Reasoning depends on envisaging the possibilities consistent with the starting point. We construct mental models of each distinct possibility and derive conclusions from them. On this account, reasoning is a simulation of the world fleshed out with our knowledge.
Continue ReadingFlying bicycles: How the Wright brothers invented the airplane
paper explores the ways in which Wilbur and Orville Wright thought as they tackled the problem of designing and constructing a heavier-than-air craft that would fly under its own power and under their control. They used analogies based on mental models.
Continue ReadingMental Models
Mental Models offers nothing less than a unified theory of the major properties of mind: comprehension, inference, and consciousness.
Most provocative, perhaps, is Johnson-Laird’s theory of consciousness: the mind’s necessarily incomplete model of itself allows only a partial control over the many unconscious and parallel processes of cognition.