Mentalese

English

Noun

Mentalese (usually uncountable, plural Mentaleses)

1. Alternative letter-case form of mentalese
   • 1964 November 12, Wilfrid Sellars, “Notes on Intentionality”, in The Journal of Philosophy, volume LXI, number 21, New York, N.Y.: The Journal of Philosophy, →DOI, →ISSN, →JSTOR, →OCLC, page 657:

     The concept of a proposition as something that can be expressed by sentences in both Mentalese and, say, English is an analogical extension of the concept of a proposition as something that can be expressed by sentences in both English and German.

   • 1977, P. G. Patel, “The Left Parieto-temporo-occipital Junction, Semantic Aphasia and Language Development around Age Seven”, in Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences, volume 15, number 196, Berlin, New York, N.Y.: Mouton de Gruyter, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 45:

     Translationists are said to treat the coding of thoughts in ‘Mentalese’, whose structure is already known, into a natural language, just like translating a natural language, say Russian, in terms of another known language, say English (G 282). Incorporationists point out the circularity of (36b) because Mentalese, supposed to be intrinsically intelligible, is just English or some other variety of a natural language, and the translation maneuver only postpones the problem, […]

   • 2006, Peter Carruthers, “The Case for Massively Modular Models of Mind”, in The Architecture of the Mind: Massive Modularity and the Flexibility of Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, section 6 (The Argument from Computational Tractability), page 51:

     [I]t is probably misleading to talk about the language of thought, or to talk about ‘Mentalese’, as if it were a single representational system. We should more properly, in the context of a thesis of massive mental modularity, talk about languages of thought, or Mentaleses.