Fodor's Mentalese Hypothesis

The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH), or called Mentalese Hypothesis, postulates a certain inner mental language. This inner language consists of a system of mental representations which has language-like syntax and semantics and is physically realized in our brain. Our thought and thinking take place in this mental language. As the media of thought and thinking this language is innate, which is fundamentally distinguished from all the natural languages that are learned. According to LOTH, thought is interpreted as the tokening of a mental representation. Thinking thus consists in syntactic operations defined over such representations.LOTH traces back to the ancient interest in the relationship between language and thought: Does thought rely on language? Which is prior? Do we must think in a language? Or is there a proprietary media for thought and thinking? This is a fundamental topic which has agitated much controversies in philosophy and in cognitive science.Fodor is the first philosopher and cognitive scientist to elaborate on LOTH. He has devoted himself to consistent studies on this topic ever since 1975, when his monograph The Language of Thought was released. This essay is going to present and discuss about Fodor's Language of Thought Hypothesis.Following the original approaches that Fodor takes, this essay intends to demonstrate how the hypothesis of language of thought is conceived, from what kind of questions it stems, which arguments are introduced to support it. After a sketch of Fodor's language of thought hypothesis, the essay proceeds to deal with two themes in particular in the hypothesis. One of them has to do with potential Wittgensteinnian criticisms against LOTH. In his response to these possible criticisms Fodor tops up and refines his hypothesis of language of thought. The other theme is the semantics of language of thought. To a great extent, whether LOTH is feasible or not depends upon how Fodor accounts for the semantics of language of thought. Nevertheless, this is the most difficult part for Fodor. Therefore, we will discuss in full about Fodor's strategy and argumentations for it.With all this introductive work done, the essay strives to point out some doubtful points implicit in Fodor's argument for LOTH. Through careful investigations upon essential arguments that LOTH relies on, I will raise doubt about Fodor's naturalistic approach, and try to argue that the various problems of LOTH lie in its hidden commitment to the referential theory of meaning. Inspired by the crystal insights that Wittgenstein develops in his PHILOSOPHISCHE UNTERSUCHUNGEN, I try to show and argue for an alternative way to study the mind and the relationship between language and thought, a more prospective way in my view. As a conclusion, I hold that LOTH is otiose, for we need no media to mediate language and thought exactly because natural language itself is that in which we think and understand.