ABSTRACT
But I found that the interviewees all had their own road maps which they relied on to understand what the environmental issue was and how it might be dealt with. I also found that these mental models were always mutually inconsistent when considered together, and often internally inconsistent when considered individually. Choosing one or more of the models as the accurate and reliable description of the environmental management problem would have been unfounded, because it would have implied that the rest of the expert models were somehow inferior to the chosen ones. It would also have been unwise, because it would just have polarized the already charged debate. If any intelligence is to be extracted from all this contradictory expert knowledge, it must be the result of an understanding of both the
differences of thinking among several experts and the cognitive dissonances of individual experts.
