We make up mental categories continuously, every time we think, be . combination in order to make up a mental category, are a form of memory. . | , (2005) Basic mental operations which make up mental categories Giulio Benedetti (Translation from Italian is my own; it has been kindly revised by Mr Nicholas White) Abstract One of the fundamental tasks the Scuola Operativa Italiana (.) [Italian Operational School] has devoted itself to has been the task of analysing, in terms of mental operations, what . calls “men- tal categories”, that is the meanings of the words that clearly do not indicate something physical (amongst these are, first of all, words which are very frequently used and are absolutely indispensable in order to think and to speak, like conjunctions, prepositions, cases, pronouns, fundamental verbs like “to be”, “to have” etc., main adverbs etc.). Traditional linguistics and modern semantics have not been able to define such meanings (neither philosophy nor cognitive psychology were successful). Such a task has shown itself to be very hard and, in contrast to other fields of the research carried out by . about the working of human mind, the methods used and the results achieved are contrasting. Because of this, in this article the author proposes a completely new model of the so-called “elemen- tary mental operations”, which, in .’s opinion, combine to make up mental categories. Moreover, by means of some examples he shows how this model allows us a rather simple analysis of mental categories themselves. Key words: mind, mental operations, attention, Scuola Operativa Italiana, linguistics, semantics, phi- losophy, cognitive psychology. Information about copyright (© 2005, by Giulio Benedetti) This article may be copied and diffused freely, except for commercial purposes. You must always quote its author (Giulio Benedetti) and its origin site (by Giorgio Marchetti) 2 The research, carried out by the Scuola Operativa Italiana (.) in approximately 50 years since the . was born, fundamentally thanks .
