Quinian Bootstrapping
Creating placeholder structures—knowing without understanding—is central to all conceptual change.
Again from The Origin of Concepts. It may have seemed from my last post that creating placeholder structures (knowing without understanding) was mentioned only in the spirit of being complete—an academic nod to an alternative never used.
But this isn’t true. Creating placeholder structures is, according to Carey, central to all conceptual change.
I focus on Quianian [sic] bootstrapping because it is a learning mechanism for which there is ample evidence in both the historical and the developmental literatures and because it is capable of explaining developmental discontinuities involving incommensurability. . . .
To remind you of the characteristics of Quinian bootstrapping: (1) relations among symbols are learned directly, in terms of each other; (2) symbols are initially at most only partly interpreted in terms of antecedently available concepts; (3) symbols serve as placeholders; (4) modeling processes—analogy, inductive inferences, thought experiment, limiting case analyses, abduction—are used to provide conceptual underpinnings for the placeholders; (5) these modeling processes combine and integrate separate representations from distinct domain-specific conceptual systems; and (6) these processes create explicit representations of knowledge previously embodied in constraints on the computations defined over symbols in one or more of the systems being integrated.
The philosopher Ned Block (1986) vividly illustrated the role of placeholders in conceptual change:
"When I took my first physics course, I was confronted with quite a bit of new terminology all at once: 'energy, momentum, acceleration, mass' and the like. As should be no surprise to anyone who noted the failure of positivists to define theoretical terms in observation language, I never learned any definitions of these new terms in terms I already knew. Rather, what I learned was how to use the new terminology—I learned certain relations among the new terms themselves (e.g., the relation between force and mass, neither of which can be defined in old terms), some relations between the new terms and old terms, and most importantly, how to generate the right numbers in answers to questions posed in the new terminology."
