"Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul. And without considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: ‘This is the cause!’" (Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace", 1867)
"Thus representations of the external world are images of the lawlike temporal succession of natural events, and if they are correctly formed in accordance with the laws of our thinking, and we are able correctly to translate them back again into actuality through our actions, then the representations that we have are also the uniquely true [ones] for our faculty of thought; all others would be false." (Hermann von Helmholtz, "Handbuch der physiologischen Optik" Vol. 3, 1867)
"Things and events explain themselves, and the business of thought is to brush aside the verbal and conceptual impediments which prevent them from doing so. Start with the notion that it is you who explain the Object, and not the Object that explains itself, and you are bound to end in explaining it away. It ceases to exist, its place being taken by a parcel of concepts, a string of symbols, a form of words, and you find yourself contemplating, not the thing, but your theory of the thing." (Lawrence P Jacks, "The Usurpation Of Language", 1910)
"Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy." (David L Watson, 1930)
"If the organism carries a ‘small-scale model’ of external reality and of its possible actions within its head, it is able to try out various alternatives, conclude which is the best of them, react to future simulations before they arise, utilize the knowledge of past events in dealing with the present and the future, and in every way to react in a much fuller, safer, and more competent manner to the emergencies which face it." (Kenneth Craik, "The Nature of Explanation", 1943)
"Thus we do not try to prove the existence of the external world – we discover it, because the fundamental power of words or other symbols to represent events [...] permits us to put forward hypotheses and test their truth by reference to experience." (Kenneth Craik, "The Nature of Explanation", 1943)
"Early scientific thinking was holistic, but speculative - the modern scientific temper reacted by being empirical, but atomistic. Neither is free from error, the former because it replaces factual inquiry with faith and insight, and the latter because it sacrifices coherence at the altar of facticity. We witness today another shift in ways of thinking: the shift toward rigorous but holistic theories. This means thinking in terms of facts and events in the context of wholes, forming integrated sets with their own properties and relationships."(Ervin László, "Introduction to Systems Philosophy", 1972)
"Because the subject matter of cybernetics is the propositional or informational aspect of the events and objects in the natural world, this science is forced to procedures rather different from those of the other sciences. The differentiation, for example, between map and territory, which the semanticists insist that scientists shall respect in their writings must, in cybernetics, be watched for in the very phenomena about which the scientist writes. Expectably, communicating organisms and badly programmed computers will mistake map for territory; and the language of the scientist must be able to cope with such anomalies." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)
"A schema, then is a data structure for representing the generic concepts stored in memory. There are schemata representing our knowledge about all concepts; those underlying objects, situations, events, sequences of events, actions and sequences of actions. A schema contains, as part of its specification, the network of interrelations that is believed to normally hold among the constituents of the concept in question. A schema theory embodies a prototype theory of meaning. That is, inasmuch as a schema underlying a concept stored in memory corresponds to the meaning of that concept, meanings are encoded in terms of the typical or normal situations or events that instantiate that concept." (David E Rumelhart, "Schemata: The building blocks of cognition", 1980)
"Since mental models can take many forms and serve many purposes, their contents are very varied. They can contain nothing but tokens that represent individuals and identities between them, as in the sorts of models that are required for syllogistic reasoning. They can represent spatial relations between entities, and the temporal or causal relations between events. A rich imaginary model of the world can be used to compute the projective relations required for an image. Models have a content and form that fits them to their purpose, whether it be to explain, to predict, or to control." (Philip Johnson-Laird, "Mental models: Toward a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness", 1983)
"The basic idea is that schemata are data structures for representing the generic concepts stored in memory. There are schemata for generalized concepts underlying objects, situations, events, sequences of events, actions, and sequences of actions. Roughly, schemata are like models of the outside world. To process information with the use of a schema is to determine which model best fits the incoming information. Ultimately, consistent configurations of schemata are discovered which, in concert, offer the best account for the input. This configuration of schemata together constitutes the interpretation of the input. (David E Rumelhart, Paul Smolensky, James L McClelland & Geoffrey E Hinton, "Schemata and sequential thought processes in PDP models", 1986)
"There is no coherent knowledge, i.e. no uniform comprehensive account of the world and the events in it. There is no comprehensive truth that goes beyond an enumeration of details, but there are many pieces of information, obtained in different ways from different sources and collected for the benefit of the curious. The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Farewell to Reason", 1987)
"If you perceive the world as some place where things happen at random - random events over which you have sometimes very little control, sometimes fairly good control, but still random events - well, one has to be able to have some idea of how these things behave. […] People who are not used to statistics tend to see things in data - there are random fluctuations which can sometimes delude them - so you have to understand what can happen randomly and try to control whatever can be controlled. You have to expect that you are not going to get a clean-cut answer. So how do you interpret what you get? You do it by statistics." (Lucien LeCam, [interview] 1988)
"We build mental models that represent significant aspects of our physical and social world, and we manipulate elements of those models when we think, plan, and try to explain events of that world. The ability to construct and manipulate valid models of reality provides humans with our distinctive adaptive advantage; it must be considered one of the crowning achievements of the human intellect." (Gordon H Bower & Daniel G Morrow, 1990)
"[Schemata are] knowledge structures that represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information." (Paul J DiMaggio, "Culture and Cognition", Annual Review of Sociology No. 23, 1997)
"According to the representational format claim, images constitute a class of mental models that is particularly suited to represent visually perceptible information. More specifically, an image can be conceived of as a viewer centered projection of an underlying mental model which, in turn, represents spatiotemporal aspects of external objects or events. Unlike propositional or network representations, images depict, rather than describe, a particular state of affairs." (Gert Rickheit & Lorenz Sichelschmidt, „Mental Models: Some Answers, Some Questions, Some Suggestions", 1999)
"In broad terms, a mental model is to be understood as a dynamic symbolic representation of external objects or events on the part of some natural or artificial cognitive system. Mental models are thought to have certain properties which make them stand out against other forms of symbolic representations." (Gert Rickheit & Lorenz Sichelschmidt, "Mental Models: Some Answers, Some Questions, Some Suggestions", 1999)
"What it means for a mental model to be a structural analog is that it embodies a representation of the spatial and temporal relations among, and the causal structures connecting the events and entities depicted and whatever other information that is relevant to the problem-solving talks. […] The essential points are that a mental model can be nonlinguistic in form and the mental mechanisms are such that they can satisfy the model-building and simulative constraints necessary for the activity of mental modeling." (Nancy J Nersessian, "Model-based reasoning in conceptual change", 1999)
"Bounded rationality simultaneously constrains the complexity of our cognitive maps and our ability to use them to anticipate the system dynamics. Mental models in which the world is seen as a sequence of events and in which feedback, nonlinearity, time delays, and multiple consequences are lacking lead to poor performance when these elements of dynamic complexity are present." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"We must begin by distinguishing between visual mental imagery and visual perception: Visual perception occurs while a stimulus is being viewed, and includes functions such as visual recognition (i. e., registering that a stimulus is familiar) and identification (i. e., recalling the name, context, or other information associated with the object). Two types of mechanisms are used in visual perception: ‘bottom-up’ mechanisms are driven by the input from the eyes; in contrast, ‘top-down’ mechanisms make use of stored information (such as knowledge, belief, expectations, and goals). Visual mental imagery is a set of representations that gives rise to the experience of viewing a stimulus in the absence of appropriate sensory input. In this case, information in memory underlies the internal events that produce the experience. Unlike afterimages, mental images are relatively prolonged." (Stephen M Kosslyn, "Mental images and the brain", Cognitive Neuropsychology 22, 2005)
"At all events, our world pictures may have components of all three kinds: perceptual, conceptual, and praxiological (action-theoretical). This is because there are three gates to the outer world: perception, conception, and action. However, ordinarily only one or two of them need be opened: combinations of all three, as in building a house according to a blueprint, are the exception. We may contemplate a landscape without forming either a conceptual model of it or a plan to act upon it. And we may build a theoretical model of an imperceptible thing, such as an invisible extrasolar planet, on which we cannot act." (Mario Bunge, "Chasing Reality: Strife over Realism", 2006)
"[…] our mental models fail to take into account the complications of the real world - at least those ways that one can see from a systems perspective. It is a warning list. Here is where hidden snags lie. You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long-term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays. You are likely to mistreat, misdesign, or misread systems if you don’t respect their properties of resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy." (Donella H Meadows, "Thinking in Systems: A Primer", 2008)
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