The Problem-Ladenness of Theory

被引：0

作者：

Daniel Levenstein ^{[1
]}

Aniello De Santo ^{[2
]}

Saskia Heijnen ^{[3
]}

Manjari Narayan ^{[4
]}

Freek J. W. Oude Maatman ^{[5
]}

Jonathan Rawski ^{[6
]}

Cory Wright ^{[7
]}

机构：

[1] Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Monreal, QC

[2] Mila, Montreal, QC

[3] Department of Linguistics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT

[4] Cognitive Psychology Unit, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden

[5] Dyno Therapeutics, Watertown, MA

[6] Department of Theoretical Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Groningen

[7] Department of Philosophy of Behavioural Science, Faculty of Social Science, Radboud University, Nijmegen

[8] Department of Linguistics & Language Development, San Jose State University, San Jose

[9] Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, Cambridge

[10] Department of Philosophy, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA

来源：

Computational Brain & Behavior | 2024年 / 7卷 / 4期

关键词：

Cognitive science; Pragmatism; Problems; Scientific theories;

D O I：

10.1007/s42113-024-00219-3

中图分类号：

学科分类号：

摘要：

The cognitive sciences are facing questions of how to select from competing theories or develop those that suit their current needs. However, traditional accounts of theoretical virtues have not yet proven informative to theory development in these fields. We advance a pragmatic account by which theoretical virtues are heuristics we use to estimate a theory’s contribution to a field’s body of knowledge and the degree to which it increases that knowledge’s ability to solve problems in the field’s domain or problem space. From this perspective, properties that are traditionally considered epistemic virtues, such as a theory’s fit to data or internal coherence, can be couched in terms of problem space coverage, and additional virtues come to light that reflect a theory’s alignment with problem-having agents and the context in a societally embedded scientific system. This approach helps us understand why the needs of different fields result in different kinds of theories and allows us to formulate the challenges facing cognitive science in terms that we hope will facilitate their resolution through further theoretical development. © Society for Mathematical Psychology 2024.

引用

页码：548 / 571

页数：23

共 212 条

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