Xiang Chen

Xiang Chen
California Lutheran University · Philosophy

Ph.D.

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40
Publications
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863
Citations

Publications

Publications (40)
Article
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Drawing on the findings from cognitive and developmental psychology, I argue that the wait-and-see approach to climate change originates from a misconception that heat is a material-like object. This ontological assumption exemplifies a general cognitive bias – we prefer to treat various ontological entities, including processes, as objects. The ob...
Article
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Studies have indicated that many people misunderstand climate change. Equipped with a limited mental model they inappropriately use a pattern matching heuristics to analyze climate change and mistakenly believe that we can stabilize atmospheric CO2 by keeping anthropogenic emissions at current rates. Drawing on the findings from cognitive and devel...
Chapter
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In this article I intend to analyze how infants’ initial causal representations emerge and how their primitive causal knowledge evolves during cognitive development. Recent studies from developmental psychology report that infants acquire knowledge of physical causality earlier than what Piaget has described—by 6 months of age infants have already...
Chapter
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In this article, I analyze how interests affect the results of scientific change through concept representation and categorization. I first review two models offered by cognitive psychology, which use frames as the representational structure to account for how interests actually affect concept representation and categorization. I then use a histori...
Chapter
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Metaphors are double-edge swords. By connecting an abstract and unknown phenomenon to a tangible and familiar one, a metaphor also creates a new reality. For example, we frequently use a metaphor to describe global warming – the atmosphere works like a greenhouse and CO2 traps heat as panes of glass in a greenhouse do. However, this greenhouse meta...
Article
I propose a new perspective with which to understand scientific revolutions. This is a conversion from an object-only perspective to one that properly treats object and process concepts as distinct kinds. I begin with a re-examination of the Copernican revolution. Recent findings from the history of astronomy suggest that the Copernican revolution...
Article
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I propose a new perspective on the study of scientific revolutions. This is a transformation from an object-only perspective to an ontological perspective that properly treats objects and processes as distinct kinds. I begin my analysis by identifying an object bias in the study of scientific revolutions, where it takes the form of representing sci...
Book
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Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions became the most widely read book about science in the twentieth century. His terms ‘paradigm’ and ‘scientific revolution’ entered everyday speech, but they remain controversial. In the second half of the twentieth century, the new field of cognitive science combined empirical psychology, computer sc...
Article
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This paper offers a preliminary analysis of conceptual change between event concepts. It begins with a brief review of the major findings of cognitive studies on event knowledge. The script model proposed by Schank and Abelson was the first attempt to represent event knowledge. Subsequent cognitive studies indicated that event knowledge is organize...
Chapter
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Object and event concepts are represented differently in the cognitive process. Schank and Abelson have proposed to use scripts to describe people's knowledge of events, and subsequent cognitive studies indicate that our event knowledge is organized in the form of temporal and causal sequences. In this paper, I propose a frame representation of scr...
Article
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In this paper I examine a cognitive mechanism of incommensurability. Using the frame model of concept representation to capture structural relations within concepts, I reveal an ontological difference between object and event concepts: the former are spatial but the latter temporal. Experiments from cognitive sciences further demonstrate that the m...
Article
This paper offers a solution to a problem in Herschel studies by drawing on the dynamic frame model for concept representation offered by cognitive psychology. Applying the frame model to represent the conceptual frameworks of the particle and wave theories, this paper shows that discontinuity between the particle and wave frameworks consists mainl...
Chapter
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Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes to many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is probably the best-known and most influential historian and philosopher of science of the last 25 years, and has become somethin...
Article
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This paper examines taxonomy comparison from a cognitive perspective. Arguments are developed by drawing on the results of cognitive psychology, which reveal the cognitive mechanisms behind the practice of taxonomy comparison. The taxonomic change in 19th-century ornithology is also used to uncover the historical practice that ornithologists employ...
Article
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Although the legitimacy of using the eye as an essential instrument in photometric experiments had been questioned by critics, the practitioners of visual photometry in the 18th and 19th centuries were convinced that the eye was reliable and capable of making accurate judgments in comparing brightness. They demonstrated their belief through their e...
Article
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Many recent cognitive studies reveal that human cognition is inherently perceptual, sharing systems with perception at both the conceptual and the neural levels. This paper introduces Barsalou's theory of perceptual symbols and explores its implications for philosophy of science. If perceptual symbols lie in the heart of conceptual processing, the...
Article
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this paper we offer a theoretical model for the pattern of conceptual change during scientific revolutions using methods from cognitive psychology. We suggest that the discontinuous pattern of scientific change follows from a view that defines concepts through lists of features. In cognitive psychology this Afeature list@ account corresponds to the...
Article
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Armed with a photometer orginally designed for evaluating telescopes, Richard Potter in the early 183Os measured the reflective power of metallic and glass mirrors. Because he found significant discrepancies between his measurements and Fresnel's predictions, Potter developed doubts concerning the wave theory. However, Potter's measurements were co...
Article
During the optical revolution, there were different styles of operating optical instruments, and their impact on the dispute between the two rival theories of light was evident. The differences in the use of optical instruments during the optical revolution originated from two incompatible instrumental traditions. This chapter begins with a brief h...
Article
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This paper concentrates on a debate over dispersion in the second half of the 1830s, in which both sides utilized the same set of experimental data to test a proposed wave account of dispersion, but could not agree on how these data should be used. The conflict regarding experimental data was caused by differences in instruments. In the debate, opt...
Article
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In a previous article we have shown that Kuhn's theory of concepts is independently supported by recent research in cognitive psychology. In this paper we propose a cognitive re‐reading of Kuhn's cyclical model of scientific revolutions: all of the important features of the model may now be seen as consequences of a more fundamental account of the...
Article
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To correct the misconception that incommensurability implies incomparability, Kuhn lately develops a new interpretation of incommensurability. This includes a linguistic theory of scientific revolutions (the theory of kinds), a cognitive exploration of the language learning process (the analogy of bilingualism), and an epistemological discussion on...
Article
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Drawing on the results of modem psychology and cognitive science we suggest that the traditional theory of concepts is no longer tenable, and that the alternative account proposed by Kuhn may now be seen to have independent empirical support quite apart from its success as part of an account of scientific change. We suggest that these mechanisms ca...
Chapter
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Traditi()naJ philosophy ofscience believes that scientists can achieve agreement on every experimental result provided it can be replidited. in an appropriate way, that is; reproducible with the same experimen­ tal arrangement and procedure. By analyzing the role of skills. in experiment appraisal, 1 explain why in fact scientists do not always con...
Article
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L'A. explore les fondements epistemologiques et sociaux de l'application de la regle de reproductibilite et d'evaluation des experiences. Dans ce but, il etudie des cas tels que l'analyse de la lumiere solaire en 1840, la philosophie de la science traditionnelle, la sociologie de la science recente, la conception wittgensteinienne de suivi de la re...
Article
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In this article I explain why scientists cannot always resolve their disagreements about experiment even though no conflicting theoretical assumptions are involved, and how incommensurability in experiment can occur while experiment are not deeply encumbered by theoretical assumptions. Based upon recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and an ex...
Chapter
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Kuhn regards local incommensurability as an unavoidable result of changes in worldview, but his account fails to explain both historical cases in which rivals with different paradigms obtained consensus, and psychological experiments in which people with different cultural backgrounds accurately presented other points of view. Although the conditio...
Chapter
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According to Lakatos's theory of scientific change, the victory of the wave theory in the nineteenth-century optical revolution was due to its empirical successes. However, historical facts do not support this opinion. Based on Laudan's theory of scientific change, this paper presents a different orientation to reconstruct the optical revolution. B...

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