This paper is a history of how “language” became a model for thought from the 1950s through the 1980s and specifically how cybernetic ideas of communication and stress pushed for the possibility of an internal language of thought. The paper begins with an introduction of psychological and cybernetic ideas of “communication” and the work done on stress in the psychological sciences during the 50s and 60s, influenced by ideas of Cold War fear and brainwashing. Cyberneticists discussed stressed systems as having problems in external and internal communication, and research on psychological stress drew from these cybernetics-based definitions. Researchers created models of “stressed minds” that rested on the breakdown of communication and ideas of diagnosis as the accessing of the state of the system, in the mathematical or psychological sense, through “noise,” that unintentional communication or behavior created by stress.
These models of stressed systems, either cybernetic or psychological, explicitly introduced the question of an internal language of thought. To discuss stress as hindering communication, particularly internal communication, some type of internal logically-consistent language must exist. For cybernetic systems, this could mean the programming language being used, but the question still remained; was there an internal language of thought? The 1970s saw a surge of debate surrounding the existence of this internal language, most clearly in Jerry Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis. This paper aims to show how cybernetic influenced models of stressed minds contributed to these language-type models.
