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12 - Imagery, metaphor, and physical reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

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Summary

A problem basic to psychology and philosophy is how new knowledge is created from already existing knowledge. In this chapter I discuss how a case study in the history of science – namely, the genesis of atomic physics during 1913–49 – can illuminate this problem (Miller 1986). In my work in psychology of science I have found useful what Jean Piaget (1970) calls the assimilation–accommodation process. According to Piaget, we come to grips with nature by incorporating information into an already existing scheme or concept which then adjusts itself to the situation. The result is a hierarchy of equilibrated structures that are increasingly better approximations to physical reality, and these structures can involve prescientific or scientific knowledge.

Right from the start, physicists in 1913 realized that the central question in atomic physics was how concepts from classical physics that are represented with images and language anchored in the world of sense perceptions could be transferred to a world beyond sense perceptions, a counterintuitive world. In 1925, the transition to the correct atomic theory (quantum mechanics) occurred only after physicists realized the inadequacy of visual imagery based on sense perceptions. But the deep meaning of the quantum mechanics was not fully comprehended until Werner Heisenberg discovered that the theory's mathematics generated the proper visual imagery of the atomic world. Thus, in the course of the analysis to follow, the problem of knowledge representation emerges naturally because the transition to a proper level of understanding required movement from a mental imagery that is perception-based to one that is propositionally based.

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Psychology of Science
Contributions to Metascience
, pp. 326 - 341
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1989

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