I used to read (and write) stuff like this a lot and it has had a lasting influence. This paper, from 2001, is new to me but an excellent representation of how I would think of things like sentences in the brain and objects of thought. The argument at its core is simple: while we naively think that we think about thinks in the world, such a story cannot be true because we can just as easily think about things that don't exist, like purple dragons, or about entities with indeterminate properties, like a man with no particular hair colour. The 'aboutness' of the thought is in the thought itself. This (to me) means that the meaning of thoughts is not the same as the meaning of sentences, and therefore, that thoughts are not sentences (Crane reaches much the same conclusion). More goodness from Tim Crane.
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