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Conceptual Combination and Scientific Discovery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Paul Thagard
Paul Thagard*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Michigan, Dearborn Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Extract

How are scientific concepts formed? This question was central for positivist and operationalist philosophers concerned to root scientific thought directly in experience (e.g., Hempel 1952, Bridgman 1927). Although the positivist program has been abandoned, the current interest in the philosophy of scientific discovery shows the need for a theory of conceptual development. This paper offers a theory of how new concepts can arise, not by abstraction from experience or by definition, but by conceptual combination. Such combination produces a new concept as a non-linear, non-definitional amalgam of existing concepts. After proposing rules intended to account for a variety of mundane cases of conceptual combination, the paper presents several illustrations of how scientific concepts have arisen through combination.

According to a strict empiricist position (Hume 1739), concepts are abstracted from experience or formed by definition. You form the concept of a dog by experiencing a number of examples of dogs and extracting the common features.

Type
Part I. Discovery and Justification
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1984 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1984 , 1984 , pp. 2 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1984

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful for useful discussions with John Holland, Keith Holyoak, Richard Nisbett, and Lindley Darden. Related issues are discussed in Holland et al. (unpublished) and in Thagard (unpublished-ST).

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