Kuhn and the cognitive revolution

Configurations

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 87-120

  Nersessian, Nancy J ^a  

^a GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0009230610     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.1998.0007     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., enlarged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
2. I emphasize "published" because in conversation with me, and in transcripts of interviews conducted by Hanne Andersen in March 1994 and October 1995, Kuhn did mention that cognitive psychological research into child development was figuring into the account he was writing in the follow-on book to Structure that he was still working on at the time of his death. He gave permission for the free use of the interviews after his death. Although his comments are sketchy, they do provide some pertinent remarks that will be discussed later in this article.
3. J. S. Bruner, J. Goodnow, and J. Austin, A Study of Thinking (New York: Wiley, 1956);
4. G. A. Miller, E. Galanter, and K. H. Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior (New York: Adams-Bannister-Cox, 1960).
5. On Quine's "third dogma," see N. J. Nersessian, "The Roots of Epistemological 'Anarchy'," Inquiry 22 (1979): 423-440.
6. See, e.g, T. Nickles, "Thomas Kuhn, Historical Philosophy of Science, and Case-Based Reasoning," in this issue;
7. N. J. Neisessian, "Opening the Black Box: Cognitive Science and History of Science," in Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science, ed. A. Thackray, Osiris 10 (1995): 194-211.
8. Nersessian, "Black Box" (above, n. 4);
9. N. J. Nersessian, "How Do Scientists Think? Capturing the Dynamics of Conceptual Change in Science," in Cognitive Models of Science, ed. R. Giere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 3-44.
10. P. Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. pp. 64-110.
11. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Ḃlackwell, 1968).
12. Kuhn, Structure (above, n. 1), p. 44.
13. Kuhn, Structure Ibid., pp. 43-44.
14. Kuhn, Structure Ibid., P. 45n2, 197n (italics in original).
15. See also Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing (above, n. 6), p. 95.
16. Kuhn, Structure, pp. 194-197;
17. Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing, p. 85.
18. Just what literature in cognitive science Kuhn was aware of and how deeply he had studied any of it is unknown. He did tead the review of some of this literature presented in the extended Tech Report of Nersessian, "Black Box" (above, n. 4), and commented that he was "altogether sympathetic to [my] viewpoint" (correspondence, March 23, 1993). Further, he requested from me specific references in neuroscience. We also discussed his interest in the child development research of Susan Carey at MIT and others who were investigating the problem of whether one can determine what is innate ("hard-wired") by studying such developmental phenomena as when babies exhibit recognition of object permanance. The only recorded discussions I am aware of are the taped interviews with Hanne Andersen (above, n. 2), in which he mentions the neural net literature and the developmental literature as pertinent to his "perceptual space" notion and the need for a clear distinction between similar and dissimilar; he states his conviction that the Roschian "graded category structure" will fall out of the neurological case, if it can be made; and he mentions that at least a chapter of the follow-on book would discuss the child developmental investigations. That book is currently being edited by John Haugeland and James Conant of the University of Pittsburgh.
19. For an overview of this research, see E. E. Smith and D. L. Medin, Categories and Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
20. E. Rosch Heider, "Universals in Color Naming and Memory," Journal of Experimental Psychology 93 (1972): 10-20.
21. E. Rosch and C. Mervis, "Family Resemblance: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories," Cognitive Psychology 7 (1975): 573-605;
22. E. Rosch, "Wittgenstein and Categorization Research in Cognitive Psychology," in Meaning and the Growth of Understanding: Wittgenstein's Significance for Developmental Psychology, ed. M. Chapman and R. A. Dixon (Berlin: Springer, 1987), pp. 151-166.
23. See, e.g., S. L. Armstrong, L. Gleitman, and H. Gleitman, "What Some Concepts Might Not Be," Cognition 13 (1983): 263-308.
24. Rosch, "Wittgenstein" (above, n. 15), p. 157;
25. T. S. Kuhn, "Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?" in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 1-23.
26. See, e.g., Armstrong, Gleitman, and Gleitman, "Concepts" (above, n. 16);
27. L. Barsalou, "The Instability of Graded Structure: Implications for the Nature of Concepts," in Concepts and Conceptual Development: Ecological and Intellectual Factors in Categorization, ed. U. Neisser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 101-140.
28. H. Andersen, P. Barker, and X. Chen, "Kuhn's Mature Philosophy of Science and Cognitive Psychology," Philosophical Psychology 9 (1996): 347-363;
29. H. Andersen, "Categorization, Anomalies, and the Discovery of Nuclear Fission," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 27 (1996): 463-492;
30. X. Chen, "Taxonomic Changes and the Particle-Wave Debate in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 26 (1995): 251-271.
31. L. Barsalou, "Frames, Contrasts, and Conceptual Fields," in Frames, Fields, and Contrast: New Essays in Semantical and Lexical Organization, ed. A. Lehrer and E. Kittay (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1992), pp. 21-74.
32. N. J. Nersessian, Faraday to Einstein: Constructing Meaning in Scientific Theories (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984);
33. N. J. Nersessian, idem, "Aether/Or: The Creation of Scientific Concepts," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 15 (1984): 175-212;
34. N. J. Nersessian, idem, "Faraday's Field Concept," in Faraday Rediscovered: Essays on the Life and Work of Michael Faraday, ed. D. Gooding and F. A. J. L. James (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 377-406;
35. N. J. Nersessian and H. Andersen, "Conceptual Change and Incommensurability: A Cognitive-Historical View," Danish Yearbook of Philosophy (in press).
36. P. Barker and B. Goldstein, "The Role of Comets in the Copernican Revolution," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 19 (1988): 299-319.
37. See also N. J. Nersessian, "Conceptual Change in Science and in Science Education," Synthese 80 (1989): 163-183.
38. Kuhn, Structure, pp. 188ff.
39. T. S. Kuhn, "Afterwords," in World Changes: Thomas Kulm and the Nature of Science, ed. P. Horwich (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 311-341. I thank Hanne Andersen for pointing this out to me.
40. T. S. Kuhn, "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" in The Probabilistic Revolution, ed. L. Krüger, L. Daston, and M. Heidelberger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), p. 21.
41. For a review of the literature, see D. L. Medin, "Concepts and Conceptual Structure," American Psychologist 44 (1989): 1469-1481.
42. R. Giere, "The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Theories," Philosophy of Science 61 (1994): 276-296.
43. See Nersessian, Faraday to Einstein,
44. "Faraday's Field Concept" (above, n. 21). The latter also establishes the saliency of the "family resemblance" notion of concepts as a historiographic tool. Several historians are revealed as "trying to make Faraday Einstein" by at least implicitly adopting the classical view and applying the Einsteinian criteria to Faraday's research.
45. Nersessian and Andersen, "Conceptual Change" (above, n. 21).
46. Kuhn, Structure, p. 119.
47. There is a vast cognitive-science literature that examines the role of analogy In problem-solving of the sort encountered in science learning and "normal" science. For a review, see K. J. Holyoak and P. Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). However, the theories derived from these empirical investigations cannot be extended without modification to some uses of analogy in "revolutionary" science such as Maxwell's.
48. See Nersessian, "How Do Scientists Think?" (above, n. 5);
49. Nersessian, idem, "Black Box" (above, n. 4);
50. N. J. Nersessian, "Abstraction via Generic Modeling in Concept Formation in Science," in Correcting the Model: Abstraction and Idealization in Science, ed. M. R. Jones and N. Cartwright (Amsterdam: Rodopi, in press).
51. K. Craik, The Nature of Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943).
52. See Nersessian, "Black Box" (above, n. 4).
53. P. N. Johnson-Laird, Mental Models (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
54. See S. M. Kosslyn, Image and Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
55. R. Shephard, "The Imagination of the Scientist," in Imagination and the Scientist, ed. K. Egan and D. Nadaner (New York: State Teachers College Press, 1988), p. 180.
56. See, e.g., M. T. H. Chi, P. J. Feltovish, and R. Glaser, "Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices," Cognitive Science 5 (1981): 121-152.
57. See Nersessian, "Abstraction" (above, n. 32).
58. J. C. Maxwell, "On Physical Lines of Force," in The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. W. D. Niven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980; reprint, New York: Dover, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 451-513.
59. J. C. Maxwell, The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, Ibid., p. 477.
60. C. Shelley, "Visual Abductive Reasoning in Archaeology," Philosophy of Science 63 (1996): 278-301.
61. See W. Perrig and W. Kintsch, "Propositional and Situational Representations of Text," Journal of Memory and Language 24 (1985): 503-518;
62. N. J. Netsessian, "In the Theoretician's Laboratory: Thought Experimenting as Mental Modeling," In PSA 1992, ed. D. Hull, M. Forbes, and K. Okruhlik (East Lansing, Mich.: PSA, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 291-301.
63. D. Gooding, Experiment and the Making of Meaning (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990).
64. P. Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 174-178.
65. G. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Other Dangerous Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
66. B. Shore, Culture in Mind (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
67. E. F. Keller, "Kuhn, Feminism, and Science?" in this issue.