Theories of Language and Mentality

Abstract

There are several reasons why the nature of language is fundamental to research in artificial intelligence in particular and to cognitive inquiry in general. One tends to be the assumption — considered in part in Chapter 2 — that thinking takes place in language, which makes the nature of language fundamental to the nature of mental processes, if not to the nature of mind itself. Another is that computers operate by means of software composed by means of a language — not a natural language, to be sure, but a computer language, which is a special kind of artificial language suitable for conveying instructions to machines. And another is that debate continues to rage over whether or not machines can have minds, a question whose answer directly depends upon the nature of mentality itself and indirectly upon the nature of language, especially the nature of languages suitable for use by machines.