 Given that intentionality is primitive, Abelard adopts a contextual approach to mental content: he embeds these irreducible acts of attention in a structure whose articulation helps define the character of its constituent elements. The structure Abelard offers is linguistic, a logic of mental acts: just as words can be said to express thoughts, so too we can use the articulated logic of language to give a theory of understanding. In short, Abelard gives something very like a linguistic account of mental representation or intentionality. To this end he embraces a principle of compositionality, holding that what an understanding is about is a function of what its constituent understandings are about. The unity of the understanding of a complex is a function of its logical simplicity, which is characterized by the presence of what Abelard calls “a single dominant conjunction” (the logical operator of greatest scope). Hence the understanding of a complex may be treated as a complex of distinct understandings, aggregated in the same thought, with its (logical) structure flowing from the ‘dominant conjunction’ over the other logical operations governing its constituent understandings. Abelard’s acts of attention thus display the logical structure of the understanding they express, and thereby give the semantics of written or spoken language. Much of Abelard’s writings on logic and dialectic are given over to working out the details as a scheme for explicating mental content.