inferential transitions between natural language sentences, where we previ-
ously lacked any disposition to make similar transitions amongst
thoughts. So when we activate our acquired inferential dispositions, to-
kens of those sentences form an indispensable part of the process of
thinking in question; hence vindicating some form of cognitive conception
of language. On Frankish’s account, in contrast, wecommitourselves to
making certain inferential transitions whenever we make up our minds;
hence bringing an aspect of our mental lives under our own intentional
control. But here, too, language has a constitutive role to play.
3.6 Explicit conceptual thought: LF and inferential promiscuityTheWnal possibility to be explored is that at least some central-process
conceptual representations might already consist of (non-imagistic,non-
conscious) natural language symbols. For example, Chomsky (1995a,
1995b) has maintained that there is a level of linguistic representation
which he calls ‘logical form’ (LF), which is where the language faculty
interfaces with central cognitive systems. It might then be claimed that
some (or all) conceptual, propositional, thinking consists in the formation
and manipulation of these LF representations. In particular, it could be
that tokening in an LF representation is what renders a given content
explicit(in the sense of KarmiloV-Smith, 1992) – that is to say, this format
serves to make it generally inferentially available (or ‘promiscuous’) out-
side its given cognitive domain, thus conferring the potential to interact
with a wide range of central cognitive operations. On this account, it would
not just be some (conscious) thoughttokenswhich constitutively involve
natural language representations; but certain explicit thoughts, astypes
(whether conscious or non-conscious), would involve such sentences.
The hypothesis can thus be that central-process thinking often operates
by accessing and manipulating the representations of the language faculty.
Where these representations areonlyin LF, the thoughts in question will
be non-conscious ones. But where the LF representation is used to gener-
ate a full-blown phonological representation (a sentence in auditory im-
agination, or an episode of ‘inner speech’), the thought will be a conscious
one. But what, now, is the basic diVerence between the hypothesis that
(many forms of) central-process thinking and reasoning operate, in part,
by deploying sentences of LF, and the hypothesis that they are conducted
entirely in Mentalese? The important point, here, is that sentences of LF
arenotsentences of Mentalese – they are not pure central-process repre-
sentations, but rather depend upon resources provided by the language
faculty; and they are not universal to all thinkers, but are always drawn
from one or another natural language.
The place of natural language in thought 223