Mental Models (Cognitive science series) [11/16/1983] Philip Johnson-Laird

by Philip N. Johnson-Laird

Mental Models offers nothing less than a unified theory of the major properties of comprehension, inference, and consciousness. In spirited and graceful prose, Johnson-Laird argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the relations among objects and events that concern us. The mind is essentially a model-building device that can itself be modeled on a digital computer. This book provides both a blueprint for building such a model and numerous important illustrations of how to do it. In several key areas of cognition, Johnson-Laird shows how an explanation based on mental modeling is clearly superior to previous theory. For example, he argues compellingly that deductive reasoning does not take place by tacitly applying the rules of logic, but by mentally manipulating models of the states of affairs from which inferences are drawn. Similarly, linguistic comprehension is best understood not as a matter of applying inference rules to propositions derived from sentences, but rather as the mind's effort to construct and update a model of the situation described by a text or a discourse. Most provocative, perhaps, is Johnson-Laird's theory of the mind's necessarily incomplete model of itself allows only a partial control over the many unconscious and parallel processes of cognition. This an extraordinarily rich book, providing a coherent account of much recent experimental work in cognitive psychology, along with lucid explanations of relevant theory in linguistics, computer science, and philosophy Not since Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's classic Plans and the Structure of Behavior has a book in cognitive science combined such sweep, style, and good sense. Like its distinguished predecessor, Mental Models may well serve to fix a point of view for a generation.

Genres: Psychology, Research, Linguistics, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published August 1, 1983

About the author

Philip N. Johnson-Laird is a professor at Princeton University's Department of Psychology and author of several notable books on human cognition and the psychology of reasoning.

Reviews

[Leo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book for research for my thesis. It’s a fairly digestible book; it’s relatively easy to understand even without a background in psychology, linguistics, or cognitive science. It’s very dated (obviously) which impacts the value of the content: Johnson-Laird asserts in an early chapter that there will never be a better analogy for how brains operate than computers, but recent cognitive science research has done everything in its power to disabuse us of that idea. Johnson-Laird dedicates several chapters to ideas about how we process language that rely explicitly on computer models. He also spends several chapters at the beginning of the book examining syllogism despite acknowledging that the way we process syllogisms is not likely representative of how we process other information because information in the real world rarely, if ever, takes the form of syllogism. This book might be useful to those interested in psycholinguistics or writers interested in learning about what sentence structures are most easily and flawlessly processed by the human mind, but I’ve found it very useless for anything else, including learning about mental modeling.

[Hofstetter Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read it as a source to my PhD project. A work that was accessible to me, although this is not my area of expertise (I am originally a physicist). I was able to extract some really valuable concepts about what human Model Thinking is.

[Nanà · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lettura sicuramente impegnativa e datata, non mi aspettavo diversamente da questo libro. L'autore è riuscito comunque, con una organizzazione del libro eccellente, a farmi apprezzare ogni pagina, anche le più tecniche.

[Pulkit]

say a hell yeah!!