Thinking about thinking: language, thought and introspection

Abstract

Peter Carruthers has made a vigorous attempt to defend the admittedly unfashionable doctrine that we think ‘in' language, despite its displacement by something like Fodor's ‘language of thought'. The idea that we think in language has considerable intuitive persuasiveness, but I suggest that this is not the force of good argument and evidence, but a familiar kind of introspective illusion. In this regard, the question of language and thought derives a more general interest, since the illusion is independently familiar from other notorious disputes in cognitive science such as the ‘imagery debate’.