scholarly journals Taking Up Thagard’s Challenge: A Formal Model of Conceptual Revision

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sena Bozdag ◽  
Matteo De Benedetto
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Change ◽  
Belief Revision ◽  
Formal Model ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
Conceptual Systems ◽  
Traditional Belief ◽  
Conceptual Structures

AbstractThagard (1992) presented a framework for conceptual change in science based on conceptual systems. Thagard challenged belief revision theorists, claiming that traditional belief-revision systems are able to model only the two most conservative types of changes in his framework, but not the more radical ones. The main aim of this work is to take up Thagard’s challenge, presenting a belief-revision-like system able to mirror radical types of conceptual change. We will do that with a conceptual revision system, i.e. a belief-revision-like system that takes conceptual structures as units of revisions. We will show how our conceptual revision and contraction operations satisfy analogous of the AGM postulates at the conceptual level and are able to mimic Thagard’s radical types of conceptual change.

scholarly journals Conceptual Learning and Local Incommensurability: A Dynamic Logic Approach

Axiomathes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corina Strößner
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Change ◽  
Belief Revision ◽  
Dynamic Logic ◽  
Expressive Power ◽  
Conceptual Learning ◽  
Rational Belief ◽  
Logical Analysis ◽  
Logical Reconstruction ◽  
Logical Study ◽  
Logic Approach

AbstractIn recent decades, the logical study of rational belief dynamics has played an increasingly important role in philosophy. However, the dynamics of concepts such as conceptual learning received comparatively little attention within this debate. This is problematic insofar as the occurrence of conceptual change (especially in the sciences) has been an influential argument against a merely logical analysis of beliefs. Especially Kuhn’s ideas about the incommensurability, i.e., untranslatability, of succeeding theories seem to stand in the way of logical reconstruction. This paper investigates conceptual change as model-changing operations similar to belief revision and relates it to the notion of incommensurability. I consider several versions of conceptual change and discuss their influences on the expressive power, translatability and the potential arising of incommensurability. The paper concludes with a discussion of animal taxonomy in Aristotle’s and Linnaeus’s work.

scholarly journals Predicate Change

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 1159-1183
Author(s):  
Corina Strößner
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Change ◽  
Belief Revision ◽  
Predicate Logic ◽  
Expressive Power

AbstractLike belief revision, conceptual change has rational aspects. The paper discusses this for predicate change. We determine the meaning of predicates by a set of imaginable instances, i.e., conceptually consistent entities that fall under the predicate. Predicate change is then an alteration of which possible entities are instances of a concept. The recent exclusion of Pluto from the category of planets is an example of such a predicate change. In order to discuss predicate change, we define a monadic predicate logic with three different kinds of lawful belief: analytic laws, which hold for all possible instances; doxastic laws, which hold for the most plausible instances; and typicality laws, which hold for typical instances. We introduce predicate changing operations that alter the analytic laws of the language and show that the expressive power is not affected by the predicate change. One can translate the new laws into old laws and vice versa. Moreover, we discuss rational restrictions of predicate change. These limit its possible influence on doxastic and typicality laws. Based on the results, we argue that predicate change can be quite conservative and sometimes even hardly recognisable.

scholarly journals THE STUDY OF CHEMICAL TRANSFORMATIONS: AN ANALYSIS OF CONCEPTUAL CHANGE AT THE BEGINNING OF HIGH SCHOOL

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 192
Author(s):  
Daniela Rodrigues Da Silva ◽  
Juan Ignacio Pozo ◽  
José Cláudio Del Pino
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Conceptual Change ◽  
Junior High School ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Implicit Theories ◽  
Chemical Transformations ◽  
School Students ◽  
Conceptual Structures ◽  
The Individual

To understand the phenomenon of chemical transformations in high school, students need to comprehend the idea of conservation of matter and of non-conservation of substances during the process.By considering the hypothesis of hierarchical integration, this article aims at showing the conceptual changes produced by junior high school students through the use of a Teaching and Learning Proposal (TLP). Due to the learning difficulties presented by the students, the TLP was structured around three assumptions which are considered basic for the studying of chemical transformations: concepts (conceptual cores); approach models (macroscopic, symbolic, submicroscopic); and strategies (problem solving and counter suggestion). Qualitative research, characterized as a case study, presents the comparison between pre and posttests, in addition to the microgenetic analysis of learning, which evaluates in detail how these changes occur in a given period of time. The research was carried out with four volunteer students in four individual meetings (sessions) organized in three stages: pre-test, development of the TLP and posttest. Content analysis was the methodology employed to analyze the outcomes. Results show that both the individual theories explained by each student and their constructions involve a process that encompasses the elaboration of models with different levels of complexity, which coexist and are mobilized according to the problems proposed, being structured by a mixture of ideas constituted by implicit theories and scientific theories, that is, in the process of conceptual change, the students built new conceptual structures (each in their own time), without abandoning those that already existed, so that, they gradually differentiated and redesigned their interpretations aimingto the understanding and use of theories organized around scientifically accepted models.

Self-Prioritization Beyond Perception

2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (6) ◽  
pp. 415-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Schäfer ◽  
Dirk Wentura ◽  
Christian Frings
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Stimulus Category ◽  
Abstract Concept ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Stimulus Features ◽  
Relevant Word ◽  
Word Shape

Abstract. Recently, Sui, He, and Humphreys (2012) introduced a new paradigm to measure perceptual self-prioritization processes. It seems that arbitrarily tagging shapes to self-relevant words (I, my, me, and so on) leads to speeded verification times when matching self-relevant word shape pairings (e.g., me – triangle) as compared to non-self-relevant word shape pairings (e.g., stranger – circle). In order to analyze the level at which self-prioritization takes place we analyzed whether the self-prioritization effect is due to a tagging of the self-relevant label and the particular associated shape or due to a tagging of the self with an abstract concept. In two experiments participants showed standard self-prioritization effects with varying stimulus features or different exemplars of a particular stimulus-category suggesting that self-prioritization also works at a conceptual level.

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