Mental Models as Cognitive Instruments in the Transformation of Knowledge

Abstract

The chapter is concerned with the epistemic structures of mechanical knowledge in its historical transformations. It describes these structures using the concept of mental models as cognitive instruments, which function as mediators between the realm of practice and experience on the one hand, and conceptual systems on the other. With the help of the concept of mental model, the chapter discusses how mechanical knowledge has emerged from experience in practical contexts and how it was transformed into theoretical and mathematically formalized knowledge systems. Focusing on one particular mental model, which describes the cognitive structure conceptualizing motion as being caused by forces, the chapter then follows its transformations in the long-term history of mechanical thinking. This so-called “motion-implies-force” model is rooted in intuitive, non-written mechanical knowledge. Over the course of history, the model was recruited, complemented, and transformed in the context of the use of mechanical tools and articulated in the work of practitioners dealing with machines, arms, ships, buildings, fortifications, and the like. Eventually, under specific cultural circumstances, this and other mental models were elaborated and integrated into mathematically formalized systems that were used, for example, in the explanation of terrestrial and celestial motions in early modern natural philosophy and the mathematical disciplines of European universities.