The Diversity of Scientific Concepts

• Applicant: Dr. Stephan Kornmesser
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 456636934

This project aims to investigate and to classify the diversity of scientific concepts by using one uniform model of representation. It is assumed that in order to cope with the diversity of scientific concepts, methods for analyzing natural language concepts have to be added to the logical methods of conceptual analysis in the philosophy of science.According to the logical account of logical empiricism, scientific concepts are (partially) inter-preted by definitions or correspondence rules. However, in the 1960s and 70s Thomas S. Kuhn challenged this view of determining scientific concepts, arguing that scientific concepts are more adequately described to have a family resemblance structure by referring to the acquisition of natural language concepts. His arguments support the hypothesis that the traditional account of logically analyzing scientific concepts by definitions and correspondence rules is too restricted and that additionally further structures of scientific concepts have to be assumed. Although the diversity of scientific concepts is a philosophical challenge since at least Kuhn, up to now there has been no systematic investigation of the diversity of scientific concepts aiming at a comprehensive classification within the philosophy of science.Apart from the discussion of scientific concepts within the philosophy of science, in the second half of the 20th century the structure and acquisition of natural language concepts became an important field of research in philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science. From this debate emerged a wide range of different approaches to concepts – e.g. prototype concepts, defined concepts (the classical view of concepts), concepts as theories, dual concepts etc. In this project, I will use these theories about natural language concepts in order to classify the diversity of scientific concepts and to reveal new types of scientific concepts.Beside the classification and investigation of scientific concepts, one of the main challenges of the project is to develop a method that allows representing all different types of scientific concepts in one model in a logically and cognitively adequate and intuitive way. To this end, this project will use the frame-model. The frame-model was developed in cognitive science and has been adapted by the philosophy of science to explicate scientific concept change. It is one of the main parts of the project to modify and extend the frame-model according to the requirements of the project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants