Talk:Philip Johnson-Laird

Suggested reworking
I don't have time to rework this article, but I am familiar with PJL (he was one of my lecturers about 30 years ago) and his work, and I'd like to offer some suggestions for how this article should be rewritten as/when someone else gets around to it. It doesn't really give us a sense of his work and how it's evolved. PJL is not notable for writing books and winning awards; those are simply byproducts of his studies of thinking and reasoning (as a cognitive psychologist), particularly his work on how humans create and use mental models. The article could start with his 1970s work with Peter Wason (of the famous four-card experiment), then go on to his later work in mental models (1980s - round about when I encountered him, and when he wrote Mental Models) and computational models of human reasoning... before exploring how his ideas of mental modelling have evolved since then. In terms of personal life, I seem to remember him being a bit of a jazz fiend. 82.71.0.229 (talk) 09:46, 26 February 2017 (UTC)


 * He was a keen player of the vibraphone. He established an important constraint on theorizing in psychology - that a theory needed to be shown to work by simulating it in code. This was long before the first steps in AI, such as LISP and Prolog, but proved highly influential. Barmore1919 (talk) 18:08, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, Wason was his Doctoral advisor. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:04, 4 March 2024 (UTC)