Status and Subscribing: A Response to Schwitzgebel

Schwitzgebel (1999) has proposed an account of theories that can be used in deciding whether children's cognitive development is like theory change in science. In this article we outline an account of conceptual learning in terms of the conceptions that people hold, the status they award to their conceptions, and the conceptual ecology containing the criteria they use in determining status. A comparison of our account with Schwitzgebel's shows an equivalence between Schwitzgebel's subscribing and one component of status (fruitfulness), but no counterpart to another (plausibility). In addition, Schwitzgebel's account predicts that people possess an explanation-seeking curiosity that is associated with patterns of arousal and affect when anomalous phenomena are encountered. We present the results of empirical work that demonstrates that students do exhibit strong affective reactions to awareness of experimental anomalies and their resolution.