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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on August 10, 2005
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(3):469-485; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi130
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© The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

You Don't Know How You Think: Introspection and Language of Thought

Edouard Machery

Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh PA 15213 USA machery{at}pitt.edu

The question ‘Is cognition linguistic?’ divides recent cognitive theories into two antagonistic groups. Sententialists claim that we think in some language, while advocates of non-linguistic views of cognition deny this claim. The Introspective Argument for Sententialism is one of the most appealing arguments for sententialism. In substance, it claims that the introspective fact of inner speech provides strong evidence that our thoughts are linguistic. This article challenges this argument. I claim that the Introspective Argument for Sententialism confuses the content of our thoughts with their vehicles: while sententialism is a thesis about the vehicles of our thoughts, inner speech sentences are the content of auditory or articulatory images. The rebuttal of the introspective argument for sententialism is shown to have a general significance in cognitive science: introspection does not tell us how we think.

  1. The problem
  2. The introspective argument for sententialism
  3. The argument for the blindness of introspection thesis
  4. Objections and replies
  5. Conclusion


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