Online research in philosophy

: This paper continues my application of theories of concepts developed in cognitive psychology to clarify issues in Kuhn's mature account of scientific change. I argue that incommensurability is typically neither global nor total, and that the corresponding form of scientific change occurs incrementally. Incommensurability can now be seen as a local phenomenon restricted to particular points in a conceptual framework represented by a set of nodes. The unaffected parts in the framework constitute the basis for continued communication between the communities supporting alternative structures. The importance of a node is a measure of the severity of incommensurability introduced by replacing it. Such replacements occur incrementally so that changes like that from the conceptual structure of Aristotelian celestial physics to the conceptual structure of Newtonian celestial physics occur in small stages over time, and for each change it is in principle possible to identify the arguments and evidence that led historical actors to make the revisions. Thus the process of scientific change is a rational one, even when its beginning and end points are incommensurable conceptual structures. It is also apparent, from a detailed examination of the conceptual structure of astronomy at the time of Copernicus, thatthe kind of conceptual difficulty identified as incommensurability may occur within a single scientific tradition as well as between two rival traditions.

: This paper offers a preliminary analysis of conceptual change between event concepts. It begins with a brief review of the major findings of cognitive studies on event knowledge. The script model proposed by Schank and Abelson was the first attempt to represent event knowledge. Subsequent cognitive studies indicated that event knowledge is organized in the form of dimensional organizations in which temporally successive actions are related causally. This paper proposes a frame representation to capture and outline the internal structure of event concepts, in particular, their causal connections. The frame representation offers an effective method to analyze the relations between event concepts, and to expose the unique cognitive mechanisms behind conceptual change involved event concepts. Finally this paper shows that the frame representation of event concepts is instrumental to understanding an important historical episode of conceptual change in the context of nineteenth-century optics.

A major theme of recent philosophy of science has been the rejection of the empiricist thesis that, with the exception of terms which play a purely formal role, the language of science derives its meaning from some, possibly quite indirect, correlation with experience. The alternative that has been proposed is that meaning is internal to each conceptual system, that terms derive their meaning from the role they play in a language, and that something akin to "meaning" flows from conceptual framework to experience. Much contemporary debate on the nature of conceptual change is a direct outgrowth of this holistic view of concepts, and much of the inconclusiveness of that debate derives from the lack of any clear understanding of what a conceptual system is, or of how conceptual systems confer meaning on their terms.

Giere's assessment is that the cognitive sciences, especially cognitive psychology, have much to offer the philosophy of science as it attempts to develop theories of the growth, development, and change of scientific knowledge as human activities. Margolis produces a model of scientific change by drawing from recent work in the cognitive sciences and attempts to show how this model explains salient cases of conceptual change. While agreeing with Giere's assessment, I argue that Margolis provides the wrong model both for scientific change and for how the interaction between cognitive science and philosophy of science should proceed.

In this paper we examine the pattern of conceptual change during scientific revolutions by using methods from cognitive psychology. We show that the changes characteristic of scientific revolutions, especially taxonomic changes, can occur in a continuous manner. Using the frame model of concept representation to capture structural relations within concepts and the direct links between concept and taxonomy, we develop an account of conceptual change in science that more adequately reflects the current understanding that episodes like the Copernican revolution are not always abrupt. When concepts are represented by frames, the transformation from one taxonomy to another can be achieved in a piecemeal fashion not preconditioned by a crisis stage, and a new taxonomy can arise naturally out of the old frame instead of emerging separately from the existing conceptual system. This cognitive mechanism of continuous change demonstrates the constructive roles of anomaly and incommensurability in promoting the progress of science.

This paper analyses conceptual change. A rejection of pure experience has prompted philosophers of science to adopt a certain perspective from which to view changes of belief. Popper, Kuhn, and others have analysed conceptual change in terms of problems or anomalies, that is, in terms of contingent reasoning about issues posed in the context of an inherited web of belief. This paper explores a more general analysis of conceptual change in dialogue with these philosophers of science. Because changes of belief are not all changes in scientific belief, we seek to unpack conceptual change in terms of dilemmas, as opposed to anomalies or problems. For a start, the notion of a dilemma has to be broader than that of an anomaly since it purports to apply to conceptual change as a whole, not just the transition from one era of normal science to another. In addition, we should detach the notion of a dilemma from the objectivism of Popper's world-3 problems.

Concepts are mental representations corresponding to words. For example, the concept `dog` is a mental structure that corresponds to the word `dog' and refers to dogs in the world. Conceptual change is produced by mental processes that create and alter such mental representations. Explaining how conceptual change works is important for understanding the growth of scientific knowledge, the development of children's thinking, and the education of students in fields such as science and mathematics. In each of these kinds of learning, a theory of conceptual change is needed that can answer such questions as the following. What is the nature of the concepts that are learned? What kinds of changes do concepts undergo? What are the mental processes that produce different kinds of conceptual change? It is also interesting to inquire whether the processes of conceptual change in scientists, young children, and students are similar or different.

This volume brings together a distinguished, international list of scholars to explore the role of the learner's intention in knowledge change. Traditional views of knowledge reconstruction placed the impetus for thought change outside the learner's control. The teacher, instructional methods, materials, and activities were identified as the seat of change. Recent perspectives on learning, however, suggest that the learner can play an active, indeed, intentional role in the process of knowledge restructuring. This volume explores this new, innovative view of conceptual change learning using original contributions drawn from renowned scholars in a variety of disciplines. The volume is intended for scholars or advanced students studying knowledge acquisition and change, including educational psychology, developmental psychology, science education, cognitive science, learning science, instructional psychology, and instructional and curriculum studies.

This paper argues that questions concerning the nature of concepts that are central in cognitive psychology are also important to epistemology and that there is more to conceptual change than mere belief revision. Understanding of epistemic change requires appreciation of the complex ways in which concepts are structured and organized and of how this organization can affect belief revision. Following a brief summary of the psychological functions of concepts and a discussion of some recent accounts of what concepts are, I propose a view of concepts as complex computational structures. This account suggests that conceptual change can come in varying degrees, with the most extreme consisting of fundamental conceptual reorganizations. These degrees of conceptual change are illustrated by the development of the concept of an acid.