Discovery in Cognitive Psychology: New Tools Inspire New Theories

Science in Context 5 (2):329-350 (1992)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The ArgumentScientific tools—measurement and calculation instruments, techniques of inference—straddle the line between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In discovery, new scientific tools suggest new theoretical metaphors and concepts; and in justification, these tool-derived theoretical metaphors and concepts are morelikely to be accepted by the scientific community if the tools are already entrenched in scientific practice.Techniques of statistical inference and hypothesis testing entered American psychology first as tools in the 1940s and 1950s and then as cognitive theories in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did psychologists resists statistical metaphors of mind prior to the institutionalization of inference techniques in their own practice; the cognitive theories they ultimately developed about “the mind as intuitive statistician” still bear the telltale marks of the practical laboratory context in which the tool was used.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, and the Philosophy of Discovery.Paul Thagard - 1982 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1982:166 - 175.
.[author unknown] - unknown
Is cognitive neuropsychology possible?Jeffrey Bub - 1994 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 1:417-427.
Cognitive science.Paul Thagard - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Networks with Attitudes.Paul Skokowski - 2007 - Artificial Intelligence and Society 22 (3):461-470.
Discovery and explanation in biology and medicine.Kenneth F. Schaffner - 1993 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Toward a Unified View of Cognitive Control.Dario D. Salvucci & Niels A. Taatgen - 2011 - Topics in Cognitive Science 3 (2):227-230.

Analytics

Added to PP
2014-01-27

Downloads
17 (#742,076)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

References found in this work

The logic of scientific discovery.Karl Raimund Popper - 1934 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Hutchinson Publishing Group.
Patterns of discovery.Norwood Russell Hanson - 1958 - Cambridge [Eng.]: University Press.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery.Karl Popper - 1959 - Studia Logica 9:262-265.
Conjectures and Refutations.K. Popper - 1963 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 21 (3):431-434.

View all 38 references / Add more references