Nancy Nersessian’s Cognitive-Historical Approach

Abstract

Nancy Nersessian raises questions about the creation of scientific concepts and proposes answers to them based on the cognitive-historical approach . These problems are mainly about the nature of the cognitive processes involved in the generation of ideas fundamentally new in human history and the efficacy of those mechanisms in achieving successful results. In this chapter, I intend to show the epistemic virtues that make this method a useful tool for establishing the dynamic hypothesis about the creation of knowledge in science. I also point out that, compared to other methods of cognitive studies on the creation of scientific knowledge – ethnography, in vivo observation, and laboratory experiments – the cognitive-historical approach turns out to be primary. I analyze Nersessian’s idea that scientists often employ model-based reasoning, in an iterative way, in order to solve representational problems in the target domain. Additionally, I examine her claim that model-based reasoning facilitates the conceptual change. This hypothesis involves a representation of concepts illustrated by the dynamic frames theory about concepts.