Abstract
Philosophers have recently paid more attention to the physical aspects of scientific models. The attention is motivated by the prospect that a model’s physical features strongly affect its use and that this suggests re-thinking modelling in terms of extended or distributed cognition. This paper investigates two ways in which physical features of scientific models affect their use and it asks whether modelling is an instance of extended cognition. I approach these topics with a historical case study, in which scientists kept records not only of their findings, but also of some the mental operations that generated the findings. The case study shows how scientists can employ a physical model (in this case diagrams on paper) as an external information store, which allows alternating between mental manipulations, recording the outcome externally, and then feeding the outcome back into subsequent mental manipulations. The case study also demonstrates that a models’ physical nature allows replacing explicit reasoning with visuospatial manipulations. I argue, furthermore, that physical modelling does not need to exemplify a strong kind of extended cognition, the sort for which external features are mereological parts of cognition. It can exemplify a weaker kind, instead.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 4387-4405 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Journal | Synthese |
Volume | 197 |
Issue number | 10 |
Early online date | 10 Sept 2018 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 31 Oct 2020 |
Bibliographical note
I thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful objections and suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge the permissions granted by Elsevier, The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the Wellcome Collection to reproduce copyrighted material.Open access via the Springer Compact Agreement.
Keywords
- task decomposition
- visuospatial reasoning
- mental rotation
- Crick
- Gamow
- protein synthesis
- Mental rotation
- Protein synthesis
- Visuospatial reasoning
- Task decomposition
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Ulrich Stegmann
- School of Divinity, History & Philosophy, Philosophy - Reader
- School of Divinity, History & Philosophy, Centre for Knowledge and Society (CEKAS)
- School of Divinity, History & Philosophy, George Washington Wilson Centre for Art and Visual Culture
- School of Divinity, History & Philosophy, Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHPSTM)
Person: Academic