Abstract

This dissertation is an examination of the Language of Thought thesis posited by Jerry Fodor. Fodor believes that our language of thought is a very robust language, one that essentially has all of the conceptual resources of any humanly possible language. I find Fodor's position regarding concepts extreme---too much is innate in the Language of Thought as he posits it. I believe that an analysis of the American Sign Language may cast light on some of the problems with Fodor's view. My basic argument is as follows: ASL is conceptually impoverished in that it has no Signs for many of the important and sophisticated concepts used in science and philosophy. That is to say, ASL lacks the means to express many of the sophisticated conceptual meanings covered by a causal theory of meaning/reference using Signs. Because of that impoverishment, those prelingually deafened people whose primary means of communication is ASL have unusual difficulty in producing sentences expressing those philosophical and scientific meanings. They also have unusual difficulty in understanding sentences that express those meanings. The explanation of 2 is either The impoverishment of ASL has led to impoverishment in the thinking of those who have no other language---i.e., to an unusual difficulty in having thoughts with those meanings as their content; or There is no impoverishment in the thinking of those native signers who use only ASL for communication, but the impoverishment of ASL makes it unusually difficult to express thoughts with those meanings in that language. The explanation is not because if the ASL signers' thoughts were not impoverished then ASL would not be either. It would not lack Signs for so many of those particular concepts. Those Signs would be added to the language naturally, as they have been to spoken languages, as a means of facilitating rapid and accurate communication of the concepts involved. So, is the explanation. So the thoughts of those who rely solely on ASL as a means of communicating concepts cannot be in an innate Mentalese with a universal Lexicon of concepts, as Fodor posits---and if their language of thought is not innate, then we have no reason to think anyone else's is either, for what is innate must be innate to the species as a whole