The language of thought and natural language

understanding
Jonathan Knowles

1 Laurence and Margolis’s argument

Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis have recently argued that certain
kinds of regress arguments against the language of thought hypothesis
(LOT) as an account of how we understand natural languages, such as
English, have been answered incorrectly or inadequately by supporters of
LOT (Laurence and Margolis 1997). They argue further that this does not
undermine LOT, since the main sources of support for LOT are (or might
be) independent of its providing an account of how we understand natural
language. In this note I seek to refute both these claims, and reinstate the
putative explanation of natural language understanding as a necessarily
central part of the support for LOT. (All otherwise unspecified page refer-
ences are to Laurence and Margolis 1997.)
One central idea of LOT-supporters has been that one’s use and under-
standing of natural language utterances rests on possessing some kind of
internal language of thought. This idea involves several related claims in
the hands of its most prominent sympathizer, Jerry Fodor (cf. Fodor 1975;
1987). One is that, to learn a natural language, one has to have some prior
medium – a language of thought – in which to frame hypotheses about the
extensions of the terms in the natural language. Another is that the
language of thought is necessary to understand natural language utter-
ances. A third is that the language of thought is necessary to explain how
natural language utterances have meaning.
Regress arguments, according to Laurence and Margolis, seek to show
that all of these claims face a fatal dilemma. Laurence and Margolis
consider three such arguments, one for each claim. They consider first the
regress on learning (60–61). Assuming LOT is correct about how we learn
a natural language, one can go on to ask how the language of thought is
learned. Either it is learned in the same way in which the natural language
is learned, or some other account is given for it. In the first case, a regress
of languages is set up and LOT is otiose. In the second case, there seems
nothing to stop the new account applying directly to the natural language,
and again LOT is otiose. The other two regress arguments – the regress on
understanding and the regress on meaning – have essentially the same
structure as the regress on learning: postulating a language of thought
either sets up an infinite regress, or begs the question as to why the account

Analysis 58.4, July October, pp. 264–72. © Jonathan Knowles

 the language of thought 265

of how the regress is stopped couldn’t be applied directly to the natural

language (cf. 61–63).
Laurence and Margolis note that the regress on learning does not work
against Fodor, since it presupposes that the language of thought is learned,
whereas for Fodor it is precisely not learned but innate. But this response
is weak, they claim, since (a) the innateness hypothesis is a highly conten-
tious but optional component of LOT (60, fn.; 61); and (b) in any case, it
does not answer the other regress arguments, pace Fodor’s (1975: 67)
claims to the contrary (61).
Supporters of LOT have taken at least part of the correct response to the
other two regress arguments to be that we can give accounts of how we
understand the language of thought, and of how it has meaning, that do
not require a further language, i.e. that halts the threatened regress.
Exactly what form such an account should take is highly controversial, but
the overarching constraint has been that it be naturalistic, i.e. that it
explain the intentional notions of understanding and meaning in terms
which are not themselves intentional but instead advert to recognized
notions of the natural sciences, such as causal law. Whether a successful
such account has been given, even whether it is likely that it ever will or
can be given, are of course highly contentious issues in current philosophy
of mind. However, according to Laurence and Margolis, even supposing
we have given or can give such an account does not answer the regresses
on understanding or meaning, since providing a naturalistic theory of
intentionality does not avoid the second horn of the dilemmas presented
by these arguments: it does not explain why such a theory can not be
directly applied to natural language.
Laurence and Margolis do not however see this failure as reason to reject
LOT, i.e. to accept the conclusions of the regress arguments. Their infer-
ence is rather that the protagonists to the debate are wrong in assuming
that the only or at least an important reason for adopting LOT must be to
explain how natural language utterances are understood and have mean-
ing; whereas in fact there is a great deal of independent evidence for LOT.
They mention LOT’s ability to explain the high degree of freedom that
exists between environmental states and behavioural consequences, and its
capacity to explain the systematic and productive nature of thought and
other psychological processes (65). On their view, explaining natural
language understanding comes in as a bonus, rather than a central piece of
evidential support for LOT (64).

2 The reply
It strikes me that Laurence and Margolis’s analysis of the situation must be
wrong. I will be arguing that the capacity to explain natural language
266 jonathan knowles

understanding must remain a central reason for accepting LOT, possibly

the central reason.
To begin with, even without going into any detail, Laurence and Marg-
olis seem to face the hermeneutical problem that it would be odd if
prominent defenders of LOT who answer the regress arguments in the way
Laurence and Margolis criticize should to such an extent misunderstand
their own dialectical position. This misunderstanding would have to be
quite deep in view of the fact that the role played by giving a successful
naturalistic semantics for the language of thought is, on Laurence and
Margolis’s view, not particularly substantial in supporting LOT.1
Moreover, the regress arguments on meaning and understanding can
cogently be answered by LOT-supporters in the ways Laurence and Marg-
olis criticize. In other words, it is not correct to claim, as Laurence and
Margolis by implication do, that, in the absence of other support for LOT,
those who put forward a naturalistic theory of intentionality for LOT as a
way of explaining natural language meaning and understanding gratui-
tously assume that such theories must apply to the internal medium, rather
than natural language. There are, as I see it, two roughly independent
reasons for rejecting this claim.
In the first place, Laurence and Margolis fail to give due credit to the role
played by the idea that the language of thought might be innate. As noted
above, they regard the idea that it should be as highly controversial and
separable from the main thesis of LOT. Yet they suggest that even if we
grant the innateness idea, it will only give a response to what they call the
regress on learning, not the regress on understanding or meaning (61). But
this is simply a mistake. The reason why positing innateness makes the
language of thought the obvious locus for a naturalistic treatment of
understanding and meaning, rather than the natural language, derives
from the fact that it seems intuitively correct to suppose that a natural
language must be learned, at least in the sense that learners must determine
the extensions of its predicates. If there is some other language in which we
learn the natural language but which ex hypothesi does not itself have to
be learned, then we can explain how the natural language is learned. For
such an explanation to work, it will also be required that we can give an
account of understanding and meaning for this innate language that does
not set up a regress of languages – i.e. it must be possible to give, for exam-
ple, a naturalistic account of intentionality for the language of thought. But
given we can provide this, it is clear that it would be very odd if the natural
language which we learn with the aid of the language of thought, and
1 I stress that this paragraph should not be read as an argument from authority but
rather a statement of what intuitively motivates LOT. The last point is connected to
my second objection to Laurence and Margolis below.
 the language of thought 267

whose expressions thus stand in a direct, or at least wholly compositional

relationship to those of the language of thought,2 were not also understood
and given meaning via translation into the language of thought. That is, it
would be extremely odd if we were built such that the natural language
medium should have cognitive resources devoted to its understanding and
semantic significance when this understanding and semantic significance is
of necessity also embodied in the internal language of thought, and with
which natural language expressions are correlated through learning.
I take this argument to unpack Fodor’s (1975: 67) claim, cited and
rejected by Laurence and Margolis (loc. cit.), that the asymmetry between
natural language and the language of thought with respect innateness
rebuts the regress on understanding (and, by implication, meaning). My
argument does not show that it is impossible that the natural language
should have meaning and be understood independently of the language of
thought, but it does strongly suggest that if (a) the language of thought is
innate, and (b) a naturalistic theory of intentionality can be given for the
language of thought, then not only the regress on learning, but also those
on understanding and meaning can, just as Fodor claims, be rebutted: One
opts for the second ‘horn’, that in which one gives a different account for
the internal language than for the natural language, and explains why it is
highly likely that this account will apply only to the internal language, on
the grounds outlined above.
Of course such a defence assumes that innateness is part of LOT, and
this is, as Laurence and Margolis note, controversial. Moreover, innateness
is not assumed by the other defender of LOT against the regress arguments
whom Laurence and Margolis mention (i.e. Crane 1995). Nevertheless, it
would not seem correct to regard innateness as merely an optional extra of
LOT, for it is problematic how we could learn any language without some
prior understanding. It seems at least correct to say that to the extent the
language of thought can be seen as innate, LOT is strengthened, and that
therefore LOT-supporters should adopt innateness as a working assump-
tion. From this, together with my argument above, it follows that the
argument for the language of thought on the basis of its explaining natural
language meaning and understanding is important for LOT.
Let us however bracket innateness, and also assume that it is not integral
to LOT, as Laurence and Margolis suggest, and move on to my second
objection to their central dialectical claim – the claim that positing a natu-
ralistic account of intentionality for LOT does not show why this account
cannot be directly applied to the natural language. Like the first objection,
it is touched on, albeit in this case not as such, by the authors themselves
2 I.e. such that the meanings of the natural language expressions stand in a one-one or
one-many relationship to the meanings of the language of thought expressions.
268 jonathan knowles

(64, fn.). Again they quote Fodor, who claims that naturalistic theories of
meaning will have
a much better chance of working for mental representations than …
for (e.g.) English words …. [Since] whether an English word gets
tokened (e.g., uttered) depends not just on what it means but also
upon the motivations, linguistic competences, and communicative
intentions of English speakers. Giving voice to an utterance, unlike
entertaining a thought, is typically a voluntary act (1987: 99–100).
Fodor’s thought here is that the law-like connections between physical
tokens and objects or properties in the world (or other physical tokens)
that underlie naturalistic theories of meaning will be unlikely to find appli-
cation so long as the physical tokens are viewed as natural language
utterances. This is because these utterances will often fail to be produced
even when the conditions for their meaning are satisfied, because whether
one speaks or not will depend on whether one chooses to make manifest
the understanding one has; and such choosing involves the conscious will,
which is ex hypothesi naturalistically recalcitrant.3
Laurence and Margolis present this consideration as incidental evidence
in favour of LOT as the basis of a theory of linguistic meaning. What they
fail to note is that the constraint on the appropriate object for naturalistic
theories of content which Fodor articulates follows pretty much straight-
forwardly from a basic commitment of any sympathizer of LOT, namely
that it is a naturalistic theory that is going to explain meaning and under-
standing. In other words, given that a naturalistic treatment of meaning
can be sustained, as all supporters of LOT take as the one of the most basic
assumptions of their position, then it is also given that such a treatment
must be applied to something more fundamental than the natural
language, for the reasons Fodor adduces. Thus, even if it is not always
made fully explicit by every commentator, it is abundantly clear that argu-
ments for LOT presuppose the rejection of the idea that linguistic meaning
is based on relationships between words in a natural language and/or
between these words and their extensions, on the grounds that such rela-
tionships will not be naturalistically explicable. As Fodor puts it in a
continuation of the above passage: ‘CCT and RTM are made for each
other’ (ibid.).4
3 A similar argument is presented in Fodor’s (1990: 53–56) discussion of Skinnerian
semantics. The argument could seemingly be strengthened by noting (a) that natural
language utterances will often be produced when the conditions for their use are not
satisfied – as in irony or metaphor; and (b) that the relations between natural
language utterances and the conditions for their meaning will in any case be compli-
cated by the phenomena of homonymy and synonymy. But these issues deserve a
separate treatment, and Fodor’s point is sufficient for present purposes.
 the language of thought 269

The consequence of this is that the second ‘horn’ of the dilemma which
Laurence and Margolis present the regress on meaning as threatening – the
one in which it is asked why the naturalistic theory of meaning given for
the language of thought cannot be directly applied to natural language – is
quite innocuous for LOT-sympathizers: as in the case of adopting innate-
ness, they can opt for this second ‘horn’ and give a straightforward reply
to the opponent, referring to the constraints and presuppositions just
discussed. In answering the regress on meaning, it is thus sufficient to give
a naturalistic theory of meaning for the language of thought, just as the
commentator who Laurence and Margolis criticize suggests.
It will no doubt be observed that my second objection, whilst it may
adequately quash the regress on meaning given the availability of a plausi-
ble naturalistic semantics, does not obviously quash the regress on
understanding. However, it seems to me that, assuming that a plausible
naturalistic account of how we understand the language of thought can be
given, the objection does also suffice to quash the regress on understand-
ing. Exactly how a theory of understanding relates to a theory of meaning
is, for any language, natural or internal, a complex and controversial issue
– but happily one which need not concern us here. For what we can
uncontroversially state is that the theory of linguistic meaning will at least
form a part or a presupposition of the theory of how language is under-
stood, so that constraints on the object of the former will also apply to the
object of the latter. But we have seen that, since these accounts will be natu-
ralistic for LOT-supporters, the theory of meaning cannot, for them, apply
directly to natural language, from which it now follows that the theory of
understanding cannot apply directly to natural language either. Hence it
turns out that LOT-sympathizers can rebut both the regress on meaning
and on understanding precisely as long as they are in a position to give a
naturalistic account of understanding (a fortiori of meaning).
A possible response to my second objection to Laurence and Margolis
might be that the aspects of linguistic utterances mentioned by Fodor in the
above quotation could never a priori rule out a direct naturalistic treat-
ment of natural language understanding. Further, one cannot even rule out
that a non-naturalistic but also non-regressive theory of language under-
standing might be forthcoming. However, the position of the LOT-theorist

4 ‘CCT’ = ‘the Crude Causal Theory of Content’ and ‘RTM’ = ‘the representational
theory of mind’. In relation to CCT, it is important to note that Fodor’s point doesn’t
depend on adopting this particular theory of content (cf. the continuations of the
discussions referred to in Fodor 1987 and Fodor 1990). In relation to RTM, I should
register that, following Laurence and Margolis (65), I am not explicitly distinguish-
ing between LOT and RTM in this piece: neither their arguments nor my objections
depend on doing so.
270 jonathan knowles

is simply that at least the only naturalistic accounts we have any under-
standing of whatsoever are such that they could not be applied to natural
language directly, and that only naturalistic accounts look as though they
will halt regresses. If naturalistic accounts could be applied to natural
language, or if non-naturalistic accounts could halt regresses, then the
motivation for LOT would surely be substantially reduced.5
In concluding this, we arrive at a second reason to reject Laurence and
Margolis’s view that it is arguments independent of natural language
understanding that really support LOT, that an explanation of natural
language understanding comes in as a kind of bonus. Of course, none of
this is to deny that LOT is often seen as gaining further support in the ways
Laurence and Margolis suggest (see §1 for a summary of these ways).
Having said that, there seems some reason to question whether this
evidence is peculiarly central to LOT in the way I have argued that derived
from the explanation of natural language understanding is. The first
evidence Laurence and Margolis cite concerns the seemingly non-rigid
relationship between behaviour and environmental circumstances evinced
by intelligent animals (loc. cit.). This non-rigidity seems to involve a gener-
alization of the ideas discussed by Fodor, quoted above, that suggest that
a naturalistic account of understanding and meaning cannot be directly
applied to natural language. But one can imagine that this generalization
is not one that all supporters of LOT would want to accept – for example,
if they regarded the kind of non-rigid reacting which LOT is meant to
explain as being de facto restricted to that which underlies the use of
language in humans. Thus restricted, the non-rigidity would offer no
support for LOT beyond that provided by the arguments from language-
understanding. The second source of evidence Laurence and Margolis cite
concerns the syntactic commitments of LOT, commitments which are
supposedly crucial in explaining the systematicity and productivity of
thought, language, and other psychological processes (loc. cit.). However,
it is a matter of some controversy exactly how empirical such commit-
ments are. Davies’s (1991) argument for LOT from the nature of thought
regards them as deducible a priori, and if that is correct, supporters of LOT
might be more willing to regard the arguments from systematicity and
productivity as less central to their view than they would be to see it taken

5 To get absolutely clear about the dialectic here, it should be noted that Laurence and
Margolis seem to allow that LOT-supporters might be able to answer the regresses
on meaning and understanding in the way I have outlined here, but that in any case
such a strategy grants too much to the opponent (p. 63–64). My claim is that this
way of answering these regress arguments is built into LOT as a fundamental presup-
position, so that it is certain that they can be so answered, and moreover, that if this
presupposition is wrong, the motivation for LOT is substantially reduced.
 the language of thought 271

out of the domain of empirical science. It is also of course controversial

whether brain syntax is necessary or even sufficient to explain systematic-
ity (cf. Aizawa 1997; Hadley 1997), and even if one sees no way out of the
Fodor line that it is necessary (cf. Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988), it is impor-
tant to bear in mind that much of the controversy between connectionists
and LOT-theorists is of a methodological nature, concerning what consti-
tutes a satisfactory explanation and what needs explaining, as much as
being straightforwardly empirical (cf. many of the remarks in Clark 1993,
e.g. at pp. 108 ff.). On this line, LOT may again turn out to be, not false,
but simply inappropriate as an empirical theory of cognitive architecture.
In any case, to the extent any of this is right, the argument for LOT from
language understanding becomes not merely important, but crucial as
support for it.
My main argument however has been that the regress arguments based
on meaning and understanding against the language of thought as an
explanation of natural language understanding are, pace Laurence and
Margolis, adequately turned aside by the availability of a plausible natu-
ralistic account of understanding and meaning even in the absence of other
sources of evidence for LOT. This is because LOT-sympathizers can opt for
the second ‘horn’ of the dilemmas presented by such arguments – the
language of thought is understood and has meaning in a way different
from the natural language – on the assumption that the account of this way
cannot or should not be directly applied to natural language. This latter
assumption can be motivated in one or both of two distinct ways: (a) on
the grounds that a natural language must be learned whilst the language of
thought is innate; or (b) on the grounds that naturalistic theories of mean-
ing and understanding, which for an LOT-sympathizer are ex hypothesi
the only ones in the offing, cannot be applied to natural languages. I have
also explained how this makes the explanation of natural language under-
standing through giving a plausible naturalistic theory of intentionality for
the language of thought an important source of support for LOT. How
much more is needed or can be given for LOT remains a matter of dispute.6

University of Oslo
1020 Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway
jonathan.knowles@filosofi.uio.no

6 Many thanks to Stefano Predelli for very helpful comments on a previous version of
this paper. Thanks also to Peter Smith and an anonymous Analysis referee for stylistic
comments and suggestions.
272 jonathan knowles

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