Our discussion on Tues. will concern the first part of this chapter from Carruthers’ book Language, Thought and Consciousness. In it he presents his own view of the relation of (natural) language to thought. On Thurs. we will discuss later sections in which he sets his views against those of Jerry Fodor.
Carruthers’ presentation is clear enough in structure that I won’t offer a detailed guide, but he does assume a couple of ideas that are explained earlier in his book. Here are some passages from his introduction where he first introduces them:
The topic of this book is the subject of an ancient debate whether thought is independent of language, or whether our thinking, on the contrary, necessarily requires or involves natural language. I shall be arguing for a version of the latter thesis.…
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One question at issue in this debate is our understanding of the nature and function of natural language. If thought is independent of such language, then language itself becomes only a medium for the communication of thoughts. I shall refer to this theory of the role and significance of natural language as the communicative conception of language. According to the communicative conception, the function and purpose of natural language is to facilitate communication and not (except indirectly, by enabling the acquisition of new beliefs) to facilitate thinking. Language thus functions wholly in the public inter-personal domain, rather than in the domain of individual cognition.…
The communicative conception of language has been widely endorsed in the history of philosophy.… It is also the standard model for those now working in cognitive science, who view language as an isolable, and largely isolated, module of the mind, which is both innately structured and specialised for the interpretation and construction of natural language sentences.…
If, on the other hand, natural language is constitutively involved in our conscious thinkings (as I shall argue), then language is itself the primary medium of such thought, and much such thinking is essentially linguistic. I shall refer to this as the cognitive conception of language, since it accords a central place to natural language within our cognition. On this account we often think in language, and the trains of reasoning which lead up to many of our decisions and actions will consist in sequences of natural language sentences.… Here the picture of communication through language is quite different. When a speaker utters a sentence, on this view, their utterance expresses a thought by constituting it, not by encoding or signalling it. A hearer who is a competent user of the same language will then understand that utterance in virtue of it constitutively expressing, for them, the very same (or a sufficiently similar) thought.
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Much of this book has the form of an extended debate with Jerry Fodor.… Fodor’s view is that language is but an input and output module to central cognition,… not implicated in the central processes of thinking and reasoning themselves.… These latter processes are held to involve sentence-like structures, to be sure, but these are not sentences of any natural language, but rather of an innate, universal, symbolic system, which Fodor calls ‘Mentalese’.…
Peter Carruthers, Language, Thought and Consciousness (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 1-2, 4