WHAT IS THE COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY OF SCIENCE?
9. Empirical investigations of science can be organized into four relatively distinct categories. The first category includes nonpsychological approaches that analyze the major discoveries in terms of political, anthropological, or social forces and mechanisms. The second category includes psycho-historical accounts of the purported cognitive and motivational processes of the focal scientists (e.g., Holmes, 1985). This approach, exemplified in CMS in the chapters by Gooding and Nersessian, is based primarily on retrospective analyses of diaries, autobiographies, lab notebooks, correspondence, and so on. It has produced some intriguing analyses, but the reliability of the scientists’ accounts that provide the raw data for such analyses is always in doubt: “But did they REALLY think this way?” asks Nersessian [p. 36]. “In the end we all face the recorded data and know that every piece is in itself a reconstruction by its author” [p. 36]. 10. The third category includes computational mode
