"Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience." (Roger Bacon, "Opus Majus", cca. 1267)
"[…] it is from long experience chiefly that we are to expect the most certain rules of practice, yet it is withal to be remembered, that observations, and to put us upon the most probable means of improving any art, is to get the best insight we can into the nature and properties of those things which we are desirous to cultivate and improve." (Stephen Hales, "Vegetable Staticks", 1727)
"Men always fool themselves when they give up experience for systems born of the imagination. Man is the work of nature, he exists in nature, he is subject to its laws, he can not break free, he can not leave even in thought; it is in vain that his spirit wants to soar beyond the bounds of the visible world, he is always forced to return." (Paul-Henri T d’ Holbach, "Système de la Nature", 1770)
"It falls into this difficulty without any fault of its own. It begins with principles, which cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its own nature, to ever higher and more remote conditions. But it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labours must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust. It thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion. The arena of these endless contests is called Metaphysic." (Immanuel Kant, "The Critique of Pure Reason", 1781)
"In order to supply the defects of experience, we will have recourse to the probable conjectures of analogy, conclusions which we will bequeath to our posterity to be ascertained by new observations, which, if we augur rightly, will serve to establish our theory and to carry it gradually nearer to absolute certainty." (Johann H Lambert, "The System of the World", 1800)
"We construct concepts when we represent them in intuition a priori, without experience, or when we represent in intuition the object which corresponds to our concept of it. - The mathematician can never apply his reason to mere concepts, nor the philosopher to the construction of concepts. - In mathematics the reason is employed in concreto, however, the intuition is not empirical, but the object of contemplation is something a priori." (Immanuel Kant, "Logic", 1800)
"Induction, analogy, hypotheses founded upon facts and rectified continually by new observations, a happy tact given by nature and strengthened by numerous comparisons of its indications with experience, such are the principal means for arriving at truth." (Pierre-Simon Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities", 1814)
"Theories are always very thin and unsubstantial; experience only is tangible." (Hosea Ballou, "Universalist Expositor", 1831)
"It is frequently analogy which guides the experienced to what are called good guesses." (Francis W Newman, "Lectures on Logic", 1838)
"A human being, what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts. Each human being becomes a little universe within the universe!" (Guy de Maupassant, [in "The Journal of a Madman"] 1851)
"By reducing imagination to the power of forming images, and by insisting that no image can be formed except out of the elements furnished by experience, I do not mean to confound imagination with memory; indeed, the frequent occurrence of great strength of memory with comparative feebleness of imagination, would suffice to warn us against such a conclusion." (George H Lewes, "The Principles of Success in Literature", 1865)
"To imagine - to form an image - we must have the numerous relations of things present to the mind, and see the objects in their actual order. In this we are of course greatly aided by the mass of organised experience, which allows us rapidly to estimate the relations of gravity or affinity just as we remember that fire burns and that heated bodies expand. But be the aid great or small, and the result victorious or disastrous, the imaginative process is always the same." (George H Lewes, "The Principles of Success in Literature", 1865)
"All experience attests the strength of the tendency to mistake mental abstractions, even negative ones, for substantive realities; and the Permanent Possibilities of sensation which experience guarantees arc so extremely unlike in many of their properties to actual sensations, that since we are capable of imagining something which transcends sensations, there is a great natural probability that we should suppose these to be it." (Hippolyte Taine, "On intelligence", 1871)
"Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases - which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept 'leaf' is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects." (Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense", 1873)
"Ideas are substitutions which require a secondary process when what is symbolized by them is translated into the images and experiences it replaces; and this secondary process is frequently not performed at all, generally only performed to a very small extent. Let anyone closely examine what has passed in his mind when he has constructed a chain of reasoning, and he will be surprised at the fewness and faintness of the images which have accompanied the ideas." (George H Lewes "Problems of Life and Mind", 1873)
"The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption - in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch." (Friedrich Nietzsche," On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense", 1873)
"Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea. To add to the mystery, the domain of our earthly existence is not only an island of infinite space, but also in infinite time. The past and the future are alike shrouded from us: we neither know the origin of anything which is, nor its final destination." (John S Mill, "Nature, The Utility of Religion and Theism", 1874)
"Summing up, then, it would seem as if the mind of the great discoverer must combine contradictory attributes. He must be fertile in theories and hypotheses, and yet full of facts and precise results of experience. He must entertain the feeblest analogies, and the merest guesses at truth, and yet he must hold them as worthless till they are verified in experiment. When there are any grounds of probability he must hold tenaciously to an old opinion, and yet he must be prepared at any moment to relinquish it when a clearly contradictory fact is encountered." (William S Jevons, "The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method", 1874)
"Incidentally, naive intuition, which is in large part an inherited talent, emerges unconsciously from the in-depth study of this or that field of science. The word ‘Anschauung’ has not perhaps been suitably chosen. I would like to include here the motoric sensation with which an engineer assesses the distribution of forces in something he is designing, and even that vague feeling possessed by the experienced number cruncher about the convergence of infinite processes with which he is confronted. I am saying that, in its fields of application, mathematical intuition understood in this way rushes ahead of logical thinking and in each moment has a wider scope than the latter " (Felix Klein, "Über Arithmetisierung der Mathematik", Zeitschrift für mathematischen und naturwissen-schaftlichen Unterricht 27, 1896)
"The mind of man, learning consciously and unconsciously lessons of experience, gradually constructs a mental image of its surroundings - as the mariner draws a chart of strange coasts to guide him in future voyages, and to enable those that follow after him to sail the same seas with ease and safety." (William C Dampier, "The Recent Development of Physical Science", 1904)
"Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested originally by the parts." (William James, "A Pluralistic Universe", 1908)
"In the presence of certain objects of thought or of certain affirmations the child, in virtue of previous experiences, adopts a certain way of reacting and thinking which is always the same, and which might be called a schema of reasoning. Such schemas are the functional equivalents of general propositions, but since the child is not conscious of these schemas before discussion and a desire for proof have laid them bare and at the same time changed their character, they cannot be said to constitute implicit general propositions. They simply constitute certain unconscious tendencies which live their own life but are submitted to no general systematization and consequently lead to no logical exactitude. To put it in another way, they form a logic of action but not yet a logic of thought." (Jean Piaget, "Judgement and Reasoning in the Child", 1928)
"Abstraction is the detection of a common quality in the characteristics of a number of diverse observations […] A hypothesis serves the same purpose, but in a different way. It relates apparently diverse experiences, not by directly detecting a common quality in the experiences themselves, but by inventing a fictitious substance or process or idea, in terms of which the experience can be expressed. A hypothesis, in brief, correlates observations by adding something to them, while abstraction achieves the same end by subtracting something." (Herbert Dingle, Science and Human Experience, 1931)
"'Schema' refers to an active organisation of past reactions, or of past experiences, which must always be supposed to be operating in any well-adapted organic response. That is, whenever there is any order or regularity of behavior, a particular response is possible only because it is related to other similar responses which have been serially organised, yet which operate, not simply as individual members coming one after another, but as a unitary mass. Determination by schemata is the most fundamental of all the ways in which we can be influenced by reactions and experiences which occurred some time in the past. All incoming impulses of a certain kind, or mode, go together to build up an active, organised setting: visual, auditory, various types of cutaneous impulses and the like, at a relatively low level; all the experiences connected by a common interest: in sport, in literature, history, art, science, philosophy, and so on, on a higher level." (Frederic C Bartlett, "Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology", 1932)
"Concepts can only acquire content when they are connected, however indirectly, with sensible experience. But no logical investigation can reveal this connection; it can only be experienced. […] this connection […] determines the cognitive value of systems of concepts." (Albert Einstein, "The Problem of Space, Ether, and the Field in Physics", Mein Weltbild, 1934)
"[…] reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible, with which thought in its advance is more and more identifying itself. We may look at the growth of knowledge […] as an attempt by our mind to return to union with things as they are in their ordered wholeness. […] and if we take this view, our notion of truth is marked out for us. Truth is the approximation of thought to reality […] Its measure is the distance thought has travelled […] toward that intelligible system […] The degree of truth of a particular proposition is to be judged in the first instance by its coherence with experience as a whole, ultimately by its coherence with that further whole, all comprehensive and fully articulated, in which thought can come to rest." (Brand Blanshard, "The Nature of Thought" Vol. II, 1939)
"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. [..] A particular type of symbolism may always fail in a particular case, as Euclidean geometry apparently fails to represent stellar space; but if all types of symbolism always failed, we should be unable to recognise any objects or exist at all." (Kenneth Craik, "The Nature of Explanation", 1943)
"A model, like a novel, may resonate with nature, but it is not a ‘real’ thing. Like a novel, a model may be convincing - it may ‘ring true’ if it is consistent with our experience of the natural world. But just as we may wonder how much the characters in a novel are drawn from real life and how much is artifice, we might ask the same of a model: How much is based on observation and measurement of accessible phenomena, how much is convenience? Fundamentally, the reason for modeling is a lack of full access, either in time or space, to the phenomena of interest." (Kenneth Belitz, Science, Vol. 263, 1944)
"The complete use of pure reason brings us finally from physical to metaphysical knowledge. But the concepts of metaphysical knowledge do not in themselves fully satisfy the demand of our integral being. They are indeed entirely satisfactory to the pure reason itself, because they are the very stuff of its own existence. But our nature sees things through two eyes always, for it views them doubly as idea and as fact and therefore every concept is incomplete for us and to a part of our nature almost unreal until it becomes an experience." (Sri Aurobindo, "The Life Divine", 1944)
"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own way." (Albert Einstein, "The World as I See It", 1949)
"Every bit of knowledge we gain and every conclusion we draw about the universe or about any part or feature of it depends finally upon some observation or measurement. Mankind has had again and again the humiliating experience of trusting to intuitive, apparently logical conclusions without observations, and has seen Nature sail by in her radiant chariot of gold in an entirely different direction." (Oliver J Lee, "Measuring Our Universe: From the Inner Atom to Outer Space", 1950)
"In speaking here of ‘comprehensibility’, the expression is used in its most modest sense. It implies: the production being produced by the creation of general concepts, relations between these concepts and sense experience. It is in this sense that the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." (Albert Einstein, "Out of My Later Years", 1950)
"As our mental eye penetrates into smaller and smaller distances and shorter and shorter times, we find nature behaving so entirely differently from what we observe in visible and palpable bodies of our surroundings that no model shaped after our large-scale experiences can ever be ‘true’. A complete satisfactory model of this type is not only practically inaccessible, but not even thinkable. Or, to be precise, we can, of course, think of it, but however we think it, it is wrong; not perhaps quite as meaningless as a ‘triangular circle’, but more so than a ‘winged lion’." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Science and Humanism", 1952)
"As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries - not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer." (Willard v O Quine, "From a Logical Point of View", 1953)
"Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics; we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged." (Willard van Orman Quine, "From a Logical Point of View", 1953)
"[a pictorial representation] is not a faithful record of a visual experience, but the faithful construction of a relational model […] Such a model can be constructed to any required degree of accuracy . What is decisive here is clearly the word 'required'. The form of a representation cannot be divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in which the given visual language gains currency." (Ernst H Gombrich," Art and illusion", 1960)
"Mental pictures offer us an opportunity to practice new traits and attitudes, which otherwise we could not do. This is possible because again - your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)
"What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see." (Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)
"People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail." (Richard Feynman, "The Character of Physical Law", 1965)
"The most pervasive paradox of the human condition which we see is that the processes which allow us to survive, grow, change, and experience joy are the same processes which allow us to maintain an impoverished model of the world - our ability to manipulate symbols, that is, to create models. So the processes which allow us to accomplish the most extraordinary and unique human activities are the same processes which block our further growth if we commit the error of mistaking the model of the world for reality." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)
"Imagining is not perceiving, but images are indeed derivatives of perceptual activity. In particular, they are the anticipatory phases of that activity, schemata that the perceiver has detached from the perceptual cycle for other purposes. […] The experience of having an image is just the inner aspect of a readiness to perceive the imagined object. (Ulrich Neisser, "Cognition and Reality" 1976)
"A mental image occurs when a representation of the type created during the initial phases of perception is present but the stimulus is not actually being perceived; such representations preserve the perceptible properties of the stimulus and ultimately give rise to the subjective experience of perception." (Stephen Kosslyn, "Image and Mind", 1980)
"These organizational processes result in our perceptions being structured into units corresponding to objects and properties of objects. It is these larger units that may be stored and later assembled into images that are experienced as quasi-pictorial, spatial entities resembling those evoked during perception itself [...] It is erroneous to equate image representations with mental photographs, since this would overlook the fact that images are composed from highly processed perceptual encodings." (Stephen Kosslyn, "Image and Mind", 1980)
"Time goes forward because energy itself is always moving from an available to an unavailable state. Our consciousness is continually recording the entropy change in the world around us. [...] we experience the passage of time by the succession of one event after another. And every time an event occurs anywhere in this world energy is expended and the overall entropy is increased. To say the world is running out of time then, to say the world is running out of usable energy. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, 'Entropy is time's arrow'." (Jeremy Rifkin, "Entropy", 1980)
"Analogies, metaphors, and emblems are the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even when, absentmindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, and they guarantee the unity of human experience. Moreover, in the thinking process itself they serve as models to give us our bearings lest we stagger blindly among experiences that our bodily senses with their relative certainty of knowledge cannot guide us through." (Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind", 1981)
"That is to say, intuition is not a direct perception of something existing externally and eternally. It is the effect in the mind of certain experiences of activity and manipulation of concrete objects (at a later stage, of marks on paper or even mental images). As a result of this experience, there is something (a trace, an effect) in the pupil's mind which is his representation of the integers. But his representation is equivalent to mine, in the sense that we both get die same answer to any question you ask - or if we get different answers, we can compare notes and figure out what's right. We do this, not because we have been taught a set of algebraic rules, but because our mental pictures match each other." (Philip J Davis & Reuben Hersh, "The Mathematical Experience", 1981)
"The thinking person goes over the same ground many times. He looks at it from varying points of view - his own, his arch-enemy’s, others’. He diagrams it, verbalizes it, formulates equations, constructs visual images of the whole problem, or of troublesome parts, or of what is clearly known. But he does not keep a detailed record of all this mental work, indeed could not. […] Deep understanding of a domain of knowledge requires knowing it in various ways. This multiplicity of perspectives grows slowly through hard work and sets the state for the re-cognition we experience as a new insight." (Howard E Gruber, "Darwin on Man", 1981)
"[...] without imagination, heightened awareness, moral sense, and some reference to the general culture, the engineering experience becomes less meaningful, less fulfilling than it should be." (Samuel C Florman, "The Civilized Engineer", 1985)
"Metaphor [is] a pervasive mode of understanding by which we project patterns from one domain of experience in order to structure another domain of a different kind. So conceived metaphor is not merely a linguistic mode of expression; rather, it is one of the chief cognitive structures by which we are able to have coherent, ordered experiences that we can reason about and make sense of. Through metaphor, we make use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience to organise our more abstract understanding. " (Mark Johnson, "The Body in the Mind", 1987)
"When we focus consciously on an object - and create a mental image for eexample- it's not because the brain pattern is a copy or neural representation of the perceived object, but because the brain experiences a special kind of interaction with that object, preparing the brain to deal with it." (Roger W Sperry, "New Mindset on Consciousness", Sunrise magazine, 1987/1988)
"Each of us has many, many maps in our head, which can be divided into two main categories: maps of the way things are, or realities, and maps of the way things should be, or values. We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps. We seldom question their accuracy; we're usually even unaware that we have them. We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be." (Stephen Covey, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", 1989)
"Modeling underlies our ability to think and imagine, to use signs and language, to communicate, to generalize from experience, to deal with the unexpected, and to make sense out of the raw bombardment of our sensations. It allows us to see patterns, to appreciate, predict, and manipulate processes and things, and to express meaning and purpose. In short, it is one of the most essential activities of the human mind. It is the foundation of what we call intelligent behavior and is a large part of what makes us human. We are, in a word, modelers: creatures that build and use models routinely, habitually – sometimes even compulsively – to face, understand, and interact with reality." (Jeff Rothenberg, "The Nature of Modeling. In: Artificial Intelligence, Simulation, and Modeling", 1989)
"The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view." (Stephen Covey, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", 1989)
"Many people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our consitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world." (Francisco Varela, "The Embodied Mind", 1991)
"The most persuasive positive argument for mental images as objects is [that] whenever one thinks one is seeing something there must be something one is seeing. It might be an object directly, or it might be a mental picture. [This] point is so plausible that it is deniable only at the peril of becoming arbitrary. One should concede that the question whether mental images are entities of some sort is not resolvable by logical or linguistic analysis, and believe what makes sense of experience." (Eva T H Brann, "The World of Imagination", 1991)
"A world view is a system of co-ordinates or a frame of reference in which everything presented to us by our diverse experiences can be placed. It is a symbolic system of representation that allows us to integrate everything we know about the world and ourselves into a global picture, one that illuminates reality as it is presented to us within a certain culture. […] A world view is a coherent collection of concepts and theorems that must allow us to construct a global image of the world, and in this way to understand as many elements of our experience as possible." (Diederick Aerts et al, "World views: From Fragmentation to Integration", 1994)
"A mental model is not normally based on formal definitions but rather on concrete properties that have been drawn from life experience. Mental models are typically analogs, and they comprise specific contents, but this does not necessarily restrict their power to deal with abstract concepts, as we will see. The important thing about mental models, especially in the context of mathematics, is the relations they represent. […] The essence of understanding a concept is to have a mental representation or mental model that faithfully reflects the structure of that concept. (Lyn D. English & Graeme S. Halford, "Mathematics Education: Models and Processes", 1995)
"We all depend on models to interpret our everyday experiences. We interpret what we see in terms of mental models constructed on past experience and education. They are constructs that we use to understand the pattern of our experiences." (David Bartholomew, "What is Statistics?", 1995)
"When we visually perceive the world, we do not just process information; we have a subjective experience of color, shape, and depth. We have experiences associated with other senses (think of auditory experiences of music, or the ineffable nature of smell experiences), with bodily sensations (e.g., pains, tickles, and orgasms), with mental imagery (e.g., the colored shapes that appear when one tubs one's eyes), with emotion (the sparkle of happiness, the intensity of anger, the weight of despair), and with the stream of conscious thought." (David Chalmers, "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience", Scientific American, 1995)
"If we are to have meaningful, connected experiences; ones that we can comprehend and reason about; we must be able to discern patterns to our actions, perceptions, and conceptions. Underlying our vast network of interrelated literal meanings (all of those words about objects and actions) are those imaginative structures of understanding such as schema and metaphor, such as the mental imagery that allows us to extrapolate a path, or zoom in on one part of the whole, or zoom out until the trees merge into a forest." (William H Calvin, "The Cerebral Code", 1996)
"The power of images consists largely in the fact that they integrate different types of knowledge and experience." (David Gooding, "Creative Rationality", 1996)
"Faced with the overwhelming complexity of the real world, time pressure, and limited cognitive capabilities, we are forced to fall back on rote procedures, habits, rules of thumb, and simple mental models to make decisions. Though we sometimes strive to make the best decisions we can, bounded rationality means we often systematically fall short, limiting our ability to learn from experience." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"In the language of mental models, such past experience provided the default assumptions necessary to fill the gaps in the emerging and necessarily incomplete framework of a relativistic theory of gravitation. It was precisely the nature of these default assumptions that allowed them to be discarded again in the light of novel information - provided, for instance, by the further elaboration of the mathematical formalism - without, however, having to abandon the underlying mental models which could thus continue to function as heuristic orientations." (Jürgen Renn, "Before the Riemann Tensor: The Emergence of Einstein’s Double Strategy", [in "The Universe of General Relativity"] 2000)
"When we acquire a language we don’t simply learn how to use the correct words, grammar and conventions for speaking appropriately in context, we also acquire a ‘world view’: an implicit set of assumptions and presuppositions regarding how to understand the world, who and what we are within it, and everything else that is entailed in categorising our experience." (Michael Forrester," Psychology of the Image", 2000)
"A mental model is a representation of some domain or situation that supports understanding, reasoning, and prediction. Mental models permit reasoning about situations not directly experienced. They allow people to mentally simulate the behavior of a system. Many mental models are based on generalizations and analogies from experience." (D Gentner, "Psychology of Mental Models" [in "International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences"], 2001)
"In the definition of meaning, it is assumed that both the source and receiver have previously coded (and stored) signals of the same or similar referents, such that the messages may have meaning and relate to behaviour. That is, the used symbols must have the same signification for both sender and receiver. If not, the receiver will create a different mental picture than intended by the transmitter. Meaning is generated by individuals in a process of social interaction with a more or less common environment. It is a relation subsisting within a field of experience and appears as an emergent property of a symbolic representation when used in culturally accepted interaction. The relation between the symbolic representation and its meaning is random. Of this, however, the mathematical theory has nothing to say. If human links in the chain of communication are missing, of course no questions of meaning will arise." (Lars Skyttner, "General Systems Theory: Ideas and Applications", 2001)
"As the least conscious layer of the user experience, the conceptual model has the paradoxical quality of also having the most impact on usability. If an appropriate conceptual model is faithfully represented throughout the interface, after users recognize and internalize the model, they will have a fundamental understanding of what the application does and how to operate it." (Bob Baxley, "Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications", 2002)
"Ecological rationality uses reason – rational reconstruction – to examine the behavior of individuals based on their experience and folk knowledge, who are ‘naïve’ in their ability to apply constructivist tools to the decisions they make; to understand the emergent order in human cultures; to discover the possible intelligence embodied in the rules, norms and institutions of our cultural and biological heritage that are created from human interactions but not by deliberate human design. People follow rules without being able to articulate them, but they can be discovered." (Vernon L Smith, "Constructivist and ecological rationality in economics", 2002)
"A mental model is conceived […] as a knowledge structure possessing slots that can be filled not only with empirically gained information but also with ‘default assumptions’ resulting from prior experience. These default assumptions can be substituted by updated information so that inferences based on the model can be corrected without abandoning the model as a whole. Information is assimilated to the slots of a mental model in the form of ‘frames’ which are understood here as ‘chunks’ of knowledge with a well-defined meaning anchored in a given body of shared knowledge." (Jürgen Renn, "Before the Riemann Tensor: The Emergence of Einstein’s Double Strategy", "The Universe of General Relativity" Ed. by A.J. Kox & Jean Eisenstaedt, 2005)
"Patterns experienced again and again become intuitions. […] Intuitive judgments are made by our use of imagery; intuition is the result of mental model building. […] The mental model used and the form of the intuition is dependent upon the question being answered." (Roger Frantz, "Two Minds", 2005)
"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)
"When a particular image appears in the mind's eye often enough it begins to connect apparently unrelated ideas leading to models and theories. […] Patterns experienced again and again become intuitions. […] Intuitive judgments are made by our use of imagery; intuition is the result of mental model building. […] The mental model used and the form of the intuition is dependent upon the question being answered." (Roger Frantz, "Two Minds", 2005)
"Often our mental models serve a very useful and practical purpose by helping us to make very quick sense of our experiences and interactions. However, the danger for us is that our mental models do not always reflect the truth, i.e. the way things really are. Often they reflect what we believe to be true, and sometimes we get it wrong." (John Middleton, "Upgrade Your Brain: 52 brilliant ideas for everyday genius", 2006)
"Our inner working models, therefore, function as interpretation schemes, on the basis of which we organize our experiences. But, such schemes also distort reality in the direction of our pattern of expectations. In short: such working models organize and screen our experiences. This means that such an inner working model organizes and colours our perception of things in such a way that it can be extremely stimulating but can also sometimes slow us down considerably." (M H M de Wolf, "Freud and Mahler", 2007)
"A worldview must be coherent, logical and adequate. Coherence means that the fundamental ideas constituting the worldview must be seen as proceeding from a single, unifying, overarching concept. A logical worldview means simply that the various ideas constituting it should not be contradictory. Adequate means that it is capable of explaining, logically and coherently, every element of contemporary experience." (M. G. Jackson, "Transformative Learning for a New Worldview: Learning to Think Differently", 2008)
"Actually, around 80% of the data we use to make decisions is already in our heads before we engage with a situation. Our power to perceive is governed and limited by cognitive filters, sometimes termed our ‘mental model’. Mental models are formed as a result of past experience, knowledge and attitudes. They are deeply ingrained, often subconscious, structures that limit what we perceive and also colour our interpretation of supposed facts." (Robina Chatham & Brian Sutton, "Changing the IT Leader’s Mindset", 2010)
"We all have mental models: the lens through which we see the world that drive our responses to everything we experience. Being aware of your mental models is key to being objective." (Elizabeth Thornton, "Learn to Be an Objective Leader without Losing Everything", 2015)
"When a culture is founded on the principle of immediacy of experience, there is no need for numeracy. It is impossible to consume more than one thing at a time, so differentiating between 'a small amount', 'a larger amount' and 'many' is enough for survival." (The Open University, "Understanding the environment: learning and communication", 2016)
