Mental Models III

"Theories usually result from the precipitate reasoning of an impatient mind which would like to be rid of phenomena and replace them with images, concepts, indeed often with mere words." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1833) 

“Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Every word and every language is a model. All maps and statistics, books and databases, equations and computer programs are models. So are the ways I picture the world in my head - my mental models. None of these is or ever will be the real world. […] Our models usually have a strong congruence with the world. That is why we are such a successful species in the biosphere. Especially complex and sophisticated are the mental models we develop from direct, intimate experience of nature, people, and organizations immediately around us.” (Donella Meadows, “Limits to Growth”, 1972)

“Concepts are inventions of the human mind used to construct a model of the world. They package reality into discrete units for further processing, they support powerful mechanisms for doing logic, and they are indispensable for precise, extended chains of reasoning. […] A mental model is a cognitive construct that describes a person's understanding of a particular content domain in the world.” (John Sown, “Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine”, 1984)

“We construct mental models that provide us with situations in which we can interact with mental objects that represent objects, properties and relations and that behave in ways that simulate the objects, properties and relations that our models represent. […] The concepts and principles that a person understands, in this sense, are embedded in the kinds of objects that he or she includes in mental models and in the ways in which those objects behave, including how they combine and separate to form other objects.” (James G Greeno, “Number sense as situated knowing in a conceptual domain”, Journal for Research on Mathematics Education Vol. 22 No. 3, 1991)

“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)

“Mental models can be literal representations of the external world (as they often are with visual imagery) or arbitrary representations (as they are with propositional, mathematical, or verbal models). In either case, they are explanatory or descriptive representations of the external world.” (Gregory J Feist, “The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind”, 2006)

“Mental models reflect the beliefs, values, and assumptions that we personally hold, and they underlie our reasons for doing things the way we do.” (Kambiz E Maani & Robert Y Cavana, “Systems Methodology”, The Systems Thinker Vol. 18 No. 8, 2007)

“All models (whether mental or those turned into computer maps/models) are developed using a particular lens of what we value - what we think is important to understand, or what performance we wish to develop or improve. Although organizations can build forum models focusing on the performance measure du jour, they would be well advised to use a systemic or integral framework for what to include.” (Peggy Holman et al, “The Change Handbook”, 2007)

"[...] a model is a tool for taking decisions and any decision taken is the result of a process of reasoning that takes place within the limits of the human mind. So, models have eventually to be understood in such a way that at least some layer of the process of simulation is comprehensible by the human mind. Otherwise, we may find ourselves acting on the basis of models that we don’t understand, or no model at all.” (Ugo Bardi, “The Limits to Growth Revisited”, 2011)

See also:
Mental Models I, II, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII