THE M. JOHNSON’S CRITICISM OF THE J. FODOR’S LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT HYPOTHESIS
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Abstract
The study is to consider the Mark Johnson’s criticism of the Jerry Fodor’s Language of Thought hypothesis. Results. According to the J. Fodor’s hypothesis there is the language of thought also called “Mentalese” that is the meta-language in which mental representations of attitudes of organism to propositions expressed in object-language (for example: belief, hope, desire, statement) are formulated. These attitudes are called “propositional attitudes”. In the hypothesis propositional attitudes are thoughts and relations between organism and proposition. The language of thought is a formal language. The M. Johnson’s criticism of the language of thought hypothesis is based on the J. Fodor’s statement about the language of thought as a formal language. M. Johnson points out that “the language of thought” is a conceptual metaphor that is the result of other conceptual metaphor “the thought as language”. Metaphor “the language of thought” is declarative of the unreality of the language of thought as a language in contrast to the natural language. Originality. M. Johnson doesn’t take into consideration that “the formal language” is a conceptual metaphor: “the formal language” is the result of metaphorization of “the system of formal signs” on the analogy of the written language but not the natural language. To a certain extent any formal language is a written language. Thus, if J. Fodor says about the language of thought as the formal language then he should depicture the language of thought not as an acoustic sign system but as a visual sign system that represents something different, perhaps, different language. This is especially important when you understand that the J. Fodor’s language of thought has striking likeness with such formal language as epistemic logic.
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