Philip Johnson‒Laird argues human reasoning is based on the construction and evaluation of mental models of the world around us.
Philip Johnson‒Laird is an expert on human cognition and the psychology of language, thinking and reasoning. He is a developer of the mental model theory of reasoning. Johnson‒Laird has shown that people reason by constructing a set of mental models of possibilities, selecting commonalities, and choosing among them.
We build models using information from our senses, but also assumptions and long‐term knowledge from memory as represented in this diagram:
Ontomatica’s domain‐of‐interest is food and drugs. A data‐centric mental model for organizing foods might begin with a layout of a grocery story.
An information model could start with a similar mental model and add data definitions by aisle (broad classes), shelves on an aisle (narrow classes), brands on a shelf, and then characteristic of individual items grouped by equivalence or similarity.
a moving picture of the action of the mind in thought
Peirce’s EGs and rules of inference are a good candidate for a natural logic