Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous computational theories of problem solving have not accounted for the occasional display of accelerated problem solving by humans working on conceptually hard problems. Researchers refer to this behavior as insight. Kaplan and Simon describe insight as the selection of a good representation of the problem by the problem solver. They propose a dual-state space theory, meta-space theory, to explain insight (lO^lan and Simon, 1990). W e show that meta-space theory is unfalsifiable. W e then show that the nature of meta-space theory makes it superfluous for the study of human problem solving.