I am replying to the thread in general and to no particular message,
although this message was triggered by Robert Bacal in LO21021 --
"Reification" is a word that refers to treating abstractions as though
they are concrete.
"Mental models" is a term, an abstraction, an idea, a notion, a
theoretical construct, a conjecture, or whatever label you prefer.
"Mental models" are not concrete, tangible, solid things to which we can
point or weigh or grasp physically. They exist in language and thought
but we are so far unable to establish unequivocally that they exist
anywhere else, especially in concrete, tangible form.
So, when someone refers to mental models, it is pointless to defend or
attack them; in the abstract they exist as surely as the keys on your
keyboard; in the concrete, they have no more tangible existence than your
belief that Rick Karash is a first-rate host. Both are true, of course,
but truth itself has no tangible form.
What is useful -- and quite productive -- is to explore the words -- and
diagrams -- that people claim represent their "mental models" for these,
more than anything else, predict what they will do in this or that
situation and, in the last analysis, predicting a specific person's
behavior in a specific situation is something I'd like to be able to do.
What about you?
Regards,
Fred Nickols
Distance Consulting
http://home.att.net/~nickols/distance.htm
nickols@worldnet.att.net
(609) 490-0095
[Host's Note: Fred, thanks for the compliment, although it's one of the
more obscure compliments I've ever received... Intangible, eh? ..Rick]
--Fred Nickols <nickols@worldnet.att.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>