“Models of human reasoning are clearly relevant to a wide variety of subject areas such as sociology, economics, psychology, artificial intelligence and man-machine systems. Broadly there are two types: psychological models of what people actually do; and formal models of what logicians and philosophers feel a rational individual would, or should, do. The main problem with the former is that it is extremely difficult to monitor thought processes - the behaviourist approach is perhaps reasonable with rats but a ridiculously inadequate source of data on man - the introspectionist approach is far more successful [e. g. in analysing human chess strategy… but the data obtained is still incomplete and may not reflect the actual thought processes involved.”

—  Brian R. Gaines

Source: Foundations of fuzzy reasoning (1976), p. 623.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Models of human reasoning are clearly relevant to a wide variety of subject areas such as sociology, economics, psychol…" by Brian R. Gaines?
Brian R. Gaines photo
Brian R. Gaines 8
British computer scientist 1938

Related quotes

“The preceding chapters described various models of mental illness. Seven major varieties of models have been described. Seven major varieties of models have been described. Three are scientific: medical, psychological, and sociocultural. Four are philosophical-moral: hermeneutic-linguistic, phenomenological- existential, humanistic, and moral-legal. Most of these major varieties can be divided into more circumscribed models giving rise to a total number of fifteen. In turn, some of these may be further divided into submodels. Thus, there are three psychodynamic, three behaviouristic, two cognitive, two macro- and two microsocial, two linguistic-symbolic, # two phenomenological, two humanistic, two hypersanity, and three moral-legal submodels. The detailed classification of the models of mental illness is presented in Tabel II.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Models of Mental Illness (1984), p. 319 ( chapter online http://positivedisintegration.com/Weckowicz1984.pdf)

Ivar Jacobson photo

“The analysis model will not be a reflection of what the problem domain looks like… The reason is simply to get a more maintainable structure where changes will be local and thus manageable. We thus do not model reality as it is, as object orientation is often said to do, but we model the reality as we want to see it and to highlight what is important in our application.”

Ivar Jacobson (1939) Swedish computer scientist

Source: Object-Oriented Software Engineering: A Use Case Driven Approach (1992), p. 185: cited in: " Object Oriented Software Engineering: A Use Case Driven Approach Ivar Jacobson, et al. (1992) http://tedfelix.com/software/jacobson1992.html", Book review by Ted Felix on tedfelix.com, 2006.

Gerd Gigerenzer photo

“The classical support for as-if models in the social sciences stems from the economist Milton Friedman (1953), who, like the psychologist B. F. Skinner, saw little value in modeling cognitive processes. In contrast, our aim is to understand actual decision processes, not only the outcomes. There is a good reason for this. Without modeling the cognitive blade of Simon's scissors, it is utterly impossible to determine in what environments heuristics succeed, that is, their ecological rationality.”

Gerd Gigerenzer Heuristics

Gerd Gigerenzer, Ralph Hertwig, and Thorsten Pachur, Heuristics: The Foundations of Adaptive Behavior, 2015.

Hans Freudenthal photo

“The subject of a science is never well circumscribed and there is little use sharpening its definition. However, nobody will deny that physics deals with nature and sociology with human society in some of their aspects. With logic, it is another matter. Logic is usually understood nowadays as a study of certain formal systems, though in former times there were philosophers who held that the subject matter of logic was the formal rules of human thought. In the latter sense it would be an empirical rather than a formal science, though its empirical subject matter would still be fundamentally different from that of psychology of thinking. One interpretation of logic does not exclude the other. Formal approaches are often easier than empirical ones, and for this reason one can understand why logic as a study of formal systems has till now made more progress than logic as a study of the formal rules of thought, even if restricted to scientific thought.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: Realistic models in probability (1968), p. 1

Marvin Minsky photo

“I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)
Context: I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning. In particular, I doubt that any logic that prohibits self-reference can be adequate for psychology: no mind can have enough power — without the power to think about Thinking itself. Without Self-Reference it would seem immeasurably harder to achieve Self-Consciousness — which, so far as I can see, requires at least some capacity to reflect on what it does. If Russell shattered our hopes for making a completely reliable version of commonsense reasoning, still we can try to find the islands of "local consistency," in which naive reasoning remains correct.

Lars Peter Hansen photo

“I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything. So economic models -- how any model by definition isn't right. When someone just says, 'Oh, your model is wrong.' That's not much of an insight. What you want to know is, is wrong in important ways or wrong in ways that are less relevant? And you want to know what does the data really say about the model?”

Lars Peter Hansen (1952) American economist

Source: David Brancaccio (2013) " Nobel Prize in Economics winner Lars Peter Hansen on imperfect models http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/nobel-prize-economics-winner-lars-peter-hansen-imperfect-models" at marketplace.org.

“During the 1960s and 1970s, when cartographers were embracing the communication model and a behavioral approach to empirical research, psychology was undergoing a revolution in its perspective on what to study and how to study it. Psychologists began to realize that stimulus-response laws do not explain human perception or behavior (any more than the gravity models used by geographers can explain spatial interaction).”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 7-8

“Wundt initiated the first systematic psychological research programme. This achievement occurred at the same time as his elaboration of a philosophy of science which was anti-inductivist and stressed the priority of explanatory motives. Specifically psychological explanations depended on concepts of psychological causality as manifested in apperceptive or volitional processes. The major differences between the Wundtian and other models of psychological experimentation can be understood in the light of this general approach. Thus experimenters and subjects had to be enlightened collaborators and the role of introspection was more significant in an explanatory than in a purely observational context. Wundt's special requirements for the psychological experiment led him to reject other early models as exemplified by the hypnotic experiment in which the experimenter-subject relationship was closer to what was to become the norm in the twentieth century.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Kurt Danziger, "Wundt's psychological experiment in the light of his philosophy of science." Psychological Research 42.1-2 (1980). p. 109; Summary

Lynda Gratton photo

“Two of the most widely adopted models of human resource management are the hard and soft versions. These are based on opposing views of human nature and managerial control strategies. The hard model is based on notions of tight strategic control, and an economic model of man according to Theory X, while the soft model is based on control through commitment and Theory Y. We argue that because these assumptions are so divergent, they cannot both properly be incorporated within a single model of human resource management.”

Lynda Gratton (1953) Business theorist

Catherine Truss, Lynda Gratton, Veronica Hope-Hailey, Patrick McGovern and Philip Stiles (1997). "Soft and hard models of human resource management: a reappraisal." Journal of Management Studies, 34(1), 53-73.

“We build models to increase productivity, under the justified assumption that it's cheaper to manipulate the model than the real thing. Models then enable cheaper exploration and reasoning about some universe of discourse. One important application of models is to understand a real, abstract, or hypothetical problem domain that a computer system will reflect. This is done by abstraction, classification, and generalization of subject-matter entities into an appropriate set of classes and their behavior.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: MDA Distilled. Principles of Model-Driven Architecture, 2003, p. 35-36.

Related topics