Introduction

In this chapter, I shall be examining an argument for the language of thought hypothesis – an argument which, in earlier work (Davies, 1992; see also 1991), I have called ‘Aunty's own argument for the language of thought’. That will be the business of sections 2–5. In the final section, I shall briefly mention some points of contact between this argument for the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis and the hypothesis that is the topic of Peter Carruthers' (1996a) book, which I shall call the ‘thinking in natural language’ (TNL) hypothesis. Before beginning on Aunty's own argument, however, I shall briefly present a framework for organising questions about the relative priority of thought and language.

Orders of priority

Should questions in the theory of thought – questions about intentionality, beliefs and concept possession, for example – be approached directly or, instead, indirectly via questions about language? Suppose that Kylie believes that kangaroos seldom kick, and expresses this thought in the English sentence: ‘Kangaroos seldom kick.’ Which takes priority, the meaning of the English sentence or the content of Kylie's thought?

A claim of priority is the converse of a claim of one-way dependence: X enjoys priority over Y if Y depends on X but X does not depend on Y. So, any question of the relative priority of X and Y has four possible answers: (i) X has priority; (ii) Y has priority; (iii) X and Y are mutually dependent (inter-dependent); (iv) X and Y are independent. But the question of the relative priority of thought and language is unclear until the relevant kind of priority has been specified.