ABSTRACT
As Quilty-Dunn et al. observe, the language-of-thought hypothesis (LoTH) has fallen out of favor in philosophy. I will support the arguments made for its rehabilitation by Quilty-Dunn et al. by reviewing old, but still potent arguments for LoTH, and briefly criticizing recent proposed alternatives to LoT, such as Frances Egan's deflationism and Eric Schwitzgebel's dispositionalism, revealing inadequacies in such antirepresentational, antisyntactic theories.
Subject(s)
Cognitive Science , Language , HumansABSTRACT
I raise a consideration complementary to those raised in the target article. Many of the most widely cited studies on decision making involve introspection in degraded conditions, namely, conditions in which agents have no reason for the decisions they reach. But the fact that confabulation occurs in degraded conditions does not impugn the reliability of introspection in non-degraded conditions, that is, in cases in which a subject actually does make a choice for a reason.