🪷On Mind: On Communities

"Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms." (Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962)

"The use of metaphor is one of many devices available to the scientific community to accomplish the task of accommodation of language to the causal structure of the world." (Richard Boyd, "Metaphor and theory change: what is ‘metaphor’ a metaphor for?", 1979)

"Concept maps have long provided visual languages widely used in many different disciplines and application domains. Abstractly, they are sorted graphs visually represented as nodes having a type, name and content, some of which are linked by arcs. Concretely, they are structured diagrams having discipline- and domain-specific interpretations for their user communities, and, sometimes, formally defining computer data structures. Concept maps have been used for a wide range of purposes and it would be useful to make such usage available over the World Wide Web." (Brian R Gaines, "WebMap: Concept Mapping on the Web", 2001)"

 "Our mental model governs what we see, how we think about things and how we act, but is this just an individual phenomenon, or can whole communities and professions share a common mental model, a shared view of reality? […] What is beyond doubt is that all professions have their own vocabularies, lexicons, tools and techniques. These models, techniques and ways of analysing things are not value-free; they represent a way of seeing the world. When we select and use them we are subconsciously buying into that way of thinking and, inevitably, we are also reinforcing our own mental model of cause and effect. We tend to expend significant effort in understanding the inner workings of a new tool or practice, but we give scant attention to the thought paradigm that underpins it." (Robina Chatham & Brian Sutton, "Changing the IT Leader’s Mindset", 2010)

"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)