Abstract

The aim of this work is twofold: to understand the intuitive sense of mechanism that accounts for commonsense predictions, expectations, explanations, and judg-ments of plausibility concerning mechanically causal situations and to understand how those intuitive ideas contribute to and develop into school physics. To facili-tate this, I provide a framework for describing and correlating characteristics of weakly organized knowledge systems. The framework is aimed at answering, at a coarse level of detail, a set of questions central to a full theory of knowledge: What are the elements of knowledge; how do they arise; what level and kind of systematicity exists; how does the system as a whole evolve; and what can be said about the underlying cognitive mechanisms that are responsible for the normal oper-ation of the system and its evolution? The empirical base is a set of clinical interviews of undergraduate physics stu-dents trying to solve a set of specially designed problems. Observations from this core and from the existing literature are extended with informal data and synthe-sized using the general framework.