Entry: Insight and Relational Mechanisms

Relational mechanisms lie at the core of human cognitive organisation, expressed in everyday language by terms such as ‘bigger than’ and ‘smaller than’ and in formal symbolic systems by logical arguments such as A> B. Ordered as a series A>B> C furthermore, such relationally based mechanisms support transitive inferences of the sort that, given A>B and B>C, A must be bigger than C an important deductive form of reasoning believed to be the cornerstone of rational choice behaviour. Relations are also central to the human ability to classify objects and events using rules of group membership. Reflected in linguistic acts of reference such as ‘that is a canary’, our further ability to denote the canary as (also) a bird reflects hierarchical principles which crucially underwrite our ability to combine and recombine words into sentences and communicate propositions about the world.