[naasking]

Are the particles that make up thoughts in our brain not also a representation of a thought? Isn't "thought" really some kind of Platonic ideal that only has approximate material representations? If so, why couldn't some language sentences be thoughts?

[qlm]

The sentence is the result of a thought. The sentence in itself does not capture every process that went into producing the sentence.

[naasking]

> The sentence in itself does not capture every process that went into producing the sentence.

A thought does not capture every process that went into producing the thought either.

[qlm]

I guess? I would argue that a thought doesn't "capture" anything though, because unlike language it's not a representational tool.

A painting of a landscape can capture details of the landscape it's representing. The landscape itself doesn't capture anything, it just is.

[naasking]

> The landscape itself doesn't capture anything, it just is.

Sure, but the landscape is something, namely an aggregate of particles. A thought in principle isn't its physical expression, but its information content, and it's represented in a human brain by some aggregate of particles. So no matter how you slice it, thoughts can only manifest within representations, and so calling language a representation of thought isn't some kind of dunk, because it also proves that human brains don't have thoughts.

It's not clear whether the information content of all possible human thoughts can be captured by language, but clearly at least some language expressions have the same information content as human thoughts.