Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird, FRS, FBA (born 12 October 1936) is a philosopher of language and reasoning and a developer of the mental model theory of reasoning. He was a professor at Princeton University's Department of Psychology, as well as the author of several notable books on human cognition and the psychology of reasoning.
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Philip Johnson-Laird in the context of Mental schema
A mental model is an internal representation of external reality: that is, a way of representing reality within the mind. Such models are hypothesized to play a major role in cognition, reasoning and decision-making. The term for this concept was coined in 1943 by Kenneth Craik, who suggested that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events. Mental models can help shape behaviour, including approaches to solving problems and performing tasks.
In psychology, the term mental models is sometimes used to refer to mental representations or mental simulation generally. The concepts of schema and conceptual models are cognitively adjacent. Elsewhere, it is used to refer to the "mental model" theory of reasoning developed by Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M. J. Byrne.
Philip Johnson-Laird in the context of Mental model theory of reasoning
The mental model theory of reasoning was developed by Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M.J. Byrne (Johnson-Laird and Byrne, 1991). It has been applied to the main domains of deductive inference including relational inferences such as spatial and temporal deductions; propositional inferences, such as conditional, disjunctive and negation deductions; quantified inferences such as syllogisms; and meta-deductive inferences.
Ongoing research on mental models and reasoning has led the theory to be extended to account for probabilistic inference (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 2006) and counterfactual thinking (Byrne, 2005).