Over the last two chapters we have been considering the nature of psychological content. In the present chapter we take up the question of how such content is represented in the human brain, or of what its vehicles might be. Following a ground-clearing introduction, the chapter falls into two main parts. In the first of these, the orthodox Mentalese story is contrasted with its connectionist rival. Then in the second, we consider what place natural language representations may play in human cognition. One recurring question is what, if anything, folk psychology is committed to in respect of content-representation.

Preliminaries: thinking in images

One traditional answer to the questions just raised, concerning the vehicles of our thoughts, is that thinking consists entirely of mental (mostly visual) images of the objects which our thoughts concern, and that thoughts interact by means of associations (mostly learned) between those images. So when I think of a dog, I do so by virtue of entertaining some sort of mental image of a dog; and when I infer that dogs bark, I do so by virtue of an association which has been created in me between the mental images of dog and of barking. This view has been held very frequently throughout the history of philosophy, at least until quite recently, particularly amongst empiricists (Locke, 1690; Hume, 1739; Russell, 1921). Those who hold such a view will then argue that thought is independent of language on the grounds that possession and manipulation of mental images need not in any way involve or presuppose natural language.