Knowledge transfer across scientific disciplines

Thomas Kuhn suggested that symbolic generalizations are applied to concrete systems by a process involving exemplars and analogical reasoning. Using the related concepts of theoretical and formal templates, I argue that the process of applying templates can in some cases be made explicit and that we do not need to rely on similarity relations and tacit knowledge. In so doing I show how some formal models can be transferred from one scientific field to another. Examples include scale-free networks, the Lotka-Volterra model from biology, and the Goodwin model in economics. I also argue that this explicit approach has advantages over the more psychologically oriented approach of Kuhn and explain the sense in which templates do and do not produce unification.