Cognitive Framework Quotes

I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me.

The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.

Your life is a reflection of how you think

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

In all aspects of life... we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.

You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it.

The way we describe our world shows how we think of our world. How we think of our world governs how we interpret our world. How we interpret our world directs how we participate in the world. How we participate in the world shapes the world.

Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

No matter how close thought sticks to the actual, it follows its own rules.

The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.

I have a funny mental framework when I do physics. I create an imaginary audience in my head to explain things to - it is part of the way I think. For me, teaching and explaining, even to my imaginary audience, is part of the process.

The world in your mind is as real as the world outside of it.

What you believe to be the truth directly determines your attitude towards yourself and the world, the words you say and the actions you take.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

Everybody's got a worldview, whether they know they have it or they don't. They might even get it when they are little tiny kids. Suppose they get it when they are in college, which is often the case, or in high school, whatever. Everything they learn after that or every thing they see after that, they fit it into that worldview. And they are making coherence of what's good, what's bad, what will work, what won't work, what's noble, what's ignoble, and so on... all through this filter.

People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality.

There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

We occupy a space of our own creation-a collage compounded by bits and pieces of actuality arranged into a design determined by our internal perceptions, our hopes, our fears, our memories, and our anticipations.

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.