Revisiting LoT: New advances on Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Philosophy
Short Title: LoT 2023

Date: 11-Jul-2023 - 13-Jul-2023
Location: Nantes, France
Contact: Hamida Demirdache
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://lot2023.univ-nantes.fr/

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science

Meeting Description:

What are the primitives of thought? Guided by this question, the nature of mental representation has been at the center of cross-disciplinary research in the cognitive sciences since their very inception. One of the most prominent answers to that question is based on the idea that there exists a language-like system of mental representations which vehicles and structures human thinking. This is known as the Language of Thought (LoT) hypothesis. In recent years, researchers have started bringing tools from different disciplines to further investigate the LoT hypothesis. This includes psychology, linguistics, and computer sciences among others.

This workshop brings together experts from linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive sciences, who have made recent groundbreaking contributions to various issues surrounding the LoT hypothesis

Program:

Tuesday, July 11
Probabilistic Language of Thought by Fausto Carcassi

Wednesday, July 12

9h30-11h00 Steven Piantadosi – The Language of Thought as a modern psychological theory
11h00-11h30 Coffee break
11h30-12h50 Fausto Carcassi – Structure learning in the probabilistic Language of Thought and Active Inference
Nina Kazanina – Neural implementation for Language of Thought
12h50-14h00 Lunch break
14h00-15h30 Isabelle Dautriche – Compositionality in non-linguistic thought and in early language acquisition
15h30-16h00 Coffee break
16h00-18h00 Rachel Dudley – Understanding of negation in infancy
Jean-Remy Hochmann – Incomplete Language of Thought in infancy
Sophie Moracchini – Semantic priming in a non-verbal learning task

Thursday, July 13

09h30-10h30 Eric Mandelbaum – The Best Game in Town, Part 1: Logic
10h30-11h30 Jake Quilty-Dunn – The Best Game in Town, Part 2: Perception
11h30-12h00 Coffee break
12h00-13h00 Nicolas Porot – The Best Game in Town, Part 3: Infants and Animals
13h00-14h00 Lunch break
14h00-15h30 Véronique Izard – Abstraction at birth
Mathias Sablé-Meyer – Using a Language of Thought formalism to account for the mental representation of geometric shapes in humans
15h30-16h00 Coffee break
16h00-17h00