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Recommended: Strengths and limitations of the theory of the mind

What is the Language of Thought Hypothesis?
LOTH is an empirical thesis about the nature of thought and thinking.
According to LOTH, thought and thinking are done in a mental language,
i.e. in a symbolic system physically realized in the brain of the relevant organisms. In formulating LOTH, philosophers have in mind primarily the variety of thoughts known as ‘propositional attitudes’. Propositional attitudes are the thoughts described by such sentence forms as ‘S believes that P’, ‘S hopes that P’, ‘S desires that P’, etc., where ‘S’ refers to the subject of the attitude, ‘P’ is any sentence, and ‘that P’ refers to the proposition that is the object of the attitude. If we let ‘A’ stand for such attitude verbs as ‘believe’, ‘desire’, ‘hope’, ‘intend’, ‘think’, etc., then the propositional attitude statements all have the form: S As that P.
LOTH can now be formulated more exactly as a hypothesis about the nature of propositional attitudes. It can be characterized as the conjunction of the following three theses (A), (B) and (C):
(A) Representational Theory of Mind (RTM): (cf. Field 1978: 37, Fodor
1987: 17)
(1) Representational Theory of Thought: For each propositional attitude A, there is a unique and distinct (i.e. dedicated)[1] psychological relation
R, and for all propositions P and subjects S, S As that P if and only if there is a mental representation #P# such that
(a) S bears R to #P#, and
(b) #P# means that P.
(2) Representational Theory of Thinking: Mental processes, thinking in particular, consists of causal sequences of tokenings of mental representations. (B) Mental representations, which, as per (A1), constitute the direct
"objects" of propositional attitudes, belong to a representational or symbolic system which is such that (cf. Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988:12-3)
(1) representations of the system have a combinatorial syntax and semantics: structurally complex (molecular) representations are systematically built up out of structurally simple (atomic) constituents, and the semantic content of a molecular representation is a function of the semantic content of its atomic constituents together with its syntactic/formal structure, and
(2) the operations on representations (constituting, as per (A2), the domain of mental processes, thinking) are causally sensitive to the syntactic/formal structure of representations defined by this combinatorial syntax.
(C) Functionalist Materialism. Mental representations so characterized are, at some suitable level, functionally characterizable entities that are realized by the physical properties of the subject having

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