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What is the Language of Thought Hypothesis? LOTH is an empirical thesis close to the nature of thought and thought. According to LOTH, thought and thinking atomic number 18 do in a mental language, i.e. in a symbolic body physic each(prenominal)y complete in the brain of the relevant organisms. In formulating LOTH, philosophers take hold in mind primarily the variety of thoughts known as propositional military capabilitys. Propositional attitudes are the thoughts described by such(prenominal) sentence forms as S believes that P, S hopes that P, S desires that P, etc., where S refers to the subject of the attitude, P is any sentence, and that P refers to the proposition that is the object of the attitude. If we let A stand for such attitude verbs as believe, desire, hope, recall, think, etc., then the propositional attitude statements all have the form S As that P. LOTH potful now be formulated to a greater extent exactly as a hypothesis about the nature of propositional at titudes. It can be characterized as the conjunction of the following three theses (A), (B) and (C) (A) Representational surmise of Mind (RTM) (cf. Field 1978 37, Fodor 1987 17) (1) Representational Theory of Thought For each propositional attitude A, there is a unique and distinct (i.e. dedicated)1 psychological relation R, and for all propositions P and subjects S, S As that P if and only if there is a mental representation P such that (a) S bears R to P, and (b) P means that P. (2) Representational Theory of Thinking affable processes, thinking in particular, consists of causal sequences of tokenings of mental representations. (B) Mental representations, which, as per (A1), constitute the comport "objects" of propositional attitudes, belong to a representational or symbolic system which is such that (cf. Fodor and Pylyshyn 198812-3) (1) representations of the system have a combinatorial syntax and semantics structurally confused (molecular) representations are systemat ically built up out of structurally elemental (atomic) constituents, and the semantic content of a molecular representation is a use of goods and services of the semantic content of its atomic constituents together with its syntactic/formal structure, and (2) the operations on representations (constituting, as per (A2), the domain of mental processes, thinking) are causally tender to the syntactic/formal structure of representations defined by this combinatorial syntax. (C) Functionalist Materialism. Mental representations so characterized are, at some suitable level, functionally characterizable entities that are realized by the physical properties of the subject having