One mechanism for many mental spaces: a shared router over a value slot in language models
Language builds discourse contexts other than the actual: a painting, a belief, a memory, a hypothetical. Each is a mental space in which the same entity can take a different value, as when a flower is red in reality but purple in a portrait. Formal semantics keeps these contexts apart because their logics differ (modal, temporal, doxastic, depictive). Fauconnier's mental-space theory, by contrast, treats them as one space-building operation. We ask which of these a transformer language model implements, and find a mechanistic version of Fauconnier's unification. The model uses one router/slot format across the inventory: a reusable value slot stores attributed content, and a causally man...
| Authors | Oliver Steele, Jiangtao Wen, Yuxing Han |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 11 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 July 2026 |
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