document: A conflict between language and atomistic information Fred Dretske and Jerry Fodor are responsible for popularizing three well-known theses in contemporary philosophy of mind : the thesis of Information-Based Semantics -LRB- IBS -RRB- , the thesis of Content Atomism -LRB- Atomism -RRB- and the thesis of the Language of Thought -LRB- LOT -RRB- . LOT concerns the semantically relevant structure of representations involved in cognitive states such as beliefs and desires . It maintains that all such representations must have syntactic structures mirroring the structure of their contents . IBS is a thesis about the nature of the relations that connect cognitive representations and their parts to their contents -LRB- semantic relations -RRB- . It holds that these relations supervene solely on relations of the kind that support information content , perhaps with some help from logical principles of combination . Atomism is a thesis about the nature of the content of simple symbols . It holds that each substantive simple symbol possesses its content independently of all other symbols in the representational system . I argue that Dretske 's and Fodor 's theories are false and that their falsehood results from a conflict IBS and Atomism , on the one hand , and LOT , on the other
doc_bio_tags: O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O B O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O B I I O B O O B O O O O O O O O O B I O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O
extractive_keyphrases: philosophy of mind content atomism ibs language of thought lot cognitive states beliefs desires
abstractive_keyphrases: information-based semantics