Abstract

Peter Carruthers' main thesis is that "Human conscious thinkings achieve their status as such by virtue of consisting of deployments of natural language sentences in imagination, which are then made available in short-term memory to be thought about in turn". In arguing for this thesis, he defends a cognitive conception of language, which "accords a central place to natural language within our cognition" against a communicative conception of language, according to which language is merely a means for articulating our thought to other people.