Public language, private language, and subsymbolic theories of mind

Gabe Dupre
2022 Mind & Language  
Language has long been a problem-case for subsymbolic theories of mind. The reason for this is obvious: Language seems essentially symbolic. However, recent work has developed a potential solution to this problem, arguing that linguistic symbols are public objects which augment a fundamentally subsymbolic mind, rather than components of cognitive symbol-processing. I shall argue that this strategy cannot work, on the grounds that human language acquisition consists in projecting linguistic
more » ... ture onto environmental entities, rather than extracting this structure from them.
doi:10.1111/mila.12400 fatcat:36na5jsjibaq5jhh4hi24qndkq