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326 Conversion

they are described by the same informal vocabulary. As an example, consider
the phrase “observing an experimental outcome”; to what does it refer? The
highly deliberate, complex and usually mechanized technique of recording,
for example, reaction times? or the mental processes of visual perception?
Likewise, “deciding whether claim X is true” is ambiguous between the mental
process of belief fixation and, say, the process of running a complex, 10-year
longitudinal study to evaluate X. We do not possess two epistemic vocabular-
ies, one for the basic cognitive processes of knowledge acquisition and one
for the conscious and acquired activities of deliberate knowledge acquisition;
indeed, the very term “knowledge acquisition” spontaneously intrudes itself
into both contexts. This terminological ambiguity enables subtle and unno-
ticed shifts back and forth between the two levels of analysis.
importing the principles of theory change from the philosophy and his-
tory of science into the behavioral sciences was a potentially productive move.
Cognitive scientists rightly pride themselves on being interdisciplinary and
the cross-disciplinary transfer of principles is a source of progress. But in the
case of conversion, the interdisciplinary move did not work. The principles
and practices that pertain to scientific theory change do not explain belief
revision in children or adults. in fact, the relation is the opposite: The specific
features of scientific practice that pertain to theory change constitute phe-
nomena that a psychological theory of the basic cognitive processes involved
in belief revision ought to explain. The laudable ambition to be interdisciplin-
ary caused more confusion than clarity by turning that relationship on its
head.

FALSIFICATION FALSIFIED
Mismatches between beliefs and reality are guaranteed. We only know the
world through a small and necessarily unrepresentative sample of experiences,
we often have reasons to move into some unfamiliar task environment, and the
world turns, grinding our beliefs into irrelevance. our minds keep us upright
in the stream of anomalies and contradictions by balancing stability and
change, resistance and conversion. The principles of knowledge- dependent
processing, center-periphery organization and dissonance reduction via
peripheral change combine into a plausible theory for how the impact of con-
tradictory information is resisted. The psychological reality of resistance does
not prevent conversions, but it makes individual conversions more difficult to
explain. A satisfactory theory must not only specify the processes by which
change travels up the center-periphery gradient to affect core beliefs but also