Abstract
In this paper we take as our point of departure Kostas Gavroglu and Yorgos Goudaroulis’s insight that, in the process of describing and explaining novel phenomena, scientific concepts are taken “out of” their original theoretical context, acquire additional meaning, and become relatively autonomous. We first present their account of how concepts are re-contextualized and, in the process, extended and/or revised. We then situate it within its philosophical context, and discuss how it broke with a long-standing philosophical tradition about concepts. Finally, we argue that recent developments in science studies can flesh out and vindicate the “concepts out of contexts” idea. In particular, historical and philosophical studies of experimentation and cognitive-historical studies of modeling practices indicate various ways in which concepts are formed and articulated “out of context.”
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Notes
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For a historical survey of the philosophical literature on the meaning of scientific concepts see Arabatzis and Kindi (2013).
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Cf. Steinle (2009).
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Cf. Nersessian (1984, 93).
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That account has subsequently been further developed and extended to modeling with physical and computational simulations by Nersessian and colleagues in studies of the contemporary model-based reasoning practices in conceptual innovation in the bioengineering sciences (see, e.g., Nersessian 2012). The bioengineering sciences provide fertile ground from which to study conceptual innovation since concepts are routinely taken out of engineering contexts and transferred to explanations and descriptions of biological phenomena, producing abundant paradoxical situations requiring concept formation and change for their resolution.
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Acknowledgments
Sections 14.2 and 14.4 above are adapted from Arabatzis (2012). We are indebted to Ana Simões for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Most of all, we are grateful to Kostas Gavroglu for his loyal friendship over many years. His generous scholarship and our innumerable discussions have been a constant source of inspiration.
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Arabatzis, T., Nersessian, N.J. (2015). Concepts Out of Theoretical Contexts. In: Arabatzis, T., Renn, J., Simões, A. (eds) Relocating the History of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 312. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14553-2_15
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