>
> Concerning Fred Reed's interesting post regarding "Autognomics", I feel
> compelled to comment that if Autognomics is not perceived to be a mental model,
> then the concept of mental model is incompletely understood. I found much of
> interest in the description of autognomics, whose underlying premises did not
> seem very new to me, but whose connection to other disciplines points to the
> possibility of new learnings. I am disappointed with the either/or tone of the
> post, which seems to suggest that those of us who think otherwise are wrong,
> and which leads the author, in my opinion, to misread the ladder of inference
> as a system, rather than a possible description of process...
I concur, and had begun to compose a more or less book-length analysis when
your post came along and said it all much more thriftily. One of the
most fundamental attributes of human thought and experience is the ease
with which we transpose from structure to process and back again. It
happens every time one composes a sentence or a piece of music... .
Under those circumstances, it seems pointless to argue that one of those
two is closer to reality (or whatever) than the other. The mental model
thread contributors have, I believe, quite consistently used that
expression to refer to the structural pole of the structure/process
duality: to figure out somebody's model, watch what he *does*.
Is that what Fred was getting at?
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From: Jim Michmerhuizen <jamzen@world.std.com>