ABSTRACT
How do scientists think, reason, and represent their knowledge? We have been investigating these questions in a variety of simulated science and real-world science domains over the last decade (Baker & Dunbar, in preparation; Dunbar, 1993, 1995, 1996; Klahr & Dunbar, 1988). Having explored scientific thinking in a variety of domains, we are now able to address the issue of the types of problem spaces that contemporary experimental scientists use. In this presentation, we will focus on the problem spaces that scientists in immunology and molecular biology use when they reason about their research at laboratory meetings and at the bench. On the basis of our analyses, we propose that real-world scientists represent and conduct their science using three major spaces: a Theory Space, an Experiment Space, and a Data Space. Here we will specify the nature of the three spaces, the criteria for identifying these spaces, and discuss the nature of between- and within-space operations.
