Of Mirrors, Tools and Trails

Abstract

Representational pluralism is a perspective that acknowledges that it is normal and even desirable in some circumstances to hold incompatible representations in one’s mind regarding a natural phenomenon. This pluralist perspective has been defended in cognitive science, psychology, philosophy of science and science education, raising several original issues about cognition, learning and scientific practice. When discussing this subject, many pluralist authors use analogies. Generally speaking, analogies use the concepts of a base domain (and their relations to each other) to explain a target domain for which the required knowledge is absent, deficient or difficult to use. Accordingly, this paper is based on the premise that pluralist analogies are means used by authors to tackle issues that are both important and conceptually difficult. The paper posits that an analysis of pluralist analogies can, globally, act as a basis for identifying important issues associated with representational plurality, revealing which aspects of these issues are considered to be conceptually difficult, and characterizing the suggested ways to overcome those difficulties. A search within pluralist literature across the abovementioned disciplines yielded a corpus of 28 analogies. It is proposed that most of these analogies are used to address four basic issues in respect to plurality: psychological coexistence, cognitive value, selection processes and teaching. The paper discusses how the analogies are used to address each of these issues. It is hoped that identification of such a set of issues might facilitate research interactions between pluralist researchers, who are often from different disciplinary backgrounds and studying different aspects of representational plurality.