When reading the papers of Solomon, Thagard and Goldman, I observed their framing doing considerable explicit and implicit work. Framing, a visual metaphor, stimulated me to respond with images of one kind or another. These should allow readers to visualize more issues and propositions than an argumentive format could have pinned down in the limited space available.

Figure 1 conveys how the three papers seem to me to frame the issue of integrating the cognitive and social: Scientists’ beliefs are the focal phenomena, within three nested boxes of factors surrounding them: thinking (reasoning etc.); cognition (information input and processing); and social (interaction among agents). (The other objects and lines will be explained in due course.) These factors are referred to as influences, something outside that gets into beliefs (1). The authors then argue about which set of influences is strongest or how to think about the factors “intermingling,” “overlapping,” “interacting.”.