# Contested concept: natural language

_**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**: This contestation masks a disagreement about the origins of human intelligence: whether complex thought enabled language, or whether the 'compression' features of language enabled complex thought.
- **Canonical**: `/concept/natural language` (data: `/concept/natural language.json`)

## Senses in use
- **A computationally efficient representational format optimized for facilitating internal thought, abstraction, and complex inference.** — used in 5 claim(s)
- **A system evolved and optimized primarily for interpersonal communication and the exchange of information.** — used in 3 claim(s)

## Claims using this term
- [The use of natural language as a representational format makes the process of general inference computationally tractable for cognitive sys…](/claim/claim_1a4d046fc44f.md) _(sense: A computationally efficient representational format optimized for facilitating internal thought, abstraction, and complex inference.)_
- [The symbolic abstraction inherent in natural language is a necessary component for making general reasoning computationally tractable in AI…](/claim/claim_1e4b311d6dc7.md) _(sense: A computationally efficient representational format optimized for facilitating internal thought, abstraction, and complex inference.)_
- [Natural language serves as a representational format that makes the task of general inference computationally tractable for artificial neur…](/claim/claim_2324c0ba6ba7.md) _(sense: A computationally efficient representational format optimized for facilitating internal thought, abstraction, and complex inference.)_
- [Natural language makes the tasks of inference and prediction computationally tractable by using abstraction to encode relevant information …](/claim/claim_2a634b8cbfd8.md) _(sense: A computationally efficient representational format optimized for facilitating internal thought, abstraction, and complex inference.)_
- [It is possible that the structural efficiency and data-compression found in natural language were shaped by the requirements of internal th…](/claim/claim_2b47cb1745b1.md) _(sense: A system evolved and optimized primarily for interpersonal communication and the exchange of information.)_
- [Natural language is optimized, at least in part, for its utility in facilitating thought and internal inference rather than being shaped so…](/claim/claim_a77f22e62394.md) _(sense: A system evolved and optimized primarily for interpersonal communication and the exchange of information.)_
- [The hypothesis that natural language is optimized for thought contradicts the prevailing view in cognitive science which asserts that langu…](/claim/claim_ce7b7122e57c.md) _(sense: A system evolved and optimized primarily for interpersonal communication and the exchange of information.)_
- [The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) makes it plausible that natural language is optimized, at least in part, for its utility in fac…](/claim/claim_dc68f3eaf264.md) _(sense: A computationally efficient representational format optimized for facilitating internal thought, abstraction, and complex inference.)_