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350 Conversion

belief base and on the principles by which truth values at different levels influ-
ence each other. A point change, a single shift in truth value, might trigger a wave
of re-assessments that propagates through the belief base. When the resulting
change is limited, it might go more or less unnoticed; when the change is major,
it is presumably experienced subjectively as a change of mind. To the extent that
the change is expressed in his discourse, it will be perceived as such by others.

Three Vignettes

The purpose of the following three vignettes is to make the resubsumption
theory plausible and to illustrate how its concepts and principles apply in dif-
ferent cases. The first two vignettes are didactic; the third is a case from the
history of science.
Consider the concept of a feedback circle. An engineering student will
encounter this concept in the context of thermostats and other control sys-
tems. He might not have noticed that the national economy can be seen as a
feedback system as well. For the student to discover this, he has to be in a sit-
uation in which the economy comes to mind – through a conversation, news
report or other input – but in which the feedback concept has a high enough
activation to compete with standard economic concepts like, for example, sup-
ply and demand. Suppose the engineering student spends several days study-
ing for an examination on control devices. Afterward, he celebrates with other
students at a local watering hole and the conversation turns toward the group
members’ future prospects and hence to the way the economy is going, which
in turn leads them to challenge each others’ ideas about how the economy
works. In this context, we would not be surprised if our protagonist suddenly
tells the group that the economy is a feedback system, perhaps in jest. Once the
bisociation has occurred, many applications of feedback concepts to economic
phenomena (business cycles, rise of monopolies, stretching of the income
distribution, etc.) come to mind. Before the last beer is emptied, the student
might be convinced that there is another way to think about the economy than
in terms of the equilibrium theorems of classical market economics. The key
feature of this hypothetical scenario is the introduction of thoughts about eco-
nomic events into a situation in which the concepts of control theory already
have a high level of activation due to the preparation for the examination.
As a second illustration, consider a person who becomes engaged in local
politics for the first time as an adult. Suppose that he initially suffers from
what we might call the Civics Theory of politics: Those who stand for election
represent the values and principles of the electorate and, once elected to office,