One issue that has been raised time and again in philosophy of mind and more recently in cognitive science is the question of qualia, or "raw feels." What are qualia and how do they fit into the cognitive science conception of mind? We consider some of the classic qualia thought experiments and two proposed solutions to the qualia problem, eliminativism and content-dependence. While neither of these solutions are actually able to dismiss or explain qualia as claimed, the content-based solution does clarify the relation between cognitive science and qualia. Because qualia are precisely the part of our experiences that are not related to informational content (and therefore intersubjective), and cognitive science is primarily based on information content, qualia are not within the domain of cognitive science.

In this paper we explore the idea of reflection in the context of scientific exploration. How does an agent reflect upon its behavior in order to enable productive exploration? We outline an abstract cognitive architecture for combining reflection and exploration. To achieve this we present a language for modeling cognition: the Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) language. We further present a computational model based on this language, TORQUE2 (Griffith etal., 1997; Griffith, 1997). TORQUE2 is a model of exploratory reasoning in the domain of scientific problem solving. We claim that the TMK language supports both reflection and exploration, and enables them to benefit from one another.

We hypothesize generic models to be central in conceptual change in science. This hypothesis has its origins in two theoretical sources. The first source, constructive modeling, derives from a philosophical theory that synthesizes analyses of historical conceptual changes in science with investigations of reasoning and representation in cognitive psychology. The theory of constructive modeling posits generic mental models as productive in conceptual change. The second source, adaptive modeling, derives from a computational theory of creative design. The theory of adaptive modeling uses generic mental models to enable analogical transfer. Both theories posit situation independent domain abstractions, i.e. generic models. Using a constructive modeling interpreution of the reasoning exhibited in protocols collected by John Clement (1989) of a problem solving session involving conceptual change, we employ the representational constructs and processing structures of the theory of adaptive modeling to develop a new computational model, ToRQUE . Here we describe a piece of our analysis of the protocol to illustrate how our synthesis of the two theories is being used to develop a system for articulating and testing ToRQUE. The results of our research show how generic modeling plays a central role in conceptual change. They also demonstrate how such an interdisciplinary synthesis can provide significant insights into scientific reasoning.