Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.