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Towards to An Explanation for Conceptual Change: A Mechanistic Alternative

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Abstract

Conceptual change is one of the most studied fields in science education and psychology of learning. However, there are still some foundational issues in conceptual change research on which no clear consensus has emerged. Firstly, there is no agreement on what changes in belief and concept systems constitute conceptual change and what changes do not. Secondly, there is no consensus on what the specific mechanisms of conceptual change are. Thirdly, there is no common explanatory framework of how to explain conceptual change. In this paper a sketch for explanations of conceptual change is outlined. According to this account, the explanation for conceptual change requires (1) a description for the information processing task and (2) a sufficiently accurate and detailed description of the cognitive mechanisms responsible for the task. The scope and limits of this type of explanation are discussed.

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Notes

  1. See for example Chi (1992), Chi et al. (1994), Posner et al. (1982), DiSessa (1993) and Vosniadou (1992).

  2. See for example Posner et al. (1982), Carey (1985), Chi (1992), DiSessa (1993) and Vosniadou (1992).

  3. This taxonomy is very superficial, preliminary and rough. It is based on the idea that it is possible to taxonomize different kinds of conceptual change to supercategories by looking at the mechanisms of conceptual change. I thank an anonymous referee of the paper for the term “supercategory”.

  4. See also Chinn and Samarapungavan (2009).

  5. See also Chinn and Samarapungavan (2009) for discussion.

  6. In philosophical literature this distinction is usually made in terms of “ultimate” and “proximate” explanations following Mayr´s (1961) famous terminology.

  7. One may of course deny the status of evolution theory for example for religious reasons, and support some other explanation for the existence of our conceptual capacities.

  8. There is a lively debate about the precise definition of constitutive and causal explanations going on in the philosophical literature. See for instance Craver (2007), Cummins (2000) and also Ylikoski (2011).

  9. These constitutive explanations are “metaphysically” different from causal explanations, because constitution is not a causal relationship, but a synchronous and asymmetric relation between relata that cannot be conceived as independent existencies (Ylikoski, forthcoming).

  10. There has been some discussion concerning the applicability of the standard notion of “mechanism” for the explanatory purposes of cognitive science. For discussion, see Piccinini and Craver (2011) and Lappi and Rusanen (2011).

  11. There is a discussion in the philosophical literature about the explanation of system´s capacities. For discussion, see Craver (2007), Cummins (2000) and Ylikoski (2011).

  12. A mechanistic model is a typical example of realist interpretation of scientific models. As well known, there is a lively discussion on explanatory power of models among philosophers, and the common wisdom is that models are always more or less unrealistic. However, there are at least four different ways—simplification, abstraction, idealization and fictionalization - to make models unrealistic, and not all of them make models false in a way that is problematic for the realist. For example, although simplified or abstracted models do not describe all the factors or all the relevant factors of target systems, they describe certain some features of their target systems. Depending on their degree of truhtlikeness they can be more or less explanatory.

  13. There are different variants of this view on explanations. Even if all these views emphasize the same basic ideas of the importance of counterfactuals, they emphasize different aspects. (Ylikoski 2011).

  14. As Ohlsson emphasizes (2009b, p. 70) a “theory” of conceptual change just cannot be the list of all possible mechanisms underlying conceptual change, but it must also constraint mechanisms in theoretically principled way.

  15. Of course, often these solutions are not ideally optimal or ideally best possible ones, because they are typically (if not always) results of different kinds of performance limitations, trade-offs between different aspects of solutions and so on.

  16. Coherence, of course, as for example Disessa emphasizes, is “a vague word”, but as he remarks, one important core meaning (of coherence) has inherently to do with relations i.e. the meaning of coherence requires an articulation of structure (DiSessa 2008). Even if the term is often left unspecified, a useful description for conceptual coherence can be found, for example, from Thagard and Verbeugt (1998) and also Thagard et al. (2002).

  17. There are some controversies about the precise definition of cognitive mechanisms. See Piccinini (2006), Shagrir (2001) and Lappi and Rusanen (2011) for discussion.

  18. This strategy is known as “the heuristics of decomposition and localization”, see Bechtel & Richardson (1993).

  19. See Bechtel (2011), Kaplan and Bechtel (2011).

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Acknowledgments

The participants of ConChaMo-workshops, and especially Otto Lappi for commenting an earlier draft of this paper. This work was funded by Academy of Finland (project number 1133369).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, History, Art and Culture Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Anna-Mari Rusanen

  2. Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, PO Box 64, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Anna-Mari Rusanen

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Rusanen, AM. Towards to An Explanation for Conceptual Change: A Mechanistic Alternative. Sci & Educ 23, 1413–1425 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-013-9656-8

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