Mental Models of Electricity
Drew R. Gentner · 1983
Question: When you plug in a lamp and it lights up, how does it happen? Subject Delta:... basically there is a pool of electricity that plug-in buys for you... the electricity goes into the cord for the appliance, for the lamp and flows up to-flows-I think of it as flowing because of the negative to positive images I have, and also because... a cord is a narrow contained entity like a river. Analogical comparisons with simple or familiar systems occur often in people's descriptions of complex systems, sometimes as explicit analogical models, and sometimes as implicit analogies, in which the person seems to borrow structure from the base domain without noticing it. Phrases like "current being routed along a conductor, " or "stopping the flow " of electricity are examples. In this paper we want to explore the conceptual role of analogy. When people discuss electricity (and other complex phenomena) in analogical terms, are they thinking in terms of analogies, or merely borrowing language from one domain as a convenient way of talking about another domain? If analogies are to be taken seriously as part of the apparatus used in scientific reasoning, it must be shown