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Belief Revision: The Resubsumption Theory 345

maintaining global coherence, the person can remain unaware of the con-
flict between Th(A) and Th(B), so new information about either domain can
be absorbed without dissonance via routine, monotonic belief formation
processes. The need to choose does not arise as long as the conflict remains
latent.

Bisociation and Manifest Conflict
There is no guarantee that a latent conflict is discovered eventually. The paral-
lel, monotonic expansion of two conflicting theories might continue through-
out the person’s lifetime. The latent conflict becomes manifest only if the
person becomes aware that theory Th(A), developed to make sense of domain
A, applies to domain B as well.
Under which circumstances will a theory that is not normally associated
with a domain be retrieved and applied to that domain? How are such seman-
tically remote connections discovered? In his 1964 book The Act of Creation,
22
Arthur Koestler called such discoveries bisociations. The question of which
conditions trigger bisociation falls under the general rubric of memory
retrieval: When is any concept or belief activated and applied to the situation
at hand? Retrieval occurs via the spread of activation through the memory
network, and, briefly put, a concept is retrieved when the sum of activation
arriving along its incoming links is above the retrieval threshold.
Applied to the problem of how a latent conflict between two theories Th(A)
and Th(B) becomes manifest, the standard principles of memory retrieval
imply that this can happen when the person is in a context in which Th(A) is
active – that is, he is currently thinking with the concepts of that theory – at
the same time that objects and events that belong to domain B are presented
to him by the environment. Some external source of information – discourse
or observation – can introduce something that belongs to domain B while
the person is thinking in terms of Th(A). If we follow Piaget in assuming that
cognitive structures strive to apply, then the simultaneous activation of a belief
and the occurrence of a potential instance of that belief provide an opportu-
nity to discover that the former applies to the latter; put differently, that the
latter can be subsumed under the former. 23
Since the publication of The Act of Creation, the development of theories
of analogical mapping has greatly enhanced our understanding of how
bisociation might work. Particularly useful are the concepts of structure
24
mapping, originally proposed by Dedre Gentner to be the key component
of analogical reasoning, and structural alignment, discussed by Gentner and