George Bartow wrote:
> Instead of "mental model" could we say "mystic
> interpretation" or "psychic pattern" or "spiritual paradigm"? I'm trying
> to discover why "mental models" is such a negative phrase to me. It's not
> that it has no meaning. At some level I actually have a negative reaction
> to the phrase.
Would an exploration of the concept of 'metaphor' prove useful here?
If I follow the logic of a constructivist philosophy, then all of reality
is what I make it out to be--what I 'constuct' within my mind. That
'reality' is then the 'knowledge' derived from my experience of living.
In order for me to communicate that knowledge to another, I must package
(encode) it in the form of 'information' that can then be conveyed to
serve as input to that other's processes of experience. Encoded
information is then some representation of my experiences organized into
some meaningful form of expression--a metaphor capable of representing
some aspect of my reality. The quality of that metaphor is limited in the
sense that is not a complete representation of my experience of reality,
but merely a reduced subset. In order to improve the utility of my
metaphor to another, it behooves me to form it in a 'shape' that is at
least somewhat consistent with that other's capacity for decoding it:
hence, the emergence of metaphor as a means of sharing mental models. In
this sense, the words that make up our language of discourse are in
themselves metaphors. A specific word, any word, has no intrinsic meaning
unto itself--it has only the capacity to convey meaning.
If our experience of the universe is indeed purely subjective (personally,
I believe it is), we are faced with a difficulty in extending that
experience into the larger whole of our society without rendering our
experiences into a somewhat more objective form. Under such a construct,
a mental model is a personal (subjective) understanding of how reality is
organized. While a mental model may indeed be substantially coherent
within the mind of the beholder, it can fall down when one tries to extend
its meaning into the mind of another. Subjective understanding is
inherently impossible to share objectively in any absolute way. It is in
our human efforts at connecting our personally-held and
inherently-subjective mental models that find ourselves using metaphors as
a means of exploring and establishing common ground. It is when those
metaphors become universally entrenched across many individual mental
models that we develop means of establishing a so-called 'shared
understanding' of a reality. The creation and universal adoption of a
language is an example.
In other words, our mental models remain substantially our own: sharing
of understanding occurs purely as a consequence of our mutual agreements
as to the possible implications of those models, those agreements taking
the form of metaphors. The implication is that mental models do have
meaning, but that meaning is constructed soley in the mind of the
beholder. Consequently, you can call a mental model whatever you want, so
long as you are willing to accept that the 'metaphor' you use to describe
it may not convey the same meaning to others.
> Exploring meaning is very crucial, IMO. Is this different than
> exploring words and diagrams? I don't know. As far as predicting
> people's behavior in specific situations is concerned, I'm think I'm
> more interested in training/developing responsible, thinking partners.
On a primitive level, the internal coherence of our mental models is both
the place from which consciousnes emerges as well as the consequence of
that consciousness's emergence. Without heading down a thorny
philosophical path, suffice it to say that, in a sense, we continuously
conduct an internal dialogue with ourselves. The purpose of that dialogue
is to produce a set of uselful, internally consistent and constant 'rules'
(or metaphors) by which we can learn to optimize our experience of and
interaction with the world in which we participate. Over time, those
rules build upon themsleves to create larger, more complex and more
complete metaphors and, hence, mental models.
In many instances--in fact, in the majority of instances--our experiences
comprise an interaction with someone else's mental model as opposed to
some entirely new and previously untrammeled patch of the universe. The
ways in which we encounter our world is substantially embodied within some
form of metaphor--a song, a passage of written or spoken text, a
purposeful thing--that conjoins with the action of its conveyance. The
more consistent our metaphors are across both subjective and objective
space, the more coherent become our connections with both our own reality
as well as the realities of others in our world. The coherence of our
intrinsic and extrinsic relationships is then the basis from which meaning
arises.
My apologies if I've waxed somewhat philosophical here. Even greater
apologies if I've missed a crucial point. I'm personally still trying to
find useful metaphors for making sense of a world that seems to be both
anything and everything expect what it used to be, and I don't wish to
pretend that I've come up with any definitive answers. Instead, I'm
learning to find meaning from the processes of asking questions. My own
exploration of mental models has taken me in many directions including
some of the more mystical and metaphysical realms you alluded to as well
as into some of the 'harder' sciences of cognition, semantics, and
complexity. When I find the expression 'mental model' to be a hindrance,
it helps me to perceive it as little more than a metaphor for what I mean
when I say 'my view of life'.
Cheers, Arnold
--Arnold Wytenburg <arnold@originalthinking.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>