Mental Models are Compatible with Logical Forms

Abstract

The mental models theory is a current cognitive approach claiming that human intellectual activity is essentially about semantic possibilities and that syntax and logical form are not relevant. Many experimental results support this theory and its predictions. So, it appears to be justified to assume its main theses. However, in this paper, I argue that the acceptance of the mental models theory does not necessarily have to lead to a rejection of logical forms. Clear relationships between the theory and standard logic can be easily found, and I try to show this in two ways. On the one hand, I claim that the models that the theory assigns to sentences are compatible with truth tables. On the other hand, I also defend that the definitions of a connective by means of another one that can be given in standard logic hold in the mental models theory too, since the sentences that are equivalent in the former have exactly the same models in the latter.

Possible roles for semantics and syntax in a government-binding structure

“…It is true, and that has been said above too, that what has been presented here is not a rigorous description of the mental models theory, but only an interpretation of it, the one given in works such as, for example, those of López-Astorga (2015, 2017, and which links it to syntax, in order to show that it can be compatible with a general structure such as the one of the linguistic government-binding theory. Based on that interpretation, this paper has offered an account of the way the processes of linguistic messages production and transmission can be carried out.…”

“…In particular, of course, with nuances, changes, and modifications, it appears that such levels can be, in principle, linked to proposals such as, for example, the one of López-Astorga (2017). Approaches such as this last one try to relate basically semantic frameworks rejecting logical forms to much more syntactic theses tending to lend primacy to the formal aspects in thought and in cognition.…”

In Favor of Logical Form

“…In this way, the basic aim of this paper is to continue to give further arguments in the direction assumed in works such as that of López-Astorga (2017a). In particular, what I will attempt to do here is, also accepting the priority role of semantics (and pragmatics) in the human mind, to deal with one of the explanations offered in a former paper supporting the theory of mental models.…”

Logical Forms Depend on Semantic Models: the Illusory Disjunctive Sentences as Pieces of Evidence

“…This paper will follow the general theoretical line of works such as López-Astorga (2017, 2019). López-Astorga (2017, 2019 proposes that, indeed, reasoning is made as the theory of mental models claims. Nevertheless, according to those very works, that does not mean that syntax has to be rejected, since the method of analysis used by the theory also allows deriving from it the real logical forms corresponding to sentences in natural language.…”

“…Therefore, the novelty that will be presented below is that this relation between semantics and syntax will be reviewed by analyzing an example that seems not to have been dealt with from the point of view of works such as the ones of López-Astorga (2017, 2019. That is the case of certain disjunctive sentences that people usually tend to consider as totally true under any circumstance, that is, in Kantian terminology, that people tend to deem as 'analytic' (or, by using a concept provided by Carnap, 1947, 'L-true'), when, actually, they do not have that characteristic.…”