Mental Models LX

"Chemistry and physics are experimental sciences; and those who are engaged in attempting to enlarge the boundaries of science by experiment are generally unwilling to publish speculations; for they have learned, by long experience, that it is unsafe to anticipate events. It is true, they must make certain theories and hypotheses. They must form some kind of mental picture of the relations between the phenomena which they are trying to investigate, else their experiments would be made at random, and without connection." (William Ramsay, "Radium and Its Products", Harper’s Magazine, 1904)

"A mental image gives you a framework upon which to work. It is like the drawing of the architect, or the map of the explorer. Think over this for a few moments until you get the idea firmly fixed in your mind." (William W Atkinson, "Practical Mental Influence and Mental Fascination", 1908)

"A mind exclusively bent upon the idea of utility necessarily narrows the range of the imagination. For it is the imagination which pictures to the inner eye of the investigator the indefinitely extending sphere of the possible, - that region of hypothesis and explanation, of underlying cause and controlling law. The area of suggestion and experiment is thus pushed beyond the actual field of vision." (John G Hibben, "The Paradox of Research", The North American Review 188 (634), 1908)

"The unconscious [...] is always empty - or, more accurately, it is as alien to mental images as is the stomach to the foods which pass through it." (Claude Levi-Strauss, "Structural Anthropology", 1958)

"A cognitive map is a specific way of representing a person's assertions about some limited domain, such as a policy problem. It is designed to capture the structure of the person's causal assertions and to generate the consequences that follow front this structure. […]  a person might use his cognitive map to derive explanations of the past, make predictions for the future, and choose policies in the present." (Robert M Axelrod, "Structure of Decision: The cognitive maps of political elites", 1976)

"The cognitive map is not a picture or image which 'looks like' what it represents; rather, it is an information structure from which map-like images can be reconstructed and from which behaviour dependent upon place information can be generated." (John O'Keefe & Lynn Nadel, "The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map", 1978)

"A symbol is a mental representation regarding the internal reality referring to its object by a convention and produced by the conscious interpretation of a sign. In contrast to signals, symbols may be used every time if the receiver has the corresponding representation. Symbols also relate to feelings and thus give access not only to information but also to the communicator’s motivational and emotional state. The use of symbols makes it possible for the organism using it to evoke in the receiver the same response it evokes in himself. To communicate with symbols is to use a language." (Lars Skyttner, "General Systems Theory: Ideas and Applications", 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)

"The mental model is the arena where imagination takes place. It enables us to experiment with different scenarios by making local alterations to the model. […] To speak of causality, we must have a mental model of the real world. […] Our shared mental models bind us together into communities." (Judea Pearl & Dana Mackenzie, "The Book of Why: The new science of cause and effect", 2018)

"A mental model is a representation, inside your head, of an external reality. Mental models are the basic units which construct a person’s world view. It is the representation that a person has in his mind about the object he is interacting with. It is the way the person thinks about what it is they are doing or dealing with. Mental models shape our actions as to how we act or behave in a particular situation. They define what people will pay attention to and how they approach and solve problems. Mental models are tools for the mind." (Anshul Khare & Vishal Khandelwal, "Mental Models, Investing, And You" Vol 1)