Mentalist Postulate

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The Mentalist Postulate is the thesis that meaning in natural language is an information structure that is mentally encoded by human beings. It is a basic premise of some branches of cognitive semantics. Semantic theories implicitly or explicitly incorporating the Mentalist Postulate include Force Dynamics and Conceptual Semantics.

Two implications of the Mentalist Postulate are: first, that research on the nature of mental representations can serve to constrain or enrich semantic theories; and secondly, that results of semantic theories bear directly on the nature of human conceptualization.