"If one comes from a technological/scientific grounding, modelling is part
and parcel of the way one thinks. Modelling helps put the "thing" we are
talking about "out there" and makes it (seem) observable.
On the other hand, a different grounding - say linguistic or experiential
or? - would necessarily lead to a different conversation"
My graduate school training was in Cognitive Science. What is considered
"accepted" information about how the human brain works is that it forms
models, schema, scripts, and operations for all situations. It is an
operation that it just does whether one is conscious of the process or
not.
For detailed information for the lay reader, and this book is still a tad
technical, I reccomend Steven Pinkers book, "How The Mind Works". Dr.
Pinker is a widely published author and professor of Cognitive Science at
MIT.
It isn't really a question of whether we use models, scientifically
trained or not, in our brains. It appears more an issue of how we
communicate those models. Whether those models are closer to the territory
forwhich we are attempting to understand. What in statistics is called a
goodness of fit test. How close does the model represent the territory.
For example clinical psychologists often call these internal models
projections. It is how we are "making sense" of something. What in our
minds are we placing onto a situation -- the model we are coming from.
Glen
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