Xiang Chen

One of the most controversial ideas in recent philosophy of science is the incommensurability of scientific theories. For Kuhn, the claim that two theories are incommensurable is the claim that there is no common language within which both theories could be fully expressed (Kuhn 1977, p. 301). In others words, two theories are incommensurable if and only if they are articulated in languages that are not mutually translatable or communicable without loss. This type of incommensurability, according to Kuhn, is the result of changes in worldview. The proponents of different paradigms practice their researches in different worlds (Kuhn 1970, p. 150). They may have different classifications of objects in the world due to their different cultures. For example, the astronomers who belonged to Ptolemy’s paradigm grouped the sun, moon, and Mars into the same set, while the astronomers who belonged to Copernicus’s paradigm classified them into three different categories.

The optical revolution, that is, the replacement of corpuscular optics by wave optics at the beginning of the nineteenth century, has attracted the attention of philosophers of science for a long time. For a long period the cause of the optical revolution was attributed to “crucial experiments” such as Foucault’s experiment on the velocity of light (Sabra 1954, pp.149-51). Later Frankel argued that social and political factors were necessary for the victory of the wave theory (Frankel 1976, p.142). These accounts, however, were severely criticized by recent theorists of scientific change, especially Lakatos and Laudan. Lakatos calls the opinion that accounted for the optical revolution solely by “crucial experiments” naive “instant rationality” (Lakatos 1978, p.68 & 72n). Laudan also regards the attempt to explain scientific revolution mainly by social and political elements as “jumping to a premature conclusion” (Laudan 1977, p.4).

Emotional design is an important development trend of interaction design. Emotional design in products plays a key role in enhancing user experience and inducing user emotional resonance. In recent years, based on the user's emotional experience, the design concept of strengthening product emotional design has become a new direction for most designers to improve their design thinking. In the emotional interaction design, the machine needs to capture the user's key information in real time, recognize the user's emotional state, and use a variety of clues to finally determine the appropriate user model. Based on this background, this research uses a deep learning mechanism for more accurate and effective emotion recognition, thereby optimizing the design of the interactive system and improving the user experience. First of all, this research discusses how to use user characteristics such as speech, facial expression, video, heartbeat, etc., to make machines more accurately recognize human emotions. Through the analysis of various characteristics, the speech is selected as the experimental material. Second, a speech-based emotion recognition method is proposed. The mel-Frequency cepstral coefficient of the speech signal is used as the input of the improved long and short-term memory network. To ensure the integrity of the information and the accuracy of the output at the next moment, ILSTM makes peephole connections in the forget gate and input gate of LSTM, and adds the unit state as input data to the threshold layer. The emotional features obtained by ILSTM are input into the attention layer, and the self-attention mechanism is used to calculate the weight of each frame of speech signal. The speech features with higher weights are used to distinguish different emotions and complete the emotion recognition of the speech signal. Experiments on the EMO-DB and CASIA datasets verify the effectiveness of the model for emotion recognition. Finally, the feasibility of emotional interaction system design is discussed.

In this paper we examine the pattern of conceptual change during scientific revolutions by using methods from cognitive psychology. We show that the changes characteristic of scientific revolutions, especially taxonomic changes, can occur in a continuous manner. Using the frame model of concept representation to capture structural relations within concepts and the direct links between concept and taxonomy, we develop an account of conceptual change in science that more adequately reflects the current understanding that episodes like the Copernican revolution are not always abrupt. When concepts are represented by frames, the transformation from one taxonomy to another can be achieved in a piecemeal fashion not preconditioned by a crisis stage, and a new taxonomy can arise naturally out of the old frame instead of emerging separately from the existing conceptual system. This cognitive mechanism of continuous change demonstrates the constructive roles of anomaly and incommensurability in promoting the progress of science.

In this article I explain why scientists cannot always resolve their disagreements about experiments even if they do not hold conflicting theoretical assumptions, and how incommensurability in experiments can occur even if experiments are not deeply encumbered by theoretical assumptions. On the basis of recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and an extended analysis of a historical case, I explore a cognitive mechanism that may generate incommensurability in experiment appraisal. I find that, because of the involvement of goal-derived categories, incommensurability in experiments may result from the conflict of goals that scientists pursue in their researches, from the differences of goal-derived classification schemata that they employ in analyzing experiments, and from discrepancies between skills that they have developed in their practices. This account differs from the conventional interpretation of Kuhn’s thesis, which attributes the cause of incommensurability solely to theoretical differences. In the conclusion, I further discuss the implications of this new account of incommensurability for both philosophical and historical studies of science.

This paper offers a solution to a problem in Herschel studies by drawing on the dynamic frame model for concept representation offered by cognitive psychology. Applying the frame model to represent the conceptual frameworks of the particle and wave theories, this paper shows that discontinuity between the particle and wave frameworks consists mainly in the transition from a particle notion ‘side’ to a wave notion ‘phase difference’. By illustrating intraconceptual relations within concepts, the frame representations reveal the ontological differences between these two concepts. ‘Side’ is an object concept built on spatial relations, but ‘phase difference’ is an event concept built on temporal relations. The conceptual analyses display a possible cognitive source of Herschel’s misconception of polarization. Limited by his experimental works and his philosophical beliefs, Herschel comprehended polarization solely in terms of spatial relations, which prevented him from replacing the object concept ‘side’ with the event concept ‘phase difference’, and eventually resulted in his failure to understand the wave account of polarization.Author Keywords: Herschel; Polarization; Object concept; Event concept; Frame; Cognitive psychology.

: Armed with a photometer originally designed for evaluating telescopes, Richard Potter in the early 1830s measured the re(integral)ective power of metallic and glass mirrors. Because he found significant discrepancies between his measurements and Fresnel's predictions, Potter developed doubts concerning the wave theory. However, Potter's measurements were colored by a peculiar procedure. In order to protect the sensitivity of the eye, Potter made certain approximations in the measuring process, which exaggerated the discrepancies between the theory and the data. Potter's measurements received strong criticisms from wave theorists, not because they felt they needed to defend their theory, but because they believed that Potter was wrong in using the eye as an essential apparatus in the experiments. Potter's photometric measurements and the subsequent debate reveal the existence of two incompatible sets of measuring procedures, each of which consisted of a body of practices concerning how photometric instruments should be used properly. In the debate, the differences regarding measuring procedures shaped the participant's judgments of experimental evidence and eventually their evaluations of the optical theories

I propose a new perspective on the study of scientific revolutions. This is a transformation from an object-only perspective to an ontological perspective that properly treats objects and processes as distinct kinds. I begin my analysis by identifying an object bias in the study of scientific revolutions, where it takes the form of representing scientific revolutions as changes in classification of physical objects. I further explore the origins of this object bias. Findings from developmental psychology indicate that children cannot distinguish processes from objects until the age of 7, but they have already developed a core system of object knowledge as early as 4 months of age. The persistence of this core system is responsible for the object bias among mature adults, i.e., the tendency to apply knowledge of physical objects to temporal processes. In light of the distinction between physical objects and temporal processes, I redraw the picture of the Copernican revolution. Rather than seeing it as a taxonomic shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric cosmology, we should understand it as a transformation from a conceptual system that was built around an object concept to one that was built around a process concept.

: This paper offers a preliminary analysis of conceptual change between event concepts. It begins with a brief review of the major findings of cognitive studies on event knowledge. The script model proposed by Schank and Abelson was the first attempt to represent event knowledge. Subsequent cognitive studies indicated that event knowledge is organized in the form of dimensional organizations in which temporally successive actions are related causally. This paper proposes a frame representation to capture and outline the internal structure of event concepts, in particular, their causal connections. The frame representation offers an effective method to analyze the relations between event concepts, and to expose the unique cognitive mechanisms behind conceptual change involved event concepts. Finally this paper shows that the frame representation of event concepts is instrumental to understanding an important historical episode of conceptual change in the context of nineteenth-century optics.

This paper examines taxonomy comparison from a cognitive perspective. Arguments are developed by drawing on the results of cognitive psychology, which reveal the cognitive mechanisms behind the practice of taxonomy comparison. The taxonomic change in 19th-century ornithology is also used to uncover the historical practice that ornithologists employed in the revision of the classification of birds. On the basis of cognitive and historical analyses, I argue that incommensurable taxonomies can be compared rationally. Using a frame model to represent taxonomy, I show how rational comparisons were achieved in the historical case through compatible contrast sets and attribute lists. Through analyzing the cognitive processes of classification and concept representation, I further explain how rival taxonomies in the historical case could be rationally compared on ‘platforms’ rooted in such cognitive mechanisms as relational assumptions and preferences for body parts in conceptual processing.

Surveys of public opinions on climate change found that a majority of American respondents regarded global warming as a critical or an important threat . Given this consensus, one might expect that a majority of Americans are ready to take immediate action to deal with the environmental crisis. However, when they were asked whether we should begin taking steps now, only 43% of American respondents said yes; 54% of them chose either the option “until we are sure that global warming is really a problem, we should not take any steps that would have economic costs,” or the option “global warming should be addressed, but its effects will be gradual, so we can deal with the problem ..

To correct the misconception that incommensurability implies incomparability, Kuhn lately develops a new interpretation of incommensurability. This includes a linguistic theory of scientific revolutions (the theory of kinds), a cognitive exploration of the language learning process (the analogy of bilingualism), and an epistemological discussion on the rationality of scientific development (the evolutionary epistemology). My focus in this paper is to review Kuhn's effort in eliminating relativism, highlighting both the insights and the difficulties of his new version of incommensurability . Finally I suggest that some of Kuhn's difficulties can be overcome by adopting a concept of rationality that filly appreciates the important role of instruments in the development of science.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of scientific change. The undulatory theory of light replaced the emission theory of light in the early nineteenth century, triggering an "optical revolution" and vigorous debates among physicists in Britain from the 1830s to the 1850s. In this study I give the first full account of this extended episode of scientific change, drawing on methods and concepts from history, sociology and philosophy of science. The interdisciplinary account of the episode provides a basis for criticizing the existing models of scientific change in the philosophy of science. ;Previous historical studies of the "optical revolution" pay little attention to the period after the 1830s. Because the cognitive superiority of the undulatory theory had become obvious in the early 1830s, some historians have implicitly assumed that any controversy would soon come to a natural end. I, however, document that intensive debates continued from the 1830s until the end of the 1850s, and that emissionists even enjoyed temporary victories in their fights with undulationists. The narrative reveals the historical complexities of this episode: the debates extended long after the cognitive superiority of the undulatory theory should have become apparent by modern standard, the results of the debates did not necessarily coincide with modern cognitive judgements, and individual agents played decisive roles in determining how long a debate lasted and how it would end. ;On the basis of the historical narrative, I provide a philosophical analysis of the practices of theory appraisal and experiment appraisal that constituted the main theme of the controversy. Instead of merely identifying the criteria of evaluation employed in this episode, I pay special attention to how individual agents actually applied these criteria in concrete situations, what kinds of strategies or tactics they employed for the applications of these criteria, and how they created favorable conditions, both cognitive and social, for successfully applying these criteria. Individual agents' efforts in selecting application strategies and in creating favorable conditions made the practices of appraisal complicated, exhibiting various features that are incomprehensible if we limit ourselves merely to studying the criteria of evaluation. ;I finally discuss a different approach to scientific change. The existing philosophical models of scientific change merely analyze the final product of science--scientific theories, and ignore the impact of social factors and the role of individual agents. I suggest we concentrate on the process of knowledge production, and pay attention to individual agents's practices in this process, as well as to the relevant cognitive and social factors that influence individual agents. Following this new approach, scientific change is understood as an evolution that involves interactions among three elements: theory, experiment, and human agent

This paper concentrates on a debate over dispersion in the second half of the 1830s, in which both sides utilized the same set of experimental data to test a proposed wave account of dispersion, but could not agree on how these data should be used. The conflict regarding experimental data was caused by differences in instruments. In the debate, optical instruments in many ways functioned like paradigms, shaping scientists' opinions. Instruments also led the debate into an impasse, because no apparatus was available for the necessary experimental replication. Because of unreconcilable differences regarding experimental evidence, the wave theory's failure in explaining dispersion did not become an obstacle to its acceptance

Many recent cognitive studies reveal that human cognition is inherently perceptual, sharing systems with perception at both the conceptual and the neural levels. This paper introduces Barsalou's theory of perceptual symbols and explores its implications for philosophy of science. If perceptual symbols lie in the heart of conceptual processing, the process of attribute selection during concept representation, which is critical for defining similarity and thus for comparing taxonomies, can no longer be determined solely by background beliefs. The analogous nature of perceptual symbols and the spatial nature of intraconceptual relations impose new constraints on attribute selection. These constraints help people with different background beliefs select compatible attributes, which constitute a common "platform" for taxonomy comparison

In a previous article we have shown that Kuhn's theory of concepts is independently supported by recent research in cognitive psychology. In this paper we propose a cognitive re-reading of Kuhn's cyclical model of scientific revolutions: all of the important features of the model may now be seen as consequences of a more fundamental account of the nature of concepts and their dynamics. We begin by examining incommensurability, the central theme of Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, according to two different cognitive models of concept representation. We provide new support for Kuhn 's mature views that incommensurability can be caused by changes in only a few concepts, that even incommensurable conceptual systems can be rationally compared, and that scientific change of the most radical sort—the type labeled revolutionary in earlier studies—does not have to occur holistically and abruptly, but can be achieved by a historically more plausible accumulation of smaller changes. We go on to suggest that the parallel accounts of concepts found in Kuhn and in cognitive science lead to a new understanding of the nature of normal science, of the transition from normal science to crisis, and of scientific revolutions. The same account enables us to understand how scientific communities split to create groups supporting new paradigms, and to resolve various outstanding problems. In particular, we can identify the kind of change needed to create a revolution rather precisely. This new analysis also suggests reasons for the unidirectionality of scientific change.