Basic mental operations which make up mental categories

One of the fundamental tasks the Scuola Operativa Italiana (S.O.I.) [Italian Operational School] has devoted itself to has been the task of analysing, in terms of mental operations, what S.O.I. calls “mental 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 S.O.I. 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 “elementary mental operations”, which, in S.O.I.’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.