I've recently read a few books on cognition and psycholinguistics which has put a name to a concept I've become increasing the familiar with, the Language of Thought Hypothesis; wherein researchers theorize that mentalese, and subsequently most of human thought, follow syntactical rules.
They attempt to translate sentences into language independent symbolic propositions, for example: "Sam spray-painted the walls." Becomes "(Sam spray paint) cause (paint go to (on wall))"
I find this endlessly fascinating but I struggle to think of an actual application of this kind of knowledge. What could we actually do with an understanding of how thoughts are structured syntactically?
The one and only thing that comes to mind would be intelligently designing future languages to fit more snugly with cognition, which is no small thing admittedly. But I would love to discuss the implications of this research if anything comes to mind to anyone.
No worries thanks for engaging. Regarding the language of thought hypothesis; any proponent of the hypothesis would readily admit that many of forms/methods of logic exist in cognition. The interesting finding is that all languages seem to share a 'universal grammar' which is broken down further than 'subject, verb, noun' but instead into 'Heads, tails, qualifiers, modifiers' and potentially other units I'm still unfamiliar with. Looking at languages like this coincidentally (or perhaps too conveniently depending on ones opinion) allows you two divide all human languages into 'head first' or 'tail first', English or Japanese, for example, respectively. Despite the fact that these units could theoretically have numerous compositions that do not and have not existed as a spoken human language.
The implication is that humans are not just designed to speak, but to speak a very certain way with marginal room for variety.