Structured thoughts: The spatial-motor view

Abstract

We defend a conception of thoughts that lies between the linguistic and digital views. First we present these views, insisting on their defining features and what distinguishes them. Then we defend what we believe to be the central claim of our view, the idea that spatial and motor thoughts can have compositional structure: non-linguistic thought can be mereological, combinatorial, productive and systematic, and hence may support deductive inferences. Our account draws on robotics, psychological and neuroloscientifics models and datas.