Thinking about Mentalese

Abstract

Whereas the notion of thinking is not difficult to understand to us, since we know what thinking is (because we sometimes think, cogitate and observe ourselves thinking), the notion of mentalese or thought-language seems to be more than ambiguous. Its ambiguity does not rise from Jerry Fodor's conception only but rather from different epistemological views of our mentality. If we are physicalists (as Fodor and his followers are) we think about our thinking processes as brain events only. If we follow Edmund Husserl's phenomenology for example, we do not treat our mind as brain at all. Correspondingly mentalese for physicalists is (and must be) something completely different than for phenomenologists.