In his last Post Horatio W. proposed to explore several terms related to Landscape Appreciation through the use of Minsky's frames. I quite agree with him in that such an approach could be very promising. After the original publication Minsky's frames has been applied, outside its main applications in Artificial Intelligence, to an extremely wide range of subjects resulting, in most cases,  in considerable advance in their understanding. To quote just a few: conflict management (Dewulf et. Al 2005); fiction literature interpretation (Oertel,2002), Knowledge Repr. Systems, (Nebel, MIT,1999), Image analysis (Bahr et al, 2003). (Note: these are mostly review papers, I'll be glad to supply these and other refs. on request). Misnky himself (1981)  ambitiously approached the question of " Why do we like music?", so the question of our preferences for certain landscapes could as well be a legitimate target.

       I think however that before we embark on this approach we should keep at hand's reach this cautionary note: the Frames approach, as proposed by Minsky, is not designed to discover 'How we Think" in given situations; it is just a model of thought processes designed to help in their understanding. Quoting Minsky:  "I only claim that the frame-system scheme may help explain a number of phenomena in human intelligence". Many models have proved to be extremely successful in increasing our understanding of a wide range of subjects; their failures have mostly arisen because of the blurring of the distinction between models of a situation or process and the actual situation or process. As long as we keep this distinction in mind…