We discuss four interconnected issues that we believe have hindered investigations into how language may affect thinking. These have had a tendency to reappear in the debate concerning linguistic relativity over the past decades, despite numerous empirical findings. The first is the claim that it is impossible to disentangle language from thought, making the question concerning "influence" poin...

In simplest terms, language is the syntactic combination of concepts (semantics), which are mnemonically addressed with man-made sensory-based representations (word-forms). The evolution of language, therefore, is minimally the evolution of competency for learning the grammar and words of a given language. Apes have an ability to learn symbolconcept associations across several modalities, albei...

1. Introduction In this chapter, I shall be examining an argument for the language of thought hypothesis – an argument which, in earlier work (Davies, 1992; see also 1991), I have called 'Aunty's own argument for the language of thought'. That will be the business of Sections 2-5. In the final section, I shall briefly mention some points of contact between this argument for the language of thou...

Human cognitive abilities are remarkable. We easily go beyond what is perceptually available to reason about abstract systems. Our cognitive ability to adapt to a vast range of environments, and even to alter our environment to suit our desires, has given our species so great an advantage over other mammals that we are now poised to exterminate most of our former predators, and must use our ing...