[lit-ideas] Re: Why French is the only logical language (Was: Creme brulee)
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:07:37 -0700
JL opines
One interesting exception here is William of Ockham. (Peter Geach has a
book on this, "Mental Acts" -- where he sees Ockham as a precursor of
views like Fodor with his 'language of thought' hypothesis).
But Ockham was a nominalist, and he would hardly have subscribed to a
theory that multiplies 'languages' beyond necessity ('verbal language',
'language of thought').
This is partly anachronistic. Mental Acts was published [1958] before
Fodor published his work on a 'language of thought,' in 1975. It also
makes a conjectural leap not borne out by the history of philosophy:
even though Occam thought that unnecessary ornateness was usually the
mark of a bad theory, he also believed that the notion of a mental
language was necessary to explain certain linguistic and logical facts;
so there is no need to brandish his razor before the notion of a mental
language. There might have been, had the mental language itself been
merely merely the analogue of existing natural languages, itself never
spoken or written.
Occam could not, of course, have given an example of a construction in a
mental language; had he been able to the mental language would have been
an unnecessary shuffle in getting from thought to word.
Here's a reference
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ockham/#3.3
Note that on top of it, if we were to try to analyse the logical form of
the language of thought we would require 'homuncular intentions', and
this would be one of the worst _regressus ad infinitum_ we could dream
in our worse nightmares. This was shown to me by R. Cummins in his
"Meaning and Representation".
As can be seen from the Stanford entry, the mental language does not
have what I would call a 'familiar' logical form, and there is still
scholarly debate about whether synonymy is possible in it. (I'm not sure
what R. Cummins means by 'homuncular intentions.' My guess is that he's
referring to the intentions of homunculi which depend somehow on the
intentions of other, nested, homunculi, ad inf.
The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on 'the language of thought' is at
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#Bib
Robert Paul
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