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18Beyond Motivation and Metaphor:'Scientific Passions' and AnthropomorphismIn Vassilios Karakostas & Dennis Dieks (eds.), Epsa11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science, Springer. pp. 455--466. 2013.
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18"Why wasn't Lorentz Einstein?" An Examination of the Scientific Method of H. A. LorentzCentaurus 29 (3): 205-242. 1986.
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17Rethinking correspondence: how the process of constructing models leads to discoveries and transfer in the bioengineering sciencesSynthese 198 (Suppl 21): 1-30. 2017.Building computational models of engineered exemplars, or prototypes, is a common practice in the bioengineering sciences. Computational models in this domain are often built in a patchwork fashion, drawing on data and bits of theory from many different domains, and in tandem with actual physical models, as the key objective is to engineer these prototypes of natural phenomena. Interestingly, such patchy model building, often combined with visualizations, whose format is open to a wide range of …Read more
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15Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Cognitive Conditions and ToolsWhite Paper for Nsf's Sbe 2020: Future Research in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. 2010.Interdisciplinary collaboration figures centrally in frontier research in many fields. Participants in inter-disciplinary projects face problems they would not encounter within their own disciplines. Among those are problems of mutual understanding, of finding a language to communicate both within projects and with the scientific community and society at large, and of needing to master concepts and methods of different disciplines. We think that a concentrated research and development effort is …Read more
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13Barriers and Models: Comments on Margolis and GierePSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990. 1990.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…Read more
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13Abstraction via generic modeling in concept formation in scienceMind and Society 3 (1): 129-154. 2002.Cases where analogy has played a significant role in the formation of a new scientific concept are well-documented. Yet, how is it that genuinely new representations can be constructed from existing representations? It is argued that the process of ‘generic modeling’ enables abstraction of features common to both the domain of the source of the analogy and of the target phenomena. The analysis focuses on James Clerk Maxwell's construction of the electromagnetic field concept. The mathematical re…Read more
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10Mental Modeling in Conceptual ChangeInternational Journal on Humanistic Ideology 3 (1): 11-48. 2010.
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10What Has History to Do with Cognition? Interactive Methods for Studying Research LaboratoriesJournal of Cognition and Culture 4 (3-4): 663-700. 2004.We have been studying cognition and learning in research laboratories in the field of biomedical engineering. Through our combining of ethnography and cognitive-historical analysis in studying these settings we have been led to understand these labs as comprising evolving distributed cognitive systems and as furnishing agentive learning environments. For this paper we develop the theme of 'models-in-action,' a variant of what Knorr Cetina has called 'knowledge-in-action.' Among the epistemically…Read more
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10Mesoscopic modeling as a cognitive strategy for handling complex biological systemsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 78 101201. 2019.
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9Conceptual ChangeIn William Bechtel & George Graham (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science, Blackwell. 2017.Much of the attention of philosophy of science, history of science, and psychology in the twentieth century has focused on the nature of conceptual change. Conceptual change in science has occupied pride of place in these disciplines, as either the subject of inquiry or the source of ideas about the nature of conceptual change in other domains. There have been numerous conceptual changes in the history of science, some more radical than others. One of the most radical was the chemical revolution…Read more
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8Particles and Waves: Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Science. Peter AchinsteinIsis 83 (3): 527-528. 1992.
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4Modeling Practices in Conceptual InnovationIn Uljana Feest & Friedrich Steinle (eds.), Scientific Concepts and Investigative Practice, De Gruyter. pp. 245-270. 2012.
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3“Groping for Trouts in a Peculiar River:” Challenges in Exploration and Application for Ethnographic Study of Interdisciplinary ScienceIn Kieran C. O'Doherty, Lisa M. Osbeck, Ernst Schraube & Jeffery Yen (eds.), Psychological Studies of Science and Technology, Springer Verlag. pp. 103-126. 2019.We describe our efforts to address theoretical opportunities and methodological challenges that arose in the context of our ethnographic investigation of research labs in four different fields of bioengineering science. The multiyear study compared the common and specific features of four sites of interdisciplinary practice and aimed to analyze personal and collective goals, problem formulations, methods, technologies, and social organization within each lab. In the second phase of the study we …Read more
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3The topics: Knowledge and cognitive scienceInternational Journal on Humanistic Ideology 3 (1). 2010.
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3Understanding the Creative Mind: a review of Margaret Boden's creative mind (review)Artificial Intelligence 79 (1): 111-128. 1995.
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2Theories, models and interpretationsIn Lorenzo Magnani, Nancy J. Nersessian & Paul Thagard (eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery, . 1999.
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2Reasoning From Imagery and Analogy in Scientific Concept FormationPSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988 (1): 41-47. 1988.How do vague notions about how one might understand certain physical phenomena get transformed into scientific concepts such as “field”, “quark”, and “gene”? Philosophers of as disparate views as Reichenbach and Feyerabend have held that the process through which scientific concepts emerge is not a reasoned process. In a manner completely mysterious and unanalyzable, scientific concepts emerge fully grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. However, when one examines actual cases of concept form…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Other Academic Areas |