• Event Date: November 12, 2009
  • Event Start Time: 12:00 PM
  • Event End Time: 7:00 PM
  • Event Location: University of Pennsylvania, Department of Philosophy
  • Event Semester: Fall 2009
  • Event Contact: Dr. Elisabeth Camp
  • Event Extra info: <a href="http://www.phil.upenn.edu/faculty/camp/">Dr. Elisabeth Camp</a>

 

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth have recently argued that baboons think in a propositional, discrete-valued, rule-governed, open-ended, and hierarchically structured representational medium; they conclude that baboons think in a Language of Thought, and that the primary reason they don't speak is that they lack a Theory of Mind.  I argue that a representational medium which possesses these five properties could still fall significantly short of a language in its expressive power, and explore the implications for our understanding of the distinctive expressive advantages of language.