The primitive acts of conceptual dependency

Abstract

How should a proposition appear in memory? It simply cannot be stored in a form that bears a strong relationship to the original form of the input in natural language. Since it is possible to say .the same thing in any number of different ways, it is unreasonable to suppose that people are constantly checking to see if a proposition that they have stored one way in memory is the same as another they have stored somewhere else in a different form. What is far more likely is that people have developed a kind of canonical form. No two propositions in memory can be equivalent in this view, since the canonical form for their meaning forces them to be represented in the same way and thus stored and treated in the same way by memory.