This chapter contains sections titled: Highlights of Past Literature Current Work Future Work.

This paper examines the form of mental representation of scientific theories in scientists and nonscientists. It concludes that images and schemas are not the appropriate form of mental representation for scientific theories but that mental models and perceptual symbols do seem appropriate for representing physical/mechanical phenomena. These forms of mental representation are postulated to have an analogical relation with the world and it is this relationship that gives them strong explanatory power. It is argued that the construct of naïve theories (...) as used in developmental psychology may be the appropriate form of mental representation for non physical/mechanical domains. The paper adopts a strong form of psychologism in the philosophy of science and argues that model-based approaches to scientific theories are more appropriate forms of representation for scientific theories than the formalist approaches that dominate current philosophy of science. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes in Maxwell’s thought between “atomic molecules” and “ultimate atoms,” and arrives at a set of properties that characterize each type of atom. It concludes that Maxwell is a mathematical atomist, an approach that entails the notion that although it is impossible to observe the ultimate atoms as free particles, we can nevertheless study them as mathematical observables, on the caveat that mathematical formalism remains tied to phenomenalism and to theoretical interpretations of such phenomena as, for example, mass (...) and force variations, gravitational pull, gas diffusion and viscosity, and heat conduction. (shrink)

If we look at Isis as an archive of research articles representing ways in which historians have written about science over the past century, then one changing practice can be found in discussions of the usefulness of metaphors in the history of the sciences. During the first half of Isis’s history, metaphors were represented in stable categories: image studies, scientific analogies, diffusion, and individual scientists associated with metaphor. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, tools drawn from sociology, feminism, and the (...) history of literature, among others, created new discussions about how metaphors might be used. More recently, useful hybrids have further diversified the ways in which metaphors are discussed. Throughout the history of Isis, the usefulness of metaphors has been renegotiated in ways that suggest a periodization of metaphoric use and access to alternative histories of the sciences. (shrink)