The cognitive science of science : explanation, discovery, and conceptual change

Author(s)

    • Findlay, Scott
    • Litt, Abninder
    • Saunders, Daniel
    • Stewart, Terrence C.
    • Zhu, Jing

Bibliographic Information

The cognitive science of science : explanation, discovery, and conceptual change

Paul Thagard ; in collaboration with Scott Findlay ... [et al.]

MIT Press, 2014

  • : pb

Available at  / 4 libraries

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Note

"First MIT Press paperback edition, 2014"--T.p. verso

Other authors: Abninder Litt, Daniel Saunders, Terrence C. Stewart, and Jing Zhu

Description and Table of Contents

Description

A cognitive science perspective on scientific development, drawing on philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computational modeling. Many disciplines, including philosophy, history, and sociology, have attempted to make sense of how science works. In this book, Paul Thagard examines scientific development from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science. Cognitive science combines insights from researchers in many fields: philosophers analyze historical cases, psychologists carry out behavioral experiments, neuroscientists perform brain scans, and computer modelers write programs that simulate thought processes. Thagard develops cognitive perspectives on the nature of explanation, mental models, theory choice, and resistance to scientific change, considering disbelief in climate change as a case study. He presents a series of studies that describe the psychological and neural processes that have led to breakthroughs in science, medicine, and technology. He shows how discoveries of new theories and explanations lead to conceptual change, with examples from biology, psychology, and medicine. Finally, he shows how the cognitive science of science can integrate descriptive and normative concerns; and he considers the neural underpinnings of certain scientific concepts.

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Details

  • NCID
    BB16725761
  • ISBN
    • 9780262525985
  • Country Code
    us
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Place of Publication
    Cambridge, Mass.
  • Pages/Volumes
    xii, 365 p.
  • Size
    23 cm
  • Classification
  • Subject Headings
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