The structure of thought

Many philosophers hold that all thoughts are conceptually structured--that they are composed of concepts in much the way that a sentence is composed of words. My dissertation explores and ultimately challenges this view, drawing on empirical results from the cognitive sciences to argue that thoughts come in a variety of structures, many of which are nonconceptual. I begin the dissertation in chapter 1 by providing a broadly functionalist account of thought according to which thoughts are contentful mental states of a subject that causally and inferentially mediate between perception and action, are modifiable through learning and are stored in memory. In chapters 2 and 3 I then discuss the thesis that thoughts are conceptually structured--i.e., that their contents or vehicles are structured like sentences. One consequence of this thesis is the Generality Constraint, which holds that the thoughts one can think are closed under recombination of the constituents of the sentences which best express them. Having generated an understanding of the thesis that thoughts are conceptually structured, I turn in the second half of the dissertation to evaluate its truth. Chapter 4 considers seve