Dautriche Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2024

Developmental and evolutionary origins of the language of thought

How do human infants and non-human animals think? Fodor famously framed the idea that human minds operate in a language-like format, a “language of thought” (LoT), where mental representations compose in the manner of formal language symbols, allowing us to build arbitrarily complex mental structures out of a small set of initial primitive operations. Through all areas of cognitive science, there has been rich evidence supporting the idea that a LoT could explain many facets of human cognition. Do infants and animals also have a LoT? While the existence of a LoT in the absence of language has been questioned for centuries by philosophers, psychologists and linguists alike, little direct…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.