MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

left-handers and right-handers, or monolinguals and bilinguals.
These are all challenges for continued exploration
whose findings are shaping contemporary models of language
processing.
See also BILINGUALISM AND THE BRAIN; CORTICAL
LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF; GRAMMAR, NEURAL BASIS OF;
HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION; LEXICON, NEURAL BASIS;
SIGN LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN
—Nina F. Dronkers
References
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Language of Thought 451
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Further Readings
Benson, D. F., and A. Ardila. (1996). Aphasia: A Clinical Perspective.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Caplan, D. (1987). Neurolinguistics and Linguistic Aphasiology.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dronkers, N., and R. T. Knight. (Forthcoming). The neural architecture
of language disorders. In M. Gazzaniga, Ed., The Cognitive
Neurosciences.
Goodglass, H. (1993). Understanding Aphasia. San Diego: Academic
Press.
Stemmer, B., and H. Whitaker, Eds. (1998). Handbook of Neurolinguistics.
New York: Academic Press.
Language of Thought
The language of thought hypothesis is an idea, or family of
ideas, about the way we represent our world, and hence an
idea about how our behavior is to be explained. Humans are
marvelously flexible organisms. The commuter surviving
her daily trip to New York, the subsistence agriculturalist,
the inhabitant of a chaotic African state all thread their different
ways through the maze of their day. This ability to
adapt to a complex and changing world is grounded in our
mental capacities. We navigate our way through our social
and physical world by constructing an inner representation,
an inner map of that world, and we plot our course from that
inner map and from our representation of where we want to
get to. Our capacity for negotiating our complex and variable
environment is based on a representation of the world
as we take it to be, and a representation of the world as we
would like it to be. In the language of FOLK PSYCHOLOGY—
our everyday set of concepts for thinking about ourselves
and others—these are an agent’s beliefs and desires. Their
interaction explains action. Thus Truman ordered the bombing
of Japan because he wanted to end World War II as
quickly as possible, and he believed that bombing offered
his best chance of attaining that end.
We represent—think about—many features of our world.
We have opinions on politics, football, food, the best way to
bring up children, and much more. Our potential range of
opinion is richer still. You may not have had views on the
pleasures of eating opossum roadkills, but now that you are
prompted, you quickly will. This richness of our cognitive
range is important to the language of thought hypothesis. Its