Situating the Question of Conceptual Change

The contemporary debate regarding the question of conceptual change relates to the learning paradox in Plato’s dialogue Menon, where Menon asks how it is possible to engage in a search for knowledge of something entirely new. How is it possible to change from a commonsense view of a phenomenon into a scientific one that also sometimes goes quite contrary to the commonsense view? Sociocultural analysis dispatch the question by talking of situated cognition and by that ignoring individual cognitions. Constructivist approaches describes cognitive development as an evolution from simple naive models of a phenomenon to more complex and powerful models, often by implying that the simple models are abandoned in favour of the new ones. Here, another model for conceptual development and conceptual change will be advanced. It is proposed that conceptual development and conceptual change is constituted by a process of a continuous assimilation of new information into an all-embracing model and, simultaneously, a differentiation within this compounded model resulting eventually in different new models. This description that stick to the Piagetian way of describing cognitive development, will be illustrated by means of empirical data from a study of children’s conceptions of the shape of the earth.