Abstract

Although its proponents do not support that idea, the theory of mental models has been used to recover deep syntactic structures of sentences. In fact, the theory has been linked to System K and modal logic, and hidden logical forms with modal operators have been proposed. However, this paper analyzes one of the last developments of the theory, the one related to counterfactual disjunctions and conditionals, in order to check whether or not that methodology can also be applied to these two kinds of sentences. The result seems to show a negative conclusion, that System K is not enough in the case of counterfactual sentences, and that, if it is wanted to recover the syntactic structures of these last sentences, it is necessary to resort, at least, to temporal logical elements as well.