ABSTRACT
Psychology.—Prepositional format in cognitive psychology is an abstract way of representing knowledge (→REPRESENTATION) that can be formalized according to a predicate logic (→INFORMATION, LOGIC, SYMBOL). It is qualified as “abstract” for two reasons. (1) The mental representation of a propositional function, that is, a psychological predicate associated with one or more arguments-for example, ON (x, y)—is a way of conceptualizing objects and their relations in terms of classes-in our example, the set of all (x, y) pairs that make the function ON (x, y) true-and hence, without reference to particular instances (→CATEGORIZATION, CONCEPT, FUNCTION). (2) Even when the predicate function is instantiated in a given context-say, ON (vase, table)— the resulting proposition is not in verbal or image format (→LANGUAGE, MENTAL IMAGERY). In our example, we are not talking about the image of a vase on a table, nor about the image of the proposition describing a vase on a table. Moreover, even though propositions are linear strings of symbols in a mental language whose lexicon strictly but not totally corresponds to that of natural language, they are still not sentences; the syntax differs (→LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT, LEXICON, SYNTAX).
