ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to show how scientific concepts and processes are embedded in representational activities of cognitive systems. The most obvious fact is that science is conducted by cognitive systems whose neural systems enable them to represent and successfully interact with the world. In the course of this chapter it will turn out that concepts from computational neuroscience and artificial life provide interesting insights into the problem of knowledge representation and, as a consequence, into the understanding of science and of what is referred to as the context of discovery. It will be shown how the dynamics of theories and scientific concepts can be described by the dynamics going on in the neural representation space (activation and weight space). Furthermore, concepts from genetic algorithms and their combination with artificial neural networks could give a cognitively founded explanation for paradigmatic shifts.
