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Thought and Natural Language : Part I

Thought and Natural Language : Part I. Joe Lau HKU. Issues. Relationships between natural language and thoughts. What are natural languages? What is thinking? Do we think in a natural language? Can we think without language?. What is thinking?. Some features of thoughts

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Thought and Natural Language : Part I

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  1. Thought and Natural Language : Part I Joe Lau HKU

  2. Issues • Relationships between natural language and thoughts. • What are natural languages? • What is thinking? • Do we think in a natural language? • Can we think without language?

  3. What is thinking? • Some features of thoughts • Thoughts are intentional / have content. • Having thoughts require having concepts. • Can deploy old concepts to think new thoughts. • Chains of thought • Associative thinking • Inferential thinking / reasoning

  4. What is natural language? • Examples • Italian, Spanish, Cantonese, Japanese … • Some features • A spoken language used to communicate • Displacement, open-ended, stimulus-free • Contrasted with • programming languages • artificial languages

  5. Do we think in natural languages? • Two questions : • Do we ever think in a natural language? • Do we only think in a natural language? • Argument from introspection • Introspection = looking into one’s own minds • Conscious thinking often seems to be a form of internal speech. • We can think aloud if we want to. • Thesis : LOT exists. LOT = NL.

  6. Pinker’s criticisms • Cases of thinking without language. • Adults without language • Young babies • Monkeys • Introspective reports of mental imagery • Features of NL : • Ambiguity, Lack of logical structure • Deixis, synonymy

  7. Announcements • Reading week next week • No lectures / tutorials. • Use BBS for questions.

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