ABSTRACT
The philosophical concerns have to do with the extent to which scientific theories can be said to be representations of the world and what constitutes adequate justification of the acceptance or rejection of a proposed theory. Some philosophers insisted that the justification of a theory rests on being able to construct a “rational” logical argument that establishes consistency between a proposed theory and available data. The appeal to cognitive psychology provides particular solutions to problems identified with other accounts of scientific theories. The growing interest in a naturalized philosophy of science following Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions led to an emerging interest in cognitive science as a repository of ideas for understanding scientific knowledge representation and reasoning. Giere examines scientific cognition in light of developments in cognitive science suggesting that performance on many advanced cognitive tasks involve distributed cognitive processes.
