| Scientific Practice, Conceptual Change, and the Nature of Concepts |
| Ingo Brigandt |
| Presented at the conference Concepts and Objectivity: Knowledge, Science, and Values (September 22–24, 2006, University of Pittsburgh) |
| Area 1 Philosophy of Mind |
| Area 2 Philosophy of Science |
| Keywords concepts conceptual change conceptual role semantics epistemic goals |
| http://www.ualberta.ca/~brigandt/Scientific_practice_and_conceptual_change.pdf |
| The theory of concepts advanced in the present discussion aims at accounting for a) how a concept makes successful practice possible, and b) how a scientific concept can be subject to rational change in the course of history. To this end, I suggest that each scientific concept consists of three components of content: 1) the concept’s reference, 2) its inferential role, and 3) the epistemic goal pursued with the concept’s use. In the course of history a concept can change in any of these three components, and change in one component—including change of reference—can be accounted for as being rational relative to other components, in particular a concept’s epistemic goal. This framework is motivated and spelled out based on a concrete case: the history of the homology concept in biology. |
This site makes heavy use of CSS and some use of the DOM and JavaScript.
It is strongly recommended that you use a current standards-compliant browser to view it, such as Firefox.
If you are having difficulties with the site, please write the maintainer and include your User Agent string, which is:
CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)
Have a nice day.
