Adele Abrahamsen's Research

Since moving in 2002-3 to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), I have been collaborating with William Bechtel on the new mechanistic philosophy of science that he pioneered in a 1993 book with Robert Richardson (reissued in 2010). Like most of the new mechanists we have focused primarily on cases in biology--e.g., chronobiology, cell biology, and cognitive neuroscience--but I have had a particular interest in extending this kind of philosophical analysis to cases in cognitive science involving such domains as language and memory.

What we now call basic mechanistic explanation provides an account of the organized parts and operations responsible for a phenomenon of interest. This is the initial focus in any mechanistic inquiry, but in the cases we have examined, scientists often then turn to the dynamics of the successfully identified parts and operations. In the last decade or so, for example, circadian researchers increasingly have been bringing computational modelers into their research teams or collaborations. We therefore proposed that dynamic mechanistic explanation should be recognized as a partnership of two approaches sometimes regarded as competitors: basic mechanistic accounts and computational models of dynamics. Coordination is achieved by linking properties of parts and operations (e.g., the rate of an mRNA transcription operation) to variables or terms in the model’s differential equations. (Cf. a freestanding dynamical model: the equations may be similar but, with no components identified, their variables characterize only the system and its environment.)

In 2010, William Bechtel and I added to our collaboration two graduate students in the philosophy department: Daniel C. Burnston and Benjamin Sheredos. Our WORking Group on Diagrams in Science (WORGODS) is examining the role of diagrams in scientists’ development of basic and dynamic mechanistic explanations. We have created and tagged a database of over 2000 figures from circadian research, and use it as a resource for identifying different types of diagrams and addressing the issues they elicit.

The other hat I wear is that of cognitive science researcher. In this work I have certain core concerns -- those aspects of cognition that most intrigue me -- but I come at those concerns from a variety of directions. What intrigues me is the onset and trajectory into adulthood of language and its well-orchestrated interactions with other cognitive capacities. My conceptual and research tools have come primarily from psychology but also from linguistics and from some specific, interdisciplinary research areas.

More specifically, my research on language and cognition has addressed early symbolic gestures and words in typically and atypically developing toddlers, the development of language—especially word meaning—at 4-10 years of age, adult psycholinguistics, and augmentative communication. Other publications have addressed interdisciplinary relations, cognitive science as an interdisciplinary field, connectionism, and learning across species in addition to basic and dynamic mechanistic explanation and diagrams. The links above provide access to these publications by date (some with PDF) and, alternatively, by topic.