 According to the language of thought hypothesis (see the entry on the  language of thought hypothesis),  our cognition proceeds rather like such a robot’s. The formulae we manipulate are not in “machine language”, of course, but rather in a species-wide “language of thought”. A sentence in the language of thought with some particular propositional content P is a “representation” of P. On this view, a subject believes that P just in case she has a representation of P that plays the right kind of role—a “belief-like” role—in her cognition. That is, the representation must not merely be instantiated somewhere in the mind or brain, but it must be deployed, or apt to be deployed, in ways we regard as characteristic of belief. For example, it must be apt to be called up for use in theoretical inferences toward which it is relevant. It must be ready for appropriate deployment in deliberation about means to desired ends. It is sometimes said, in such a case, that the subject has the proposition P, or a representation of that proposition, tokened in her “belief box” (though of course it is not assumed that there is any literal box-like structure in the head).