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The sister in Cleveland example
@Suppose that a neurosurgeon operates on a someone's Belief Box, inserting the sentence "I have a sister in Cleveland". When the patient wakes up, the doctor says "Do you have a sister?" "Yes", the patient says, "In Cleveland." Doctor: "What's her name?" Patient: "Gosh, I can't think of it." Doctor: "Older or younger?" Patient: "I don't know, and by golly I'm an only child. I don't know why I'm saying that I have a sister at all." Finally, the patient concludes that she never really believed she had a sister in Cleveland, but rather was a victim of some sort of compulsion to speak as if she did. The upshot is supposed to be that the language of thought theory is false because you can't produce a belief just by inserting a sentence in the Belief Box.
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Note that the LOT hypothesis does not imply :
Inference to the best explanation arguments are very common.
These phenomena support LOT only if we cannot find better explanations of these phenomena.
In Dennett, D.C. (1981). Cure for the Common Code. In Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1981. (Originally appeared in Mind, April 1977.)
@In a recent conversation with the designer of a chess-playing program I heard the following criticism of a rival program: "it thinks it should get its queen out early." This ascribes a propositional attitude to the program in a very useful and predictive way, for as the designer went on to say, one can usefully count on chasing that queen around the board. But for all the many levels of explicit representation to be found in that program, nowhere is anything roughly synonymous with "I should get my queen out early" explicitly tokened. The level of analysis to which the designer's remark belongs describes features of the program that are, in an entirely innocent way, emergent properties of the computational processes that have "engineering reality." I see no reason to believe that the relation between belief-talk and psychological talk will be any more direct. (Dennett 1981, p.107)
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So opponents to LOT have to either deny the phenomena, or that LOT provides the best explanation (because there is a better alternative),
In Dennett, D.C. (1981). Cure for the Common Code. In Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1981. (Originally appeared in Mind, April 1977.)
@In a recent conversation with the designer of a chess-playing program I heard the following criticism of a rival program: "it thinks it should get its queen out early." This ascribes a propositional attitude to the program in a very useful and predictive way, for as the designer went on to say, one can usefully count on chasing that queen around the board. But for all the many levels of explicit representation to be found in that program, nowhere is anything roughly synonymous with "I should get my queen out early" explicitly tokened. The level of analysis to which the designer's remark belongs describes features of the program that are, in an entirely innocent way, emergent properties of the computational processes that have "engineering reality." I see no reason to believe that the relation between belief-talk and psychological talk will be any more direct. ^^^Dennett 1981, p.107
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William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347)
@Ockham was perhaps the first person to give not just lip service to the notion of “mental language” (because Aristotle and Boethius had mentioned it), but actually to develop the notion in some detail and to put it to work for him. Written language for Ockham is “subordinated” to spoken language, and spoken language is “subordinated” to mental language. For Ockham, the terms of mental language are concepts; its propositions are mental judgments. stanford:ockham/#3.3
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We should accept LOT because LOT provides the best explanation of such phenomena:
These phenomena support LOT only if we cannot find better explanations of these phenomena.
In Dennett, D.C. (1981). Cure for the Common Code. In Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1981. (Originally appeared in Mind, April 1977.)
@In a recent conversation with the designer of a chess-playing program I heard the following criticism of a rival program: "it thinks it should get its queen out early." This ascribes a propositional attitude to the program in a very useful and predictive way, for as the designer went on to say, one can usefully count on chasing that queen around the board. But for all the many levels of explicit representation to be found in that program, nowhere is anything roughly synonymous with "I should get my queen out early" explicitly tokened. The level of analysis to which the designer's remark belongs describes features of the program that are, in an entirely innocent way, emergent properties of the computational processes that have "engineering reality." I see no reason to believe that the relation between belief-talk and psychological talk will be any more direct. (Dennett 1981, p.107)
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Some of these objections might be more appropriate for an imagery theory rather than a map theory.
@I remark in the first place the difference that exists between the imagination and pure intellection [or conception]. For example, when I imagine a triangle, I do not conceive it only as a figure comprehended by three lines, but I also apprehend these three lines as present by the power and inward vision of my mind, and this is what I call imagining. But if I desire to think of a chiliagon, I certainly conceive truly that it is a figure composed of a thousand sides, just as easily as I conceive of a triangle that it is a figure of three sides only; but I cannot in any way imagine the thousand sides of a chiliagon [as I do the three sides of a triangle], nor do I, so to speak, regard them as present [with the eyes of my mind]. - Section 2 of Descartes' Meditation VI
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