Mental Actions and Mental Objects in the Space of Science Discourse

This paper presents an approach to discourse of science as a mental space. We propose to consider this space as formed by mental actions and mental objects. Mental actions were described earlier [1], and mental objects are conceived in this paper as the main ideas of an academic text expressed by definitions. Based on more than 7000 primary research publications, it is shown that the correlations between mental objects and mental actions vary in composition and strength in publications of various disciplines; therefore, this method can capture the characteristics of the intelligent tools of research and communication in a particular discipline. Presenting the contents of research publications as a constellation of extracted mental actions and mental objects can be one of the way of improving text mining.