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Is language-of-thought the best game in the town we live?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2023

Gary Lupyan Open the ORCID record for Gary Lupyan [Opens in a new window]
Gary Lupyan*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. lupyan@wisc.edu; http://sapir.psych.wisc.edu
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Abstract

There are towns in which language-of-thought (LoT) is the best game. But do we live in one? I go through three properties that characterize the LoT hypothesis: Discrete constituents, role-filler independence, and logical operators, and argue that in each case predictions from the LoT hypothesis are a poor fit to actual human cognition. As a hypothesis of what human cognition ought to be like, LoT departs from empirical reality.

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Open Peer Commentary
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Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 46 , 2023 , e281
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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