Abstract
Historians and philosophers of science have, in recent decades, offered evidence in support of several influential models of conceptual change in science. These models have often drawn on and in turn driven research on conceptual change in childhood and in science education. This nexus of reciprocal influences is held together by several largely unexamined analogies and by several assumptions concerning analogy itself. In this chapter, we aim to shed some light on these hidden premises and subject them to critical scrutiny. Our critical survey suggests the following hypothesis: conceptual change in both childhood and science is driven by the epistemic subject’s quest for coherence.
This paper has profited greatly from comments, suggestions, and corrections from Anna-Mari Rusanen and three anonymous referees. Any remaining errors are our own.
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Notes
- 1.
A fairly straightforward example – one to which we will return later – is whether mechanisms for the adoption of novel conceptions that maximize conceptual coherence and internal consistency in childhood development are necessary or sufficient for the process of scientific theory change. Similarly, we may ask whether the kinds of theoretical “paradigm shifts” that have historically occurred in science constrain the types of conceptual mechanisms that can allow for successful conceptual change in development. Stella Vosniadou and her colleagues have done extensive empirical research on these issues (cf., e.g., Vosniadou 2007; Christou and Vosniadou 2005; Vosniadou et al. 2004).
- 2.
This presupposition is typical of, though not exclusive to, “theory-theory” approaches to the developmental attainment of conceptual tools for dealing with human behavior, where the theory most children acquire is variously called “folk psychology” or “theory of mind.” In such contexts, the debt owed to the history and philosophy of science is often explicitly acknowledged, as in the title of Piaget student Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s (1988) essay, “The Child is a Theoretician, not an Inductivist.” In another example, Allison Gopnik observed that the tendency of developmental psychologists to refer to a child’s conceptual knowledge base as a “theory” is a reflection of the extent to which developmental psychology must be previously informed by the history of science. She writes (1996): “cognitive and developmental psychologists have invoked the analogy of science itself. They talk about our everyday conceptions of the world as implicit and intuitive theories, and about changes in those conceptions as theory changes” (Gopnik 1996, p. 485, emphasis added).
- 3.
We are grateful to Anna-Mari Rusanen for pointing us toward many of the works cited in this paragraph.
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Dunst, B., Levine, A. (2014). Conceptual Change: Analogies Great and Small and the Quest for Coherence. In: Matthews, M. (eds) International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7654-8_41
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