This reminds me a lot of one of Kuhn’s essays A Function for Thought Experiments. Where basically he’s like “people often conflate variables together; thought experiments can tease apart those conflations.” E.g., kids will usually start out conflating height with volume so that even though they watch the experimenter pour the “same” amount of water into a taller, thinner glass, they will end up saying that the left hand glass in (c) has more water than the one on the right.
Which is generally a good heuristic: height of water line and volume are usually pretty correlated. Eventually, though, experience brings these two variables into tension and kids will update their models. Kuhn argues that thought experiments are often playing this role, i.e., calling attention to and resolving conceptual tension between variables that were previously conflated.
In any case, I think the strategy “considering more possibilities” is really important for figuring out the “edges” of concepts… it feels sort of like “playing” with them until you have a “feel” for what they are.… which seems related to me to your ideas about “indexing,” too. Anyways, I thought a bunch of these examples were great. I now find myself confused about waves.
This reminds me a lot of one of Kuhn’s essays A Function for Thought Experiments. Where basically he’s like “people often conflate variables together; thought experiments can tease apart those conflations.” E.g., kids will usually start out conflating height with volume so that even though they watch the experimenter pour the “same” amount of water into a taller, thinner glass, they will end up saying that the left hand glass in (c) has more water than the one on the right.
Which is generally a good heuristic: height of water line and volume are usually pretty correlated. Eventually, though, experience brings these two variables into tension and kids will update their models. Kuhn argues that thought experiments are often playing this role, i.e., calling attention to and resolving conceptual tension between variables that were previously conflated.
In any case, I think the strategy “considering more possibilities” is really important for figuring out the “edges” of concepts… it feels sort of like “playing” with them until you have a “feel” for what they are.… which seems related to me to your ideas about “indexing,” too. Anyways, I thought a bunch of these examples were great. I now find myself confused about waves.
(I like this connection, thanks!)