Physical models and embodied cognition

Ulrich Stegmann* (Corresponding Author)

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
9 Downloads (Pure)

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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)4387-4405
Number of pages19
JournalSynthese
Volume197
Issue number10
Early online date10 Sept 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 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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