1. Introduction: Metaphor and Theory Change

2009 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Keyword(s):  
Theory Change

Revisiting the Theory-Constitutive Metaphor

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ii (15) ◽  
pp. 36-55
Author(s):  
Bent Sørensen ◽  
Torkild Thellefsen ◽  
Amalia Dewi
Keyword(s):  
Theory Change ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Scientific Thought ◽  
Richard Boyd ◽  
Seminal Article

In his seminal article “Metaphor and Theory Change: What is `Metaphor ́ a metaphor for?” (1993, [1979]), Richard Boyd describes a certain class of metaphors within science, namely, the theory-constitutive metaphors (henceforth the TCMs); this class of metaphors, Boyd explains, plays an important role in the formulation and development of theories because they express explanatory claims which, at least for the time being, cannot be conceived in any other known (literal) way. Hence, TCMs become a part of scientific thought and the development of concepts. TCMs can fix reference to casual relations in the physical world, even though they have an open-endedness (vagueness and are not fully explicated); the TCMs, therefore, have a programmatic character or they invite further research. In the following we try to add more characteristics to the TCMs from a Peircean perspective, namely, that the TCMs depend on abduction – this 1) makes them both creative and explanatory, 2) relates them to guessing and anchors them in instinct, whereby 3) their plausibility concerns an affinity between mind and nature.

scholarly journals Productive perils: on metaphor as a theory-building device

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-111
Author(s):  
Claudio J Rodríguez H
Keyword(s):  
Theory Change ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Semiotic Theory ◽  
The Way

AbstractMetaphors constitute a relevant method for both building and making sense of theories. Semiotics is not exempt from their influence, and an important range of semiotic theories depends on metaphors to be meaningful. In this paper, we wish to examine the place of theory-constitutive metaphors considering the interaction view and the extent to which some areas of semiotics, particularly, the semiotics of culture and biosemiotics, are enriched by having metaphors dominate the way we think about them. The intention of the paper is not to document the different metaphors that have built semiotic theory, but rather to observe through a number of examples that semiotic research contains theory-building metaphors and that these are productive means of developing semiotic thinking further, with the caveat that theory change can be unexpected based on how we build metaphors for our theories.

Coming to Understand the Social and Physical Worlds

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Theory Change ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Load Force ◽  
New Information ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Underlying Processes ◽  
Adaptation Task

Children’s conceptual development has been described as a process of“theory change.” Specifically, children begin with an idea and then iteratively update that idea by combining existing and new information, making and testing predictions and then revising their idea based on new data again. Similar processes have been postulated to account for adaptive phenomenon in perceptual psychology and motor control. The similarities between the two processes suggest that performance on tasks that measure conceptual and sensory‐motor “theory change”respectively may be related. The goal of the present study is to determine whether children’s development in a complex conceptual domain, theory of mind, is associated with children’s performance in a load force adaptation paradigm. Theory of mind is broadly defined as the ability to understand how mental states, such as beliefs and desires, motivate ourown and other people’s actions. In contrast, load force adaptation is the ability to gradually adjust the amount of force exerted on an object in order to smoothly lift it up, as experience with the weight of the object is gained. To explore the mechanisms underlying these two processes, children between the ages of 3.5 and 4.5 years participate in a load force adaptation task and a battery of theory of mind tasks. We predict that since the underlying processes appear to be theoretically similar, the individual differences in the ability to adapt load force and in theory of mind ability will be positively correlated.   

Theory Change in Science

1973 ◽  
pp. 167-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noretta Koertge
Keyword(s):  
Theory Change

Postscript on the Realism-Instrumentalism Debate

2020 ◽  
pp. 374-416
Author(s):  
George E. Smith ◽  
Raghav Seth
Keyword(s):  
Theory Change ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Face

The body of the monograph has throughout skirted around the philosophic literature comprising the “realist-instrumentalist” debate. This Postscript does not take sides in this debate, but offers suggestions intended to make the debate more tractable. One suggestion concerns two largely ignored distinctions: the first between theoretical claims that enter into the design of an experiment constitutively versus only heuristically; the second between intermediate standings a hypothesis can have between its being a mere conjecture and its becoming deeply entrenched through the success of research predicated on it. The second half of the Postscript explains why, of all elements of science, the equations in theory-mediated measurement that authorize values for target quantities to be obtained from values of more accessible quantities and the values so obtained can, under identifiable conditions, have the strongest claim to permanence in the face of both new data and theory change.

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