Quantification and the language of thought

Many researchers have suggested that the psychological complexity of a concept is related to the length of its representation in a language of thought. As yet, however, there are few concrete proposals about the nature of this language. This paper makes one such proposal: the language of thought allows first order quantification (quantification over objects) more readily than second-order quantification (quantification over features). To support this proposal we present behavioral results from a concept learning study inspired by the work of Shepard, Hovland and Jenkins. Humans can learn and think about many kinds of concepts, including natural kinds such as elephant and water and nominal kinds such as grandmother and prime number. Understanding the mental representations that support these abilities is a central challenge for cognitive science. This paper proposes that quantification plays a role in conceptual representation—for example, an animal X qualifies as a predator if there is some animal Y such that X hunts Y . The concepts we consider are much simpler than real-world examples such as predator, but even simple laboratory studies can provide important clues about the nature of mental representation. Our approach to mental representation is based on the language of thought hypothesis [1]. As pursued here, the hypothesis proposes that mental representations are constructed in a compositional language of some kind, and that the psychological complexity of a concept is closely related to the length of its representation in this language [2, 3, 4]. Following previous researchers [2, 4], we operationalize the psychological complexity of a concept in terms of the ease with which it is learned and remembered. Given these working assumptions, the remaining challenge is to specify the representational resources provided by the language of thought. Some previous studies have relied on propositional logic as a representation language [2, 5], but we believe that the resources of predicate logic are needed to capture the structure of many human concepts. In particular, we suggest that the language of thought can accommodate relations, functions, and quantification, and focus here on the role of quantification. Our primary proposal is that quantification is supported by the language of thought, but that quantification over objects is psychologically more natural than quantification over features. To test this idea we compare concept learning in two domains which are very similar except for one critical difference: one domain allows quantification over objects, and the other allows quantification over features. We consider several logical languages that can be used to formulate concepts in both domains, and find that learning times are best predicted by a language that supports quantification over objects but not features. Our work illustrates how theories of mental representation can be informed by comparing concept learning across two or more domains. Existing studies work with a range of domains, and it is useful to consider a “conceptual universe” that includes these possibilities along with many others that have not yet been studied. Table 1 charts a small fragment of this universe, and the penultimate column shows example stimuli that will be familiar from previous studies of concept learning. Previous studies have made important contributions by choosing a single domain in Table 1 and explaining