Creating Scientific Concepts

by Nancy Nersessian
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008
272 pp., illus. 54 b/w. Trade, $32.00
ISBN: 0-262-14105-1.

Reviewed by Amy Ione
The Diatrope Institute
Berkeley, CA   94704 USA.

ione@diatrope.com

Creating Scientific Concepts by Nancy Nersessian uses a cognitive-historical methodology to investigate the kinds of reasoning that underlie conceptual innovation. Given that this approach relies heavily on extant records of scientific practices to understand how individuals, the community, and contextual realities shape concept formation, it is not surprising that the book uses case studies thick with description to probe the continuum of analogical, visual and simulative modeling.   The sum, which effectively penetrates how scientists "solve" problems, succeeds because Nersessian's analysis keeps three principles in mind:   First, she asserts that philosophical theories of scientific knowledge need to be informed by the best available scientific understanding of the knowing subject, as developed in the biological, cognitive and social sciences.   Second, philosophical theories of scientific knowledge need to be informed by the knowledge-constructing strategies used by scientists both over the history of the development of scientific knowledge and in contemporary practices.   Finally, Nersessian shows that empirical methods, such as historical analysis, psychological experimentation, ethnography, and computational modeling, can be employed in developing and testing philosophical hypothesis.

Perhaps the most compelling aspects of the book are the author's naturalistic recasting of the problem of conceptual change in science and her demonstration that science studies can shift the focus of the problem from the conceptual structures themselves to the nature of the practices employed by human agents in creating, communicating, and the replacing of a currently accepted scientific representations of a domain.   All in all, I found the accounts fascinating. Nersessian demonstrates the ways scientists turn to modeling practices to further their reasoning and understanding as they create and use theories in their work. What is perhaps most exceptional is the author's range.   She includes empirical data on scientific practices within their socio-cultural contexts; concepts, methods, and analyses from cognitive science; an extensive body of literature on scientific practices in the science studies fields; and philosophical analysis of the problems and issues.

Two exemplars in the beginning of the book offer concrete examples of an extended problem-solving process.   The first is Maxwell's model-based reasoning in creating a mathematical representation of the electromagnetic field concept.   The Maxwell study is Nersessian's primary exemplar and represents what Margaret Boden has termed an "H-creative" idea, an idea that arises from an episode in which something fundamentally new in human history is created. Her second example presents a contrast, using a "think-aloud" protocol of an experimental participant, referred to as S2, based in part on an experimental investigation of expert problem solving by the cognitive scientists John Clement.   S2 is a "P-creative," using Boden's terminology, creating something that is already culturally available but not to the individual in question.   In this case, S2 solves a problem related to springs, elastic objects used to store mechanical energy, which leads him to a change in his concept of springs.   Essentially, he comes to understand that a torsion spring works by twisting and that the amount of force (actually torque) it exerts is proportional to the amount it is twisted.   Maxwell's drawings and those of S2 are particularly supportive of her arguments.   Equally helpful, and more fascinating given the subject matter, are Nersessian's renderings of Maxwell's descriptions, when there was not specific Maxwell drawing to illustrate a point, (many of Maxwell's drafts were destroyed in a fire).

After introducing some specifics through the case studies that "set the stage," Nersessian proposes a cognitive basis for creative practices in the human capacity for simulative thinking through mental modeling.   The balance of her writing here is impressive.   She both surveys the research and shows that there is no consensus view.   One strong point of the book is her analysis of the interrelationship of representation and reasoning in mental modeling, including her finding that constructed models are imaginary hybrids of target and source domains, possessing constraints of their own. Another strong point is her inclusion of related debates that can be confused with her own presentation, e.g., the Imagery debates.   As she explains, the predominant cognitive science literature on imagery has been directed toward visual mental imagery.   Dubbed the "imagery debate" by Michael Tye, much of this literature is concerned with debating whether the images that participate in experiences of "pictures in the mind's eye" are epiphenomena or a fundamental form of representation used in cognitive processing.   As Nersessian correctly points out, the problems pondered in the "imagery debates" are largely irrelevant to the questions she is addressing since her concern is the role that external visual representations play in reasoning with mental models.

What is most powerful throughout this work is Nersessian's ability to cover so much territory as she focuses on the questions: What is creativity?   How does conceptual change happen when we must start from existing knowledge?   Her impressive grappling with these questions relies on reasoning strategies such as analogy, imagery and mental stimulation to establish a cognitive basis for scientific practices in ordinary human thinking, while enriching our understanding of cognition in general.   What sets her apart from many other commentators who have also looked at creativity and the history of science is her emphasis on how mental models interact with external representations, an area traditionally neglected by historians and philosophers.   As she notes:   "What is powerful about this idea is that constraints abstracted from different sources can interact in such a way that a model with a heretofore unrepresented structure or behaviors can emerge." (p. 130).   Thus, it is not that she does not see analogy and mental stimulation as important, but rather she shows that they can only represent a portion of a creative process that produces a novel understanding of a process or event.   Thus, the "grappling" for a solution is discussed in terms of bootstrapping, and the presentation is more fully aware of the value of creating external models, diagrams and representations than what we find in much of the literature where the stress is on brain function.   For Nersessian:   "[A]nalogies are cast as sources of constraints for building models, . . . imagistic representations afford simulative reasoning, and . . . thought-experimenting is construed as a form of reasoning through imaginative simulation" (p. 130).

Although Nersession acknowledges that the strategies she examines are not unique to scientists, I found myself wishing she had said more about how our efforts to build an understanding of model-based reasoning in conceptual innovation is a cross-disciplinary practice.   Without a doubt, I am quite enthusiastic about her approach to the kinds of reasoning that underlie conceptual innovation, for I have used it myself when writing about creativity.   Still, because I have also argued that the cognitive aspects of artmaking are often denied due to a history that has "decided" that cognition is a term that is not applicable to the arts, I always notice when artmaking is absent from any discussion that probes our creative process.   Art, of course, is not her focus and, insofar as scientific practices go, this work is exceptional.

Few, I believe, would argue against the idea that conceptual change is one of the most creative and striking dimensions of scientific practice.   Indeed, the popularity of the idea of paradigm change and so-called scientific revolutions is so closely interwoven with the impact of events such as Newton's notion of gravity, Einstein's notion of space-time and Watson-Crick's notion of DNA that I find it astonishing that philosophers of science traditionally give minimal thought to how scientific concepts are created in an active, rather than a logical, sense.    All in all, I recommend this book highly.   It is well researched, extensive in its scope, and highly readable.