are social constructs of some kind, taught and transmitted via language.
Consider, as a kind of simple model, what happens when someone attends
a course in logic at college or university – they learn to make certain sorts
of transition amongst sentences of certain forms, refraining from making
those which they learn to recognise as invalid. Then at the end of the
course – one hopes! – they have a set of inferential dispositions which
diVer from those they had before, and which are dispositions to make
transitions amongstsentences. If these same inferential dispositions there-
after govern (some of) the transitions they make amongst sentences in
inner speech, then we have a vindication of the view that sentences of inner
speech can occupy the causal role distinctive of thought. For, by hypoth-
esis, these would be inferences which would not occur at all at a non-
conscious level.
We should stress that this picture of the role of language in conscious
cognition isnotacomputationalone. The idea is not that there are proces-
ses which operate on and transform sentences in inner speech purely in
virtue of the syntactic properties of the latter. For an imaged natural
language sentence comes to us already laden with its content, in the normal
case. The phenomenology of inner speech is that meanings-clothed-in-
forms pass before our minds, just as the phenomenology of listening to
other people speaking is thatwe hear meaning inthe words that they use.
Because of this, the two-level story being sketched here is not in com-
petition with a Fodorian computational account of mind. For all that we
have said, it may well be that underlying each imaged natural language
sentence is a sentence of Mentalese which confers on it its meaning. It can
still be the case that the imaged sentences are constitutive of some kinds of
thought, if there are inferences which we are only inclined to make at all
when certain contents are tokened in natural language form.
3.5 Conscious thinking 2: two-level theoriesWe have sketched one way in which natural language sentences may have
come to be constitutive of conscious conceptual thinking, by mediating
socially-learned and constructednormsof good reasoning. Another pos-
sibility – which is orthogonal to, but consistent with, this one – has recently
been developed by Frankish (1998, forthcoming; see also Cohen, 1992),
building on some early ideas of Dennett’s (1978c). The idea is that lan-
guage – whether overt or sub-vocal – forms the object of various forms of
higher-order mentalising, which together give rise to a whole new level of
cognition, which Frankish dubs ‘the virtual mind’. This is the level at
which we can consciouslymake upandchangeour minds, deciding to
adopt a certain opinion in the light of the evidence for it, say, or deciding to
The place of natural language in thought 221