Representational Theory of Mind

Historical Versions of RTM

RTM was prominent in the modern period of philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, being associated with such philosophers as René Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Advocates of the theory in this period tended to advance RTM as a theory about such familiar mental states as beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on (mental states generally known as propositional attitudes), and about mental processes of thinking involving such states. They were also prone to regard mental representations as being images that are introspectable, private, and immaterial.

The Return of RTM

With the rise of behaviorist views of the mind in both philosophy and psychology, traditional versions of RTM fell out of favor in the early decades of the 20th century, particularly in the English speaking world. However, as the limitations of behaviorism became apparent a new version of RTM was developed that came to dominate the newly emerging field of cognitive science in the 1960s and 1970s. Such a view has been given its clearest articulation and most thoroughgoing defense by the American philosopher Jerry Fodor. For Fodor, the representations involved in having a propositional attitude such as a belief or a desire are language-like rather than imagistic so that, for example, believing that dogs bark involves having a sentence in one's mind that means dogs bark. Fodor labels the language that the mind employs the language of thought (LOT). LOT is a nonnatural language that will be shared by all members of the human species regardless of what language they speak. Being a language, LOT has a finite number of basic symbols and a finite number of syntactic rules for combining those symbols to create larger complex structures such as sentences. The meaning of a sentence of LOT is a product of the meaning of its component words and its syntactic structure.

Fodor is a physicalist in the respect that he thinks that the mind is ultimately a physical thing whose mental properties are determined by its physical properties. Consequently, he thinks that the symbols of LOT are physically embodied in the brain. However, any given LOT sentence is multiply realizable in the sense that its instances can take a variety of different physical forms in the brain of distinct individuals. For Fodor, whether or not an instance of a particular sentence of LOT in one's mind [Page 653]expresses a belief, a desire, or whatever, depends on how it is processed by the mental mechanisms that have access to it. Sentences that express beliefs are processed in the distinctive way that is characteristic of the belief relation and so on for all the other types of propositional attitude relations. This idea is often figuratively expressed by saying that when one has a particular belief, one has a relevant sentence of LOT in one's belief box; that when one has a particular desire, one has the relevant sentence of LOT in one's desire box; and so on.

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