Hi Amy,
Here is a link to Gregory Currie's paper, Art, the Mind and the Brain.
To be honest, I've always had mixed feelings about Jerry Fodor's computationalist approach, which is a central inspiration for Currie's as far as I can tell. However, Fodor's concept of "mentalese" suggests the existence of a mental language which doesn't rely on a lexical syntactical structure (as I recall) which sounds like what Currie might be arguing against in his book. Or maybe he isn't.
The impression that I got from Cynthia's review was that Currie feels that such a thing would stretch the term "language" beyond it's elasticity. For what it's worth, I believe that it can be (and has been) cogently argued that thought itself entails mental languages that are not lexically structured, i.e., not sentential, grammatical, or word based. This goes a long way in explaining how animals other then ourselves think without the benefit of lexical syntax.
My guess is that his paper is too vague and reductionistic for your (Amy's) taste, but I could be wrong. Currie's paper is pretty short, so I won't get into it any further right now.
Best, Glenn ============================================================== Post Message: Send a message to artwithbraininmind-l@pks.bu.edu Web Archive: http://pks.bu.edu/artwithbraininmind-l Unsubscribe: Send message to majordomo@pks.bu.edu with 'unsubscribe artwithbraininmind-l' in body.
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