# Contested concept: Language of Thought (LOT)

_**What you are reading**: one contested-concept page in Deliberus's deliberation graph. Deliberus maps human reasoning — including claims that are contested, mistaken, or extreme — so that disagreement can be examined precisely. A claim's presence here is not an endorsement: the graph records that someone argued it, how it connects to other reasoning, and how far scrutiny has gotten. The metadata on this page describes the state of that scrutiny, not the truth of the claim._

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- **Contestedness**: criterion
- **Diagnosis**: The disagreement over LOT drives the debate on whether human-like intelligence is 'hard-wired' with logic or 'soft-wired' through the cultural acquisition of language.
- **Canonical**: `/concept/Language of Thought (LOT)` (data: `/concept/Language of Thought (LOT).json`)

## Senses in use
- **A theoretical internal symbolic void or representational role that might be occupied or constructed by natural language itself.** — used in 2 claim(s)
- **An innate, universal internal representation system that must exist prior to and independent of natural language acquisition.** — used in 2 claim(s)

## Claims using this term
- [Jerry Fodor (1975) dismissed the possibility that a cognitive system could learn to reason with natural language without first possessing a…](/claim/claim_14aa985a8395.md) _(sense: An innate, universal internal representation system that must exist prior to and independent of natural language acquisition.)_
- [There is little empirical evidence supporting the extreme version of the Language of Thought (LOT) hypothesis, which posits a general, inna…](/claim/claim_1d2e62c757a0.md) _(sense: An innate, universal internal representation system that must exist prior to and independent of natural language acquisition.)_
- [In the absence of a pre-existing mental system with the scope and representational capacity of natural language, it is plausible that learn…](/claim/claim_89b0ebaba938.md) _(sense: A theoretical internal symbolic void or representational role that might be occupied or constructed by natural language itself.)_
- [If a general, language-like Language of Thought (LOT) does not exist prior to the acquisition of natural language, then natural language ma…](/claim/claim_e94f3f5738d3.md) _(sense: A theoretical internal symbolic void or representational role that might be occupied or constructed by natural language itself.)_