In his late years, Thomas Kuhn became interested in the process of scientific specialization, which does not seem to possess the destructive element that is characteristic of scientific revolutions. It therefore makes sense to investigate whether and how Kuhn’s insights about specialization are consistent with, and actually fit, his model of scientific progress through revolutions. In this paper, I argue that the transition toward a new specialty corresponds to a revolutionary change for the group of scientists involved in such a (...) transition. I will clarify the role of the scientific community in revolutionary changes and characterize the incommensurability across specialties as possessing both semantic and methodological aspects. The discussion of the discovery of the structure of DNA will serve both as an illustration of my main argument and as reply to one criticism raised against Kuhn—namely, that his model cannot capture cases of revolutionary yet non-disruptive episodes of scientific progress. Revisiting Kuhn’s ideas on specialization will shed new light on some often overlooked features of scientific change. (shrink)

According to a seminal paper by Barsalou , frames are attribute-value-matrices for representing exemplars or concepts. Frames have been used as a tool for reconstructing scientific concepts as well as conceptual change within scientific revolutions . In the frame-based representations of scientific concepts developed so far the semantic content of concepts is determined by a set of attribute-specific values. This way of representing semantic content works best for prototype concepts and defined concepts of a conceptual taxonomy satisfying the no-overlap principle. (...) In addition to the semantic content of prototype concepts and defined concepts, frames can also contain empirical knowledge that is represented as constraints between the values of the frame. Beside prototype concepts and defined concepts, theoretical concepts that are multiply operationalized play an important role in science. However, so far no frame-based representation of theoretical concepts has been proposed. In this paper, it will be shown that theoretical concepts can be represented by frames and that frame-based representations of prototype concepts and defined concepts have another structure than frame-based representations of theoretical concepts. In order to explicate this difference, we will develop a frame-based method for representing all three kinds of concepts by means of mathematical graph-theory. One important consequence will be that the constraints of a frame representing a theoretical concept are entailed by the structure of the frame, as opposed to a frame representing defined or prototype concepts. (shrink)

The frame model was developed in cognitive psychology and imported into the philosophy of science in order to provide representations of scientific concepts and conceptual taxonomies. The aim of this article is to show that beside the representation of scientific concepts the frame model is an efficient instrument to represent and analyze scientific theories. That is, we aim to establish the frame model as a representation tool for the structure of theories within the philosophy of science. For this, we will (...) develop the notion of a theory frame and distinguish between theory frames for qualitative theories in which scientific measurement is based on nominal scales and theory frames for quantitative theories in which measurement is based on ratio scales. In three case studies, we will apply frames to a psychological, a linguistic, and a physical theory, thereby showing that the frame model is a powerful and intuitively accessible instrument to analyze the laws of scientific theories, the determination of theoretical concepts, the explanatory role of theoretical concepts, the abductive introduction of a new theoretical concept, the distinction between the core and the periphery of a theory, the diachronic development of a theory, and the distinction between qualitative and quantitative scientific concepts. Finally, we will provide a comparison to the structuralist view of theories, one of the most elaborated and applied models of theory representation. (shrink)

In his mature works, Kuhn abandons the concept of a paradigm and becomes more interested in the analysis of the conceptual structure of scientific theories. These changes are interpreted as resulting from a ‘linguistic turn’ that Kuhn underwent sometimes around the 1980s. Much of the philosophical discussions about Kuhn’s post-‘linguistic turn’ philosophy revolves around his views on taxonomic concepts. Apart from taxonomy, however, the mature Kuhn introduces other concepts, such as conceptual networks and lexicons. This article distinguishes these three concepts (...) and shows that adopting each one of them has different impacts on Kuhn’s model of science. After distinguishing and assessing the concepts of taxonomy, network, and lexicon, it will be argued that the latter not only fits the Kuhnian model of science better, but it also helps capture the wide sense of Kuhn’s early concept of a paradigm. (shrink)

In the philosophy of science, the frame model is used in order to represent and analyze scientific concepts and conceptual change. However, the potential of the frame model is far from being fully exploited: Up to now, the frame model is only applied to a rather small set of different kinds of concepts and important advantages of the frame model for reconstructing and analyzing concepts have been neglected. In this article, we will essentially extend the frame model in the following (...) way: We will develop a frame-based approach for representing a comprehensive class of different kinds of concepts including conjunctively and disjunctively defined concepts, family resemblance concepts, prototype concepts, operationalized concepts, dual concepts integrating two different ways of concept determination, and theoretical concepts. In order to do so, we will define different kinds of frames with respect to the logical structure of the kind of concept that is represented by a particular frame. We will exemplify our approach by means of ten frames applied to standard cases of conceptual analyses in philosophy and cognitive science as well as to scientific concepts of political science, psychology, linguistics and physics. (shrink)

The frame model, originating in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, has recently been applied to change-phenomena traditionally studied within history and philosophy of science. Its application purpose is to account for episodes of conceptual dynamics in the empirical sciences suggestive of incommensurability as evidenced by “ruptures” in the symbolic forms of historically successive empirical theories with similar classes of applications. This article reviews the frame model and traces its development from the feature list model. Drawing on extant literature, examples of (...) frame-reconstructed taxonomic change are presented. This occurs for purposes of comparison with an alternative tool, conceptual spaces. The main claim is that conceptual spaces save the merits of the frame model and provide a powerful model for conceptual change in scientific knowledge, since distinctions arising in measurement theory are native to the model. It is suggested how incommensurability as incomparability of theoretical frameworks might be avoided. Moreover, as nontranslatability of worldviews, it need not to be treated as a genuine problem of conceptual representation. The status of laws vis à vis their dimensional bases as well as diachronic similarity measures are discussed. (shrink)

For historical epistemology to succeed, it must adopt a defensible set of categories to characterise scientific activity over time. In historically orientated philosophy of science during the twentieth century, the original categories of theory and observation were supplemented or replaced by categories like paradigm, research program and research tradition. Underlying all three proposals was talk about conceptual systems and conceptual structures, attributed to individual scientists or to research communities, however there has been little general agreement on the nature of these (...) structures. Recent experimental research in cognitive science has considerably refined the theory of concepts. Drawing upon the results of that research, philosophers can construct more concrete and empirically defensible representations of conceptual systems. I will suggest that this research supports a modest and useful sense of both normal and revolutionary science, not as epistemological continuities or discontinuities, but as particular patterns of conceptual change. (shrink)

: 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. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper we investigate how scientific theories can be represented by frames. Different kinds of scientific theories can be distinguished in terms of the systematic power of their frames. In the second part we outline the central questions and goals of our research project. In the third and final part of this paper we show that frame-representation is a useful tool in the comparison of the theories of phlogiston and oxygen, despite those theories being traditionally (...) conceived as incommensurable. The frame-theoretic representation reveals common attributes, values and ultimately structural correspondence relations between the two theories. In our view this outcome lends credence to a structural realist view of science. (shrink)