The closed room

The most significant model of reasoning to come out of Cognitive Science began with the early work of Newell and Simon (1972) on human problem solving and has developed into an architecture for cognition SOAR (Newell, 1990). A significant feature of this tradition in Cognitive Science is that it renders the cognitive as analytic. This article will analyze the assumptions of this tradition. A first set of arguments explores the consequences of the metaphor of the closed room as introduced by Newell. A second set of arguments develops the notion of an average everyday task environment. The latter parts of the article present For Lack Of A Better Name (FLOABN; Alterman, Zito‐Wolf, & Carpenter, 1998), a computational cognitive model of everyday activity in the usage of household and office devices. FLOABN models cognition in the everyday task environment. The roots of FLOABN are clearly in the tradition of SOAR but they have been transformed by critiques that originate in the literature on everyday activity a...