Resumen de The rational and natural mind: from concepts to the language of thought
Víctor Martín Verdejo Aparicio
The mind presents itself as an object of study which dovetails a rational and a physical nature. Accordingly, the present work consists mainly in the examination of a genuinely philosophical and a genuinely empirical theory about the mind, and in the elucidation of the intrinsic connections between them. The target philosophical theory is the one that constitutively appeals to the notion of rationality and that works within what is presently called the Rationality Framework (RF). The target empirical theory is the one that in cognitive science is known as the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOT). At the heart of both theories there is the assumption of realism about mental states and the categories of folk psychology and, for this reason, those theories can be taken as providing (rationalist and empirical) articulations of the view that folk-psychological explanation is of a legitimate kind.
In the first part of the present work, the distinctive features of approaches belonging to RF, which are in the first place theories about concepts, are exhaustively analysed and it is shown that those (characteristically neo-Fregean) approaches are unique in promoting a theoretical integration of the metaphysical, the semantic, and the epistemological dimensions of concepts. After the analysis of their distinctive features, it is argued that, in spite of the several criticisms to which they have been submitted in the literature, there is nothing that prevents considering those approaches as providing, beyond concepts themselves, also a general account of thought and thinking.
In the second part, the claims and arguments in favour of LOT are carefully examined in order to provide a clear statement of the fundamental commitments of that empirical hypothesis. Once those commitments are clarified, on the one hand, we can see that theories in the spirit of RF are, in spite of being genuinely philosophical, empirically committed to LOT. On the other hand, we open the possibility of pointing out some crucial misunderstandings to which LOT has been frequently liable and that play a crucial role in the rejection of the hypothesis by leading reasoning in the connectionist landscape.
As a result of the recommended view, a unifying picture of the mind begins to emerge, one in which philosophical research on nonmechanical rationality and empirical research on mechanical rationality go very much hand in hand.
