_ Source: _Volume 94, Issue 3, pp 391 - 409 The author outlines a provisional phenomenology of problem solving. He begins by reviewing the history of problem-solving psychology, focusing on the Gestalt approach, which emphasizes the influence of prior knowledge and the occurrence of sudden insights. He then describes problem solving as a process unfolding in a field of consciousness against a background of unconscious knowledge, which encodes action patterns, schemata, and affordances. A global feeling of wrongness or tension is (...) resolved by a series of field transitions, which are guided by peripheral experiences of coherence or “rightness.” The author treats the distinction between reproductive thought and productive thought as a difference in field structure. With reproductive thoughts and actions we perform operations to solve a problem in a semi-automatic sequence. In productive thought, by contrast, a kind of parallel search occurs. This may explain the otherwise obscure phenomenology of struggling to break an impasse. (shrink)

Some philosophers have laid down rather severe strictures on whether there can be thought without language. Wittgenstein asserted that ‘the limits of language…mean the limits of my world’. Davidson has argued that ‘a creature cannot have thoughts unless it is an interpreter of the speech of another’. Dummett has interpreted some pronouncements as meaning that ‘the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological processes of thinking and…the only proper method of analysing thought consists (...) in the analysis of language’. And there is also the position that thought has its own language that might exist even prior to or in the absence of natural language. But here I am going to concentrate on what might be possible in the absence of natural language. I do not know what it would mean to consider thinking in the absence of its own intrinsic language, a language of thought, if the two always co-exist. (shrink)

The study of insight in problem solving and creative thinking has seen an upsurge of interest in the last 30 years. Current theorising concerning insight has taken one of two tacks. The special-process view, which grew out of the Gestalt psychologists’ theorising about insight, proposes that insight is the result of a dedicated set of processes that is activated by the individual's reaching impasse while trying to deal with a problematic situation. In contrast, the business-as-usual view argues that insight is (...) brought about by the same processes that underlie ordinary thinking . Although those two views are typically treated as being in opposition, it has recently been proposed that a complete understanding of insight will require bringing together aspects of both views. The present paper carries that proposal further. Critical analysis of those two viewpoints demonstrates that each has a positive contribution to make to our understanding of insight, but also is.. (shrink)

How does social organization persist? How does social organization transform? This article proposes that social scientists can begin to answer these questions by considering social organization as the intermittent construction and decay of patterned action, and social actors as centers of organization with the capacity to exert force within some social scene. From this perspective, contexts that shape the dynamics of both actors and scenes could be imagined as turbulent flows that push and pull action into temporary patterns. By viewing (...) social organization as temporary vortexes of involvement within turbulent flows of action, social scientists can focus their attention on the processes at play in the creation, stabilization, and collapse of social organization. Such a perspective corrects some of the limitations in network and field approaches for investigating the fluidity of social organization. Key Words: social organization • timing • stability • cycles • social patterns. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn this paper I present and argue for a model of conceptual development in science and apply it to the transition from classical to modern physics associated with Einstein. The model claims a continuous and rational transition between incompatible subsequent conceptual systems in mathematical science and explains its mechanism. The model was developed in a study of the transition from preclassical to classical mechanics. I argue for a strong structural analogy between the transition from preclassical to classical mechanics on (...) the one hand and from classical to modern physics on the other. The first transition is briefly sketched here by reference to Galileo and his disciples; in the second transition Planck and Lorentz on the one hand and Einstein on the other play the respective roles.A detailed and documented reconstruction of the transition from preclassical to classical mechanics on the basis of this model has already been published and is only briefly referred to in the paper. The transition from classical to modern physics is portrayed here much more extensively—though of course merely in broad brush strokes. Einstein–s role in this transition is reconstructed in the light of a conceptualization of his scientific knowledge as an active structure of thought, shaped by his intellectual experience. In this way, the development of his individual thinking is shown to be part of the overall process of conceptual transformation from classical to modern physics. The reconstruction sketched in this paper is to be considered as a proposal to be substantiated, reformed, and improved by future detailed studies. (shrink)