Functional reasoning and functional modelling

A car that will not start on a cold winter day and one that will not start on a hot summer day usually indicate two very different situations. When pressed to explain the difference, we would give a winter account-´Oil is more viscous in cold conditions, and that causes . . .´-and a summer story-´Vapor lock is a possibility in hot weather and is usually caused by . . .´ How do we build such explanations? One possibility is that understanding how the car works as a device gives us a basis for generating the explanations. But that raises another question: how do people understand devices? Model-based reasoning is a subfield of artificial intelligence focusing on device understanding issues. In any model-based-reasoning approach, the goal is to ´model´ a device in the world as a computer program. Unfortunately, ´model´ is a loaded term-different listeners understand the word to mean very different concepts. By extrapolation, ´model-based reasoning´ can suggest several different approaches, depending on the embedded meaning of model.´.<>