Summary
An implicit model is the unspoken working picture of the world that lets us act without stopping to think. Movement Ecology, which writes on strategy for social movements, defines it in the article ‘Sensemaking’ as “a non-conceptual, embodied representation of our environment”: we get around safely because our bodies, senses, social norms, tools and artefacts guide us. The idea builds on the ‘predictive processing’ account of cognition.
Its opposite is an explicit model, a deliberate description, often a story about causes and effects. Implicit models are shared, formed by biology and culture, and mostly hold up; when one fails, we’re surprised and reach for explicit models, which fail more often.
Rationale
Part 1 names ‘implicit models’, and Wolfgang Wopperer of Movement Ecology joined our studios. Their model lives in bodies, norms and tools as much as heads: cognition that is “embodied, ecological and distributed”.