Cognitive Issues in the History & Philosophy of Science

历史上的认知问题

• 批准号: 8911550
• 负责人: Howard Margolis
• 金额: $ 4万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1989
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1989-08-01 至 1990-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=8911550&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Cognitive; Issues; History; & Philosophy

Scientific revolutions, how they occur, why some scientists make the transition to the new theory and others do not are all issues of central importance for understanding the nature and modes of development of science and technology. Professor Margolis is bringing a cognitive science approach to these issues. Specifically, he is looking at two closely related projects extending his prior work. The first project explores his novel hypothesis about the nature of scientific revolutions, the "barrier hypothesis." In the barrier hypotheses, Professor Margolis speculates that in paradigm shifts one can identify some particularly stubborn intuition, the "barrier," that must be overcome to permit the emergence of the new paradigm. Further, as used in this hypothesis, the stubborn intuition requires the absence of any comparably well-entrenched contrary intuition. He has found that in some cases, the barrier may not even be something previously seen as central for the paradigm shift. In the Copernican Revolution, Professor Margolis found the barrier to be the nested spheres sense of how the heavens are constructed. For the Darwinian Revolution, he found it to be the perceived intuition that a world that demonstrates design must have had a designer. In this research project he will extend his analysis of the barrier hypothesis by examining the chemical revolution of Lavoisier. A second part of his research under this grant will examine the role of continuity in revolutions. As a case in point, he will examine the transparent way of showing the relations which permit transformation of the Ptolemaic into the Tychonic into the Copernican system so that the observational equivalence that holds across all three systems becomes particularly easy to see. This study will allow him to make number of novel points about the history of these transformations, several of which tie into the "barrier" idea.

科学革命，它们是如何发生的，为什么一些科学家过渡到新的理论而另一些没有，这些问题对于理解科学技术发展的性质和模式都是至关重要的。马戈利斯教授用认知科学的方法来解决这些问题。具体来说，他正在研究两个密切相关的项目，以扩展他之前的工作。第一个项目探讨了他关于科学革命本质的新颖假设，即“屏障假说”。在障碍假说中，马戈利斯教授推测，在范式转换中，人们可以识别出一些特别顽固的直觉，即必须克服的“障碍”，以允许新范式的出现。此外，正如在这个假设中使用的那样，顽固的直觉要求没有任何相对牢固的相反直觉。他发现，在某些情况下，这种障碍甚至可能不是先前被视为范式转变的核心。在哥白尼革命中，马戈利斯教授发现，这个障碍是嵌套的球体，它说明了天堂是如何构成的。对于达尔文革命，他发现这是一种感知的直觉，即一个展示设计的世界一定有一个设计师。在这个研究项目中，他将通过考察拉瓦锡的化学革命来扩展他对势垒假说的分析。他在这项资助下的第二部分研究将考察连续性在革命中的作用。作为一个恰当的例子，他将研究一种透明的方式来显示关系，这种关系允许从托勒密体系到第谷体系再到哥白尼体系的转换，这样，在这三个体系中观测到的等效性就变得特别容易看到。这项研究将使他对这些转变的历史提出一些新颖的观点，其中一些与“屏障”的想法有关。