A Review of Sketches of Thought

That intelligence is a form of information processing and that the framework of modern digital computers provides pretty much all that is needed for representing and processing information for doing AI are two of the most foundational of such assumptions. Turing (1950) explicitly articulated this idea in the late 1940s, and later Newell and Simon (1976) proposed the physical symbol system hypothesis (PSSH) as a newer form of the same set of intuitions about the relation between computation and thinking. In this tradition, the computational approach is not just one way of making intelligent systems, but representing and processing information within the computational framework is necessary for intelligence as a process, wherever it is implemented. The language of thought (LOT) hypothesis, of which Fodor (1975) has given the most well-known exposition, is a variant of the computational hypothesis in AI. LOT holds that underlying thinking is a medium that has the properties of formal symbolic languages that we are familiar with in computer science.