Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T06:40:39.405Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Kuhnian Puzzle Solving and Schema Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Thomas Nickles
Thomas Nickles*
Affiliation:
University of Nevada, Reno
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Philosophy Department (102), University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Looking at Thomas Kuhn's work from a cognitive science perspective helps to articulate and to legitimize, to some degree, his rejection of traditional views of concepts, categorization, theory structure, and rule-based problem solving. Whereas my colleagues focus on the later Kuhn of the MIT years, I study the early Kuhn as an anticipation of case-based reasoning and schema theory. These recent developments in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence may point toward a more computational version of Kuhn's ideas, but they also expose ambiguities in his work, notably in his understanding of exemplars.

Type
Experiment and Conceptual Change
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue S3: Supplement. Proceedings of the 1998 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers Sep., 2000 , 2000 , pp. S242 - S255
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

‡

I am grateful to the U.S. Natiomal Science Foundation for research support. Thanks also to Peter Barker, Kim Beal, Bill Brewer, Gaye McCollum-Nickles, and Nancy Nersessian for references and suggestions.

References

Andersen, Hanne, Barker, Peter, and Chen, Xiang (1996), Kuhn's Mature Philosophy of Science and Cognitive Psychology, Philosophical Psychology 9: 347363.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barlett, Frederick (1932), Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence (1990), On the Indistinguishability of Exemplar Memory and Abstraction in Category Representation, in Srull, T. and Wyer, R. Jr. (eds.), Advances in Social Cognition, vol. 3. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 6188.Google Scholar
Brewer, William (1987), Schemas Versus Mental Models in Human Memory, in Morris, Peter (ed.), Modelling Cognition. New York: John Wiley, 187197.Google Scholar
Brewer, William, and Nakamura, Glenn (1984), The Nature and Function of Schemas, in Wyer, R. Jr. and Srull, T. (eds.), Handbook of Social Cognition, vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 119160.Google Scholar
Brewer, William and Tenpenny, Patricia (in press), The Role of Schemata in the Recall and Recognition of Episodic Information.Google Scholar
Cartwright, Nancy (1983), How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/0198247044.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cartwright, Nancy, Shomar, Towfic, and Su$aArez, Mauricio (1995), The Tool Box of Science, in Herfel, William, Krajewski, W$lsadys$lsaw, Niiniluoto, Ilkka, and W$oAjcicki, Ryszard (eds.), Theories and Models in Scientific Processes. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 137149.Google Scholar
Chen, Xiang, Andersen, Hanne, and Barker, Peter (1998), Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Revolutions and Cognitive Psychology, Philosophical Psychology 11: 528.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giere, Ronald (1988), Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226292038.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giere, Ronald. (1994), The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Theories, Philosophy of Science 61: 276296.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoyningen-Huene, Paul (1993), Reconstructing Science: Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kolodner, Janet (1993), Case-Based Reasoning. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., enlarged. First edition 1962. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas. (1974), Second Thoughts on Paradigms, in Suppe, Frederick (ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 459482.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas. (1978), Black-body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 18941912. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas. (1992). The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science, first Rothschild Lecture, Harvard University, November 19, 1991.Google Scholar
Marshall, Sandra (1995), Schemas in Problem Solving. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511527890CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nersessian, Nancy (1995), Opening the Black Box: Cognitive Science and History of Science, Osiris 10: 194211.10.1086/368749CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newell, Allen and Simon, Herbert (1972), Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Nickles, Thomas (1981), What Is a Problem that We May Solve It?, Synthese 47: 85118.10.1007/BF01064267CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nickles, Thomas. (1992), Good Science as Bad History: From Order of Knowing to Order of Being, in McMullin, Ernan (ed.), The Social Dimensions of Science. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 85129.Google Scholar
Nickles, Thomas. (1998), Kuhn, Historical Philosophy of Science, and Case-Based Reasoning, Configurations 6: 5185 (special issue on Thomas Kuhn).10.1353/con.1998.0008CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosch, Eleanor (1973), Natural Categories, Cognitive Psychology 4: 328350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rouse, Joseph (1987), Knowledge and Power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Rumelhart, David, Smolensky, Paul, McClelland, James, and Hinton, Geoffrey (1986), Schemata and Sequential Thought Processes in PDP Models, in McClelland, James and Rumelhart, David (eds.), Parallel Distributed Processing, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 757.10.7551/mitpress/5236.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sommerfeld, Arnold (1919), Atombau und Spektrallinien. Braunschweig: Vieweg, Many later editions.Google Scholar
Vicente, Kim and Brewer, William (1993), Reconstructive Remembering of the Scientific Literature, Cognition 46: 101128.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed