The mentalist postulate is the thesis that meaning in natural language

Natural language

In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...

 is an information structure that is mentally encoded by human beings. It is a basic premise of some branches of cognitive semantics

Cognitive semantics

Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement. The main tenets of cognitive semantics are, first, that grammar is conceptualisation; second, that conceptual structure is embodied and motivated by usage; and third, that the ability to use language draws upon general cognitive...

. Semantic theories implicitly or explicitly incorporating the mentalist postulate include force dynamics

Force Dynamics

Force dynamics is a semantic category that describes the way in which entities interact with reference to force. Force Dynamics gained a good deal of attention in cognitive linguistics due to its claims of psychological plausibility and the elegance with which it generalizes ideas not usually...

 and conceptual semantics

Conceptual Semantics

Conceptual semantics is a framework for semantic analysis developed mainly by Ray Jackendoff. Its aim is to provide a characterization of the conceptual elements by which a person understands words and sentences, and thus to provide an explanatory semantic representation...

.

Two implications of the mentalist postulate are: first, that research on the nature of mental representation

Mental representation

A representation, in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality, or else a mental process that makes use of such a symbol; "a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types...

s can serve to constrain or enrich semantic theories; and secondly, that results of semantic theories bear directly on the nature of human conceptualization.