Mental Modeling in Conceptual Change

Abstract

IntroductionThe nature and processes of are problems that are of considerable interest to researchers across several disciplines occupied with developing understandings of science, learners, or cognitive development. Although the problems and methods to address them have different formulations in these areas, there is a long history in each of specifying the beginning and ending states of deep conceptual changes, such as what constitutes the nature of representational changes from Newtonian mechanics to the theory of relativity, or from a naive understanding of physical phenomena to a scientific understanding provided by physics or biology, or from individual early (possibly innate) representational structures to adult community representations of a whole range of phenomena, including of other humans, during processes of cognitive development.A major outstanding problem in all of these areas is the nature of the processes - or mechanisms - through which concepts and conceptual structures change. In part because of similarities in features of conceptual changes across these areas, such as ontological shifts and degrees of incommensurability, some, myself included, have proposed that the same or related processes are at work in the several kinds of conceptual change. Clearly one would expect differences between, for example, the practices used by scientists in constructing new concepts and students learning new (for them) concepts. For one thing scientists have articulated theoretical goals and sophisticated metacognitive strategies while children and students do not. However, in conceptual processes, a significant parallel is that each involves problem solving. One way to think of learning science, for instance, is that students are engaged in (or need to be enticed into) trying to understand the extant scientific conceptualization of a domain. In this process, learning happens when they perceive the inadequacies of their intuitive understandings - at least under certain conditions - and construct representations of the scientific concepts for themselves. The impetus for a problem solving process can arise from many sources: acquiring new information, encountering a puzzling phenomenon, or perceiving an inadequacy in current ways of understanding.Concepts provide a means through which humans make sense of the world. In categorizing experiences we sort phenomena, noting relationships, differences, and interconnections among them. A conceptual structure is a way of systematizing, of putting concepts in relation to one another in at least a semi - or locally - coherent manner. But a conceptual structure is complex and intricate and it is not possible to entertain it in its entirety all at once. Trying to understand new experiences or how a concept relates to others can reveal hereto-fore unnoticed limitations and problems in the representational capabilities of current conceptual structures and even reveal inconsistencies with other parts. Although how reflectively they engage in the process differs, scientists, learners, and developing children all engage in this kind of sense-making which suggests that to a greater or lesser extent conceptual is a reasoned change in view (Karman, 1986).Thinking of conceptual in this way focuses attention on the nature of the reasoning scientists use in solving representational problems. Creating models as systems of inquiry is central in the problem solving practices of scientists. There is a large literature in history and philosophy of science that establishes that processes of constructing and manipulating analogical, visual, and simulative models play central role in episodes of conceptual across the sciences. On the account of conceptual in science I have been developing, reasoning through such models (model-based reasoning) provides a significant means (not necessarily the only means) through which conceptual innovation and occur (See, e. …