognize the same objects. For example, it is more likely that subjects will not recognize a hand that is rotated in such a way that it would be physically impossible for an actual hand.^{[citation needed]} It has since also been empirically tested and supported that the mind might better manipulate mathematical descriptions in topographical wholes. These findings have illuminated what the mind is not doing in terms of how it manipulates symbols.
• Certain deaf adults who neither have capability to learn a spoken language nor have access to a sign language, known as home signers, in fact communicate with both others like them and the outside world using gestures and self-created signing. Although they have no experience in language or how it works, they are able to conceptualize more than iconic words but move into the abstract, suggesting that they could understand that before creating a gesture to show it. Ildefonso, a homesigner who learned a main sign language at twenty-seven years of age, found that although his thinking became easier to communicate, he had lost his ability to communicate with other homesigners as well as recall how his thinking worked without language.
• Other studies that have been done to discover what thought processes could be non-lingual include a study done in 1969 by Berlin and Kay which indicated that the color spectrum was perceived the same no matter how many words a language had for different colors, and a study done in 1981 and fixed 1983 which alluded, that counterfactuals are processed at the same rate, ease of conveying through words notwithstanding.
• Maurits (2011) describes an experiment to measure the word order of the language of thought by the relative time needed to recall the verb, agent, and patient of an event. It turned out that the agent was recalled most quickly and the verb least quickly, leading to a conclusion of a subject–object–verb language of thought (SOVLOT). Surprisingly, some languages, e.g., Persian language, have this ordering form, meaning that the brain needs less energy to convert the concepts in this languages into the thought concepts.

Language ideology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_ideology

Language ideology (also known as linguistic ideology) is, within anthropology (especially linguistic anthropology), sociolinguistics, and cross-cultural studies, any set of beliefs about languages as they are used in their social worlds. Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices. Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are influenced by political and moral interests, and they are shaped in a cultural setting. When recognized and explored, language ideologies expose how the speakers' linguistic beliefs are linked to the broader social and cultural systems to which they belong, illustrating how the systems beget such beliefs. By doing so, language ideologies link implicit and explicit assumptions about a language or language in general to their social experience as well as their political and economic interests.

Applications and approaches

Definitions

Scholars have noted difficulty in attempting to delimit the scope, meaning, and applications of language ideology. Paul Kroskrity, a linguistic anthropologist, describes language ideology as a "cluster concept, consisting of a number of converging dimensions" with several "partially overlapping but analytically distinguishable layers of significance", and cites that in the existing scholarship on language ideology "there is no particular unity . . . no core literature, and a range of definitions." One of the broadest definitions is offered by Alan Rumsey, who describes language ideologies as "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world." This definition is seen by Kroskrity as unsatisfactory, however, because "it fails to problematize language ideological variation and therefore promotes an overly homogeneous view of language ideologies within a cultural group." Emphasizing the role of speakers' awareness in influencing language structure, Michael Silverstein defines linguistic ideologies as "sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use." Definitions that place greater emphasis on sociocultural factors include Shirley Heath's characterization of language ideologies as "self-evident ideas and objectives a group holds concerning roles of language in the social experiences of members as they contribute to the expression of the group", as well as Judith Irvine's definition of the concept as "the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests."

Critical vs. neutral approaches

The basic division in studies of language ideology is between neutral and critical approaches to ideology. In neutral approaches to language ideology, beliefs or ideas about a language are understood to be shaped by the cultural systems in which it is embedded, but no variation within or across these systems is identified. Often, a single ideology will be identified in such cases. Characterizations of language ideology as representative of one community or culture, such as those routinely documented in ethnographic research, are common examples of neutral approaches to language ideology.

Critical approaches to language ideology explore the capacity for language and linguistic ideologies to be used as strategies for maintaining social power and domination. They are described by Kathryn Woolard and Bambi Schieffelin as studies of "some aspects of representation and social cognition, with particular social origins or functional and formal characteristics." Although such studies are often noted for their discussions of language politics and the intersection between language and social class, the crucial difference between these approaches to language ideology and neutral understandings of the concept is that the former emphasize the existence of variability and contradiction both within and amongst ideologies, while the latter approach ideology as a conception on its own terms.

Areas of inquiry

Language use and structure

Many scholars have argued that ideology plays a role in shaping and influencing linguistic structures and speech forms. Michael Silverstein, for example, sees speakers' awareness of language and their rationalizations of its structure and use as critical factors that often shape the evolution of a language's structure. According to Silverstein, the ideologies speakers possess regarding language mediate the variation that occurs due to their imperfect and limited awareness of linguistic structures, resulting in the regularization of any variation that is rationalized by any sufficiently dominant or culturally widespread ideologies. This is demonstrated by such linguistic changes as the rejection of "he" as the generic pronoun in English, which coincided with the rise of the feminist movement in the second half of the twentieth century. In this instance, the accepted usage of the masculine pronoun as the generic form came to be understood as a linguistic symbol of patriarchal and male-dominated society, and the growing sentiment opposing these conditions motivated some speakers to stop using "he" as the generic pronoun in favor of the construction "he or she." This rejection of generic "he" was rationalized by the growing desire for gender equality and women's empowerment, which was sufficiently culturally prevalent to regularize the change.

Alan Rumsey also sees linguistic ideologies as playing a role in shaping the structure of a language, describing a circular process of reciprocal influence where a language's structure conditions the ideologies that affect it, which in turn reinforce and expand this structure, altering the language "in the name of making it more like itself." This process is exemplified by the excessive glottalization of consonants by bilingual speakers of moribund varieties of Xinca, who effectively altered the structure of this language in order to make it more distinct from Spanish. These speakers glottalized consonants in situations in places more competent speakers of Xinca would not because they were less familiar with the phonological rules of the language and also because they wished to distinguish themselves from the socially-dominant Spanish-speakers, who viewed glottalized consonants as "exotic."

Ethnography of speaking

Studies of "ways of speaking" within specific communities have been recognized as especially productive sites of research in language ideology. They often include a community's own theory of speech as a part of their ethnography, which allows for the documentation of explicit language ideologies on a community-wide level or in "the neutral sense of cultural conceptions." A study of language socialization practices in Dominica, for example, revealed that local notions of personhood, status, and authority are associated with the strategic usage of Patwa and English in the course of the adult-child interaction. The use of Patwa by children is largely forbidden by adults due to a perception that it inhibits the acquisition of English, thus restricting social mobility, which in turn has imbued Patwa with a significant measure of covert prestige and rendered it a powerful tool for children to utilize in order to defy authority. Thus there are many competing ideologies of Patwa in Dominica: one which encourages a shift away from Patwa usage and another which contributes to its maintenance.

Linguistic ideologies in speech act theory

J. L. Austin and John Searle's speech act theory has been described by several ethnographers, anthropologists, and linguists as being based in a specifically Western linguistic ideology that renders it inapplicable in certain ethnographic contexts. Jef Verschueren characterized speech act theory as privileging "a privatized view of language that emphasizes the psychological state of the speaker while downplaying the social consequences of speech," while Michael Silverstein argued that the theory's ideas about language "acts" and "forces" are "projections of covert categories typical in the metapragmatic discourse of languages such as English." Scholars have subsequently used speech act theory to caution against the positioning of linguistic theories as universally applicable, citing that any account of language will reflect the linguistic ideologies held by those who develop it.

Language contact and multilingualism

Several scholars have noted that sites of cultural contact promote the development of new linguistic forms that draw on diverse language varieties and ideologies at an accelerated rate. According to Miki Makihara and Bambi Schieffelin, it becomes necessary during times of cultural contact for speakers to actively negotiate language ideologies and to consciously reflect on language use. This articulation of ideology is essential to prevent misconceptions of meaning and intentions between cultures, and provides a link between sociocultural and linguistic processes in contact situations.

Language policy and standardization

The establishment of a standard language has many implications in the realms of politics and power. Recent examinations of language ideologies have resulted in the conception of "standard" as a matter of ideology rather than fact, raising questions such as "how doctrines of linguistic correctness and incorrectness are rationalized and how they are related to doctrines of the inherent representational power, beauty, and expressiveness of language as a valued mode of action.".

Language policy

Governmental policies often reflect the tension between two contrasting types of language ideologies: ideologies that conceive of language as a resource, problem, or right and ideologies that conceive of language as pluralistic phenomena. The linguistic policies that emerge in such instances often reflect a compromise between both types of ideologies. According to Blommaert and Verschueren, this compromise is often reinterpreted as a single, unified ideology, evidenced by the many European societies characterized by a language ideological homogenism.

Ideologies of linguistic purism

Purist language ideologies or ideologies of linguistic conservatism can close off languages to nonnative sources of innovation, usually when such sources are perceived as socially or politically threatening to the target language. Among the Tewa, for example, the influence of theocratic institutions and ritualized linguistic forms in other domains of Tewa society have led to a strong resistance to the extensive borrowing and shift that neighboring speech communities have experienced. According to Paul Kroskrity this is due to a "dominant language ideology" through which ceremonial Kiva speech is elevated to a linguistic ideal and the cultural preferences that it embodies, namely regulation by convention, indigenous purism, strict compartmentalization, and linguistic indexing of identity, are recursively projected onto the Tewa language as a whole.

Alexandra Jaffe points out that language purism is often part of "essentializing discourses" that can lead to stigmatizing habitual language practices like code-switching and depict contact-induced linguistic changes as forms of cultural deficiency.

Standard language ideology

Main article: Standard language

As defined by Rosina Lippi-Green, standard language ideology is "a bias toward an abstract, idealized homogeneous language, which is imposed and maintained by dominant institutions and which has as its model the written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper middle class." According to Lippi-Green, part of this ideology is a belief that standard languages are internally consistent. Linguists generally agree, however, that variation is intrinsic to all spoken language, including standard varieties.

Standard language ideology is strongly connected with the concepts of linguistic purism and prescriptivism. It is also linked with linguicism (linguistic discrimination).

Literacy

Literacy cannot be strictly defined technically, but rather it is a set of practices determined by a community's language ideology. It can be interpreted in many ways that are determined by political, social, and economic forces. According to Kathryn Woolard and Bambi Schieffelin, literacy traditions are closely linked to social control in most societies. The typical European literacy ideology, for example, recognizes literacy solely in an alphabetic capacity.

Kaluli literacy development

In the 1960s, missionaries arrived in Papua New Guinea and exposed the Kaluli to Christianity and modernization, part of which was accomplished through the introduction of literacy. The Kaluli primers that were introduced by the missionaries promoted Westernization, which effectively served to strip the vernacular language of cultural practices and from discourse in church and school. Readers written in the 1970s used derogatory terms to refer to the Kaluli and depicted their practices as inferior, motivating the Kaluli to change their self-perceptions and orient themselves towards Western values. The missionaries' control of these authoritative books and of this new "technology of language literacy" gave them the power to effect culture change and morph the ideology of Kaluli into that of modern Christianity.

Orthography

Orthographic systems always carry historical, cultural, and political meaning that are grounded in ideology. Orthographic debates are focused on political and social issues rather than on linguistic discrepancies, which can make for intense debates characterized by ideologically charged stances and symbolically important decisions.

Classroom practice/second language acquisition

"Language ideologies are not confined merely to ideas or beliefs, but rather is extended to include the very language practices through which our ideas or notions are enacted" (Razfar, 2005). Teachers display their language ideologies in classroom instruction through various practices such as correction or repair, affective alignment, metadiscourse, and narrative (see Razfar & Rumenapp, 2013, p. 289). The study of ideology seeks to uncover the hidden world of students and teachers to shed light on the fundamental forces that shape and give meaning to their actions and interactions.