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Memory and the construction of scientific meaning: Michael Faraday's use of notebooks and records
Abstract
Research examining the relationship between external artifacts and scientific thinking has highlighted the dynamic role of memory aids. This article explores how the nineteenth-century physicist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) used extensive laboratory notebooks and a highly structured set of retrieval strategies as dynamic aids during his scientific research. The development and dynamic use of memory artifacts are described as part of a distributed, “real-world,” cognitive environment. The processes involved are then related to aspects of expert memory and to the use of model-based reasoning in science. The system demonstrates the importance of epistemic artifacts in scientific cognition and is suggestively related to other cognitive artifacts used in scientific research that rely on similar cognitive processes.
... However, artifacts do (sometimes quite dramatically) transform our cognitive practices. Lab notebooks, for example, have significantly transformed many of the cognitive practices in laboratories (see, e.g., Tweney and Ayala 2015;Holmes et al. 2003). In sum, lab notebooks rank high on all dimensions, except transformation. ...
Researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences, particularly those working in laboratories, use a variety of artifacts to help them perform their cognitive tasks. This paper analyses the relationship between researchers and cognitive artifacts in terms of integration. It first distinguishes different categories of cognitive artifacts used in biological practice on the basis of their informational properties. This results in a novel classification of scientific instruments, conducive to an analysis of the cognitive interactions between researchers and artifacts. It then uses a multidimensional framework in line with complementarity-based extended and distributed cognition theory to conceptualize how deeply instruments in different informational categories are integrated into the cognitive systems of their users. The paper concludes that the degree of integration depends on various factors, including the amount of informational malleability, the intensity and kind of information flow between agent and artifact, the trustworthiness of the information, the procedural and informational transparency, and the degree of individualisation.
This article presents a methodology for the exegesis which has been generated through
supervisory practice and experience and writer-researchers’ practices of producing PhD
theses in creative writing research, with two exemplary, first person descriptions by
HDR candidates of their PhD research journeys so far. The proposal here focuses on
the creative and cognitive practices brought into play in carrying out each PhD project,
asserting that ‘exegetical thinking’ is enmeshed in both creative writing and research
processes in a growing ‘spiral’ of complexity and innovation as connections are made
between the thesis components in producing original research.
In the mid-1970s, the psychiatrist Edward Hare published two accounts of Michael Faraday's memory symptoms, based upon which he suggested the diagnostic possibilities of an amnesic syndrome related to a transient ischemic attack in the vertebrobasilar cerebrovascular system. This article revisits the contemporary evidence of Faraday's letters and the notes of his physician, Peter Mere Latham, and considers subsequent responses to and shortcomings of Hare's analysis. In light of more recent conceptualizations of memory disorders, a new formulation for Faraday's memory symptoms is suggested: namely, that he manifested a functional cognitive disorder.
Michael Faraday is considered one of the greatest science lecturers in history. He popularized the Christmas Lectures as a format of science communication that has survived until today in the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Especially, his Chemical History of a Candle has become a classic of science communication that has inspired numerous approaches to science teaching. Science educators have appreciated the wealth of factual knowledge to be derived from working with the candle (knowing science). In light of a more recent philosophy of science education, which advocates for an increased focus on aspects of scientific inquiry (doing science) to balance a mere amassing of facts, this article undertakes to analyze Faraday’s lectures with regard to their potential benefits for teaching scientific inquiry. It does so by referring to a proven teaching unit from the Art of Teaching. This approach will be briefly introduced along with the teaching unit. Hermeneutic analysis of original sources and secondary literature will illustrate how Faraday’s lecture and his views on experimentation can inform an augmentation of the teaching unit. It will be shown that the strength of Faraday’s lectures does not lie in its epistemological virtues. A theoretical explanation for this finding is provided from instructional psychology. Concerning the hallmarks of contemporary science education, Faraday’s lecture still goes beyond a mere communication of facts. Adapted to the classroom, it can improve introductory science lessons exploiting the affective benefits to be gathered from performing easy-to-do and impressive-to-watch investigations.
To account for the large demands on working memory during text comprehension and expert performance, the traditional models of working memory involving temporary storage must be extended to include working memory based on storage in long-term memory. In the proposed theoretical framework cognitive processes are viewed as a sequence of stable states representing end products of processing. In skilled activities, acquired memory skills allow these end products to be stored in long-term memory and kept directly accessible by means of retrieval cues in short-term memory, as proposed by skilled memory theory. These theoretical claims are supported by a review of evidence on memory in text comprehension and expert performance in such domains as mental calculation, medical diagnosis, and chess.
The goal of this paper is to develop a systematic taxonomy of cognitive artifacts, i.e., human-made, physical objects that functionally contribute to performing a cognitive task. First, I identify the target domain by conceptualizing the category of cognitive artifacts as a functional kind: a kind of artifact that is defined purely by its function. Next, on the basis of their informational properties, I develop a set of related subcategories in which cognitive artifacts with similar properties can be grouped. In this taxonomy, I distinguish between three taxa, those of family, genus, and species. The family includes all cognitive artifacts without further specifying their informational properties. Two genera are then distinguished: representational and non-representational (or ecological) cognitive artifacts. These genera are further divided into species. In case of representational artifacts, these species are iconic, indexical, or symbolic. In case of ecological artifacts, these species are spatial or structural. Within species, token artifacts are identified. The proposed taxonomy is an important first step towards a better understanding of the range and variety of cognitive artifacts and is a helpful point of departure, both for conceptualizing how different artifacts augment or impair cognitive performance and how they transform and are integrated into our cognitive system and practices.
This study investigates nineteenth century laboratory work on electromagnetism through historical accounts and experimental replications. Oersted found that when a magnetic needle was placed in varying positions around a conducting wire, its orientation changed: in moving from a spot above the wire to one below, its sense inverted. This behavior was confusing and provocative. Early experimenters such as Johann Schweigger, Johann Poggendorff, and James Cumming engaged it by bending wire into loops. These loops, which increased the magnetic effect on a compass placed within, also provided evidence of their understanding and confusion. Coiling conducting wires around iron magnetized it, but when some wires coiled oppositely from others, the effect diminished. This effect confused contemporaries of Joseph Henry who made electromagnets, and amateurs later in the century who constructed multisection induction coils. I experienced these confusions myself while working with multilayer coils and induction coils that I made to replicate the historical instruments. This study shows how confusion can be a productive element in learning, by engaging learners to ask questions and invent experiments. By providing space for learners' confusions, teachers can support the development of their students' physical understandings.
The theory and practice of note-taking were matters of concern for Renaissance humanists. They recommended commonplace books as stores of copious literary material for use in speeches and writing; but these notebooks were regarded as tools for training and improving recall from memory, not as substitutes for it. This article examines the operation of this assumption and the challenges to it that appeared, especially during the 17th century. There was a shift away from notebooks as memory prompts so that they began to be seen as external sources from which information might be retrieved when needed. This development involved a profound re-assessment of the cultural status of memory.
Is invention really “99 percent perspiration and one percent inspiration” as Thomas Edison assured us? Inventive Minds assembles a group of authors well equipped to address this question: contemporary inventors of important new technologies, historians of science and industry, and cognitive psychologists interested in the process of creativity. In telling their stories, the inventors describe the origins of such remarkable devices as ultrasound, the electron microscope, and artificial diamonds. The historians help us look into the minds of innovators like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Michael Faraday, and the Wright brothers, drawing on original notebooks and other sources to show how they made their key discoveries. Finally, cognitive psychologists explore the mental processes that figure in creative thinking. Contributing to the authors’ insight is their special focus on the “front end” of invention—where ideas come from and how they are transformed into physical prototypes. They answer three questions: How does invention happen? How does invention contrast with other commonly creative pursuits such as scientific inquiry, musical composition, or painting? And how might invention best happen—that is, what kinds of settings, conditions, and strategies appear to foster inventive activity? The book yields a wealth of information that will make absorbing reading for cognitive and social psychologists, social historians, and many working scientists and general readers who are interested in the psychology of personality and the roots of ingenuity.
Michael Faraday: A Very Short Introduction explores the life of one of the best-known scientific figures of the nineteenth century. Faraday's achievements — his discovery of electro-magnetic induction, the principle behind the electric generator and transformer — are set in the context of the rapidly changing place that science had in society. This VSI dispels the myth of Faraday as an isolated, experimental genius working in a basement laboratory. Instead it shows his place as a key figure in the developing scientific institutions of the time and his legacy as a theorist of the physical world and his influence on later physicists such as Kelvin, Maxwell, and Einstein.
An account that analyzes the dynamic reasoning processes implicated in a fundamental problem of creativity in science: how does genuine novelty emerge from existing representations?
How do novel scientific concepts arise? In Creating Scientific Concepts, Nancy Nersessian seeks to answer this central but virtually unasked question in the problem of conceptual change. She argues that the popular image of novel concepts and profound insight bursting forth in a blinding flash of inspiration is mistaken. Instead, novel concepts are shown to arise out of the interplay of three factors: an attempt to solve specific problems; the use of conceptual, analytical, and material resources provided by the cognitive-social-cultural context of the problem; and dynamic processes of reasoning that extend ordinary cognition.
Focusing on the third factor, Nersessian draws on cognitive science research and historical accounts of scientific practices to show how scientific and ordinary cognition lie on a continuum, and how problem-solving practices in one illuminate practices in the other. Her investigations of scientific practices show conceptual change as deriving from the use of analogies, imagistic representations, and thought experiments, integrated with experimental investigations and mathematical analyses. She presents a view of constructed models as hybrid objects, serving as intermediaries between targets and analogical sources in bootstrapping processes. Extending these results, she argues that these complex cognitive operations and structures are not mere aids to discovery, but that together they constitute a powerful form of reasoning—model-based reasoning—that generates novelty. This new approach to mental modeling and analogy, together with Nersessian's cognitive-historical approach, make Creating Scientific Concepts equally valuable to cognitive science and philosophy of science.
Bradford Books imprint
Research records composed of notes and protocols have long played a role in the efforts to understand the origins of what have come to be seen as the established milestones in the development of modern science. The use of research records to probe the nature of scientific investigation itself however is a recent development in the history of science.
With Eduard Dijksterhuis, we could address them as a veritable "epistemologiCal laboratory". The purpose of a workshop entitled "Reworking the Bench: Laboratory Notebooks in the History of Science", held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin was to bring together historians who have been exploiting such resources, to compare the similarities and differences in the materials they had used and and to measure the potential and scope for future explorations of "science in the making" based on such forms of documentation. The contributions which form this volume are based on papers presented at this workshop or written afterward by participants in the discussions.
This is the first book that addresses the issue of research notes for writing history of science in a comprehensive manner. Its case studies range from the early modern period to present and cover a broad range of different disciplines.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mark the transition from a visually starved to a visually overloaded culture. In centuries before our own, public figures were known primarily through the written word and secondarily through the visual portrait. Even in the nineteenth century, biographers devoted long passages to describing the presence, manner and dress of prominent persons.1 In contrast biographers today tend to provide a series of photographs, usually snapshots, of contemporary individuals; captions only briefly contextualise this primary visual information.2 Further, the reportage of events has become intrinsically visual. On television, edited film footage frequently takes precedence over the construction of the verbal story and the narration of dramatic events is often — and sometimes incongruously — accompanied by a still portrait of the chief protagonist taken at an unrelated moment; but this image, familiar to the audience through its repeated use, has come to stand for the individual, whatever the context.
In 1818 Michael Faraday and a handful of other London artisans formed a self-help group with the aim of teaching themselves to write like gentlemen. For a year and a half Faraday's essay-circle met regularly to read aloud and criticize one another's writings. The ‘Mental Exercises’ they produced are a record of the life, literary tastes, and social and political ideas of Dissenting artisans in Regency London. This book publishes the essays and poems produced by Faraday's circle. The complete corpus of the essay-circle's writings is accompanied by detailed annotations, extracts from key sources, and a full-length introduction explaining the biographical, historical and literary context of the group.
This chapter describes the progress made toward understanding chess skill. It describes the work on perception in chess, adding some new analyses of the data. It presents a theoretical formulation to characterize how expert chess players perceive the chess board. It describes some tasks that correlate with chess skill and the cognitive processes of skilled chess players. It is believed that the demonstration of de Groot's, far from being an incidental side effect of chess skill, actually reveals one of the most important processes that underlie chess skill—the ability to perceive familiar patterns of pieces. In the first experiment discussed in the chapter, two tasks were used. The memory task was very similar to de Groot's task: chess players saw a position for 5 seconds and then attempted to recall it. Unlike de Groot, multiple trials were used—5 seconds of viewing followed by recall—until the position was recalled perfectly. The second task or the perception task for simplicity involved showing chess players a position in plain view.
Science as Psychology reveals the complexity and richness of rationality by demonstrating how social relationships, emotion, culture and identity, are implicated in the problem-solving practices of laboratory scientists. The authors gather and analyze interview and observational data from innovation-focused laboratories in the engineering sciences to show how the complex practices of laboratory research scientists provide rich psychological insights, and how a better understanding of science practice facilitates understanding of human beings more generally. The study focuses not on dismantling the rational core of scientific practice, but on illustrating how social, personal and cognitive processes are intricately woven together in scientific thinking. The authors argue that this characterization addresses the integration problem in science studies - how to characterize the fluid entanglements of cognitive, affective, material, cultural and other dimensions of discovery and problem solving. The book is thus a contribution to science studies, the psychology of science and general psychology. © Lisa M. Osbeck, Nancy J. Nersessian, Kareen R. Malone, and Wendy C. Newstetter 2011.
How do scientists use analogies and other processes to break away from old theories and generate new ones? This book documents such methods through the analysis of video tapes of scientifically trained experts thinking aloud while working on unfamiliar problems. Some aspects of creative scientific thinking are difficult to explain, such as the power of analogies, the use of physical intuition, and the enigmatic ability to learn from thought experiments. The book examines the hypothesis that these processes are based on imagistic mental simulation as an underlying mechanism. This allows the analysis of insight ("Aha!") episodes of creative theory formation. Advanced processes examined include specialized conserving transformations, Gedanken experiments, and adjusted levels of divergence in thinking. Student interviews are used to show that students have natural abilities for many of the basic reasoning and model construction processes and that this has important implications for expanding instructional theories of conceptual change and inquiry.
In 1856, Michael Faraday (1791–1867) conducted nearly a year's worth of research on the optical properties of gold, in the course of which he discovered the first metallic colloids. Following our own discovery of hundreds of the specimens prepared by Faraday for this research, the present paper describes the cognitive role of these "epistemic artifacts" in the dynamics of Faraday's research practices. Analysis of the specimens, Faraday's Diary records, and replications of selected procedures (partly to replace missing kinds of specimens and partly to understand the "tacit knowledge" implicated in Faraday's research) are outlined, and a reconstruction of the events surrounding the initial discovery of metallic colloids is presented.
In 1932, Cambridge University Press published Remembering, by psychologist, Frederic Bartlett. The landmark book described fascinating studies of memory and presented the theory of schema which informs much of cognitive science and psychology today. In Bartlett's most famous experiment, he had subjects read a Native American story about ghosts and had them retell the tale later. Because their background was so different from the cultural context of the story, the subjects changed details in the story that they could not understand. Based on observations like these, Bartlett developed his claim that memory is a process of reconstruction, and that this construction is in important ways a social act. His concerns about the social psychology of memory and the cultural context of remembering were long neglected but are finding an interested and responsive audience today. Now reissued in paperback, Remembering has a new Introduction by Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Journal of the History of Ideas 65.4 (2004) 603-625
Ae for "Adversariorum methodus." Be for "Beauty, Beneficience, Bread, Bleeding, Blemishes." By associating the first letter with the initial vowel of a word, generations of eighteenth-century readers, students, and observers diligently regulated access to information they reputed worth retaining. Following this rule, they organized the notes they took on a certain subject, the thoughts and observations they believed were worth remembering, and the exemplary words of their favorite authors. The rule was devised by John Locke for his "new method of making commonplace-books," a method characterized by a particular system for indexing the entries of a notebook that became popular in the eighteenth century. Before Locke developed his new method readers had already familiarized themselves with the practice of keeping an account of their readings, excerpting passages of texts, and copying them in their notebooks under a relevant heading. Throughout the early modern period commonplace books provided repositories for arranging notes, excerpts, drawings, and objects. Regarded as aids to memory and storehouses of knowledge, they were part of a pedagogic tradition related to rhetoric and the art of memory that dated back to the classical period. Reducing vast amounts of knowledge to a manageable form, they instantiated a special relationship between the accumulation of knowledge and the organization of space. At the turn of the eighteenth century Locke's new method promised to facilitate compilers' task by providing a new way of accumulating multum in parvo at a time of increasing concern for the uncontrollable growth of the "Stock of Knowledge." It did so by seeking to increase the amount of information one could annotate in the notebook, while also speeding up its retrieval. Many eighteenth-century compilers relied on it in order to reduce the volume of their notebooks and save time. Some were lured by the promise that this technique could also help them to order their minds and thus turn them into better people.
Although commonplace books have dropped out of usage today, they were still mentioned in nineteenth-century educational manuals. As tools that lay at the intersection between practices of collecting, reading, classifying, learning, and the arts of rhetoric, they have come to the fore of historical discussion. In some cases, commonplace books have been regarded as capable of providing insights into compilers' reading patterns and as biographical sources casting light on compilers' personal idiosyncrasies and cataloguing manias. The intellectual and cultural significance of Locke's own new method of compiling has accordingly been discussed in relation to Locke's own intellectual biography (and in particular his medical interests), in the context of shifting patterns of systematization of knowledge and in light of the dissemination of eighteenth-century encyclopedic projects. However, still little is known about the uses and the popularity of the Lockean method in the eighteenth century.
What follows considers the spreading of Lockean commonplacing in the context of eighteenth-century discussions on the nature of the self. Locke himself contributed to these discussions when, in the second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694), he famously suggested that self-identity lay in the mind and resided in the continuity of memory and consciousness. Now a widely shared assumption of Western modernity, the view that self lies in the mind has long been dated back to the Age of Enlightenment. Yet early in this period Locke's proposal to make self-identity coextensive with memory and self-knowledge proved controversial. The debate that followed is now part of the canon of the history of philosophy and of the philosophical literature as a whole. In the course of the debate some of Locke's critics doubted that it was possible to found the self in conscious memory: they wondered about the destiny of the self during intervals of unconsciousness and found it absurd to define personal identity in terms of something that was inherently discontinuous. On this basis they attacked the Lockean self as intrinsically inconstant and unstable.
It is worth noting that the time of the debate on the coherence and continuity...
Texts bear traces of complex struggles. For scientific texts, issues to do with the meaning of words and their reference are often where such struggles occur. In texts too identity is fashioned in the social realm and texts are woven closely into human cognition. The focus on how texts function to produce meaning, characteristic of recent literary theory, provides remarkable resources for locating these features in scientific texts. The project sketched here in a preliminary manner seeks to bring such resources to bear on Michael Faraday's writings and explores in Faraday's rich and reflexive textual space his persistent concern to stabilize the meaning and reference of words as well as the less conscious subtle complexities associated with the production of meaning. Both weave closely into his scientific theorizing and fashioning of identity.
Hans Christian Ørsted and Thomas Johann Seebeck are recognized as the discoverers of electromagnetism and thermoelectricity. Yet what each man believed he had discovered differed markedly from what many contemporaries saw in those discoveries and from subsequent canonized representations of them. The central historical concern of this paper is to track the details of how scientists' understanding of what was discovered in these two cases, as embodied in their preferred language, evolved over time in response to different interests, conceptual preferences, and ontological beliefs. The very concept of discovery, in accordance with which scientists bestow recognition only on someone who has discovered something held to be true of the world, plays an important role in the process of consensus formation by the interacting collectivity of scientists. In its historiographical assessment of such episodes, this study builds upon Thomas Kuhn's recognition that “discovering a new sort of phenomena is necessarily a complex process which includes recognizing both that something is and what it is”; upon augustine Brannigan's analysis of the social construction of discovery accounts, whereby “the attribution of discovery is structured…by the perception that the achievement is coherent with existing knowledge in the field”; and upon Ludwik Fleck's analysis of the creative role of an interacting “thought collective” in the “genesis and development of a scientific fact.”
The present paper attempts to define an experimental ethnography as an approach to the understanding of scientific thinking. Such an ethnography relies upon the replication of contemporary and historical scientific practices as a means of capturing the cultural and cognitive meanings of the practices in question. The approach is contrasted to the typical kind of laboratory experiment in psychology, and it is argued that replications of scientific practices can reveal dimensions of the microstructure of science and of its context that otherwise may remain invisible. An extended example is presented, based upon replications of the experimental procedures used by Michael Faraday (1791-1867) in 1856 during his examination of the optical properties of gold.
Faraday's notebooks constitute one of the largest and most revealing archives left to us by a major scientist. These records reveal a good deal of systematic invention and exploration of recording techniques by Faraday, work that reveals much about his thinking about science, as well as of the role of memory in general in scientific thinking.
After an initial consideration of psychological experimentation, the author describes a long series of experiments in the fields of perception, imagination, and remembering, using material which approximated that found in everyday life. The work on perceiving utilized chiefly geometrical diagrams; and that on imagination, ink-blots. The results in these two cases revealed the influence of the subjects' attitudes and indicated their tendency to introduce previously learned material. In the experiments on remembering two methods were used, one the method of repeated reproduction by a given subject and the other the method of serial reproduction where the material reproduced by one subject became the learning material for a second subject whose recall constituted the learning material for a third subject, etc. This latter series of experiments showed that proper names and titles are very unstable in recall, that there is a bias toward the concrete, that individualizing aspects of the material (stories) tend to be lost, and that abbreviations and rationalizations occur. Throughout the book emphasis is placed on the social determinants of the manner and matter of recall, a point of view which is supported in the anthropological material cited. "Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
External memory–records of experiences that are maintained in repositories that are external to their users–provides context for many everyday cognitive acts. Some initial research has shown that such context influences learning, remembering, and judgements of knowing. The scope of both basic and applied memory research should be broadened in ways that address issues about the interaction of external memory and mind.
This 2006 book was the first handbook where the world's foremost ‘experts on expertise’ reviewed our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts' knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of expertise is also studied by retrospective interviews and the daily lives of experts are studied with diaries. In 15 major domains of expertise, the leading researchers summarize our knowledge on the structure and acquisition of expert skill and knowledge and discuss future prospects. General issues that cut across most domains are reviewed in chapters on various aspects of expertise such as general and practical intelligence, differences in brain activity, self-regulated learning, deliberate practice, aging, knowledge management, and creativity.
In this paper I aim to show that the creation and manipulation of written vehicles is part of our cognitive processing and, therefore, that writing transforms our cognitive abilities. I do this from the perspective of cognitive integration: completing a complex cognitive, or mental, task is enabled by a co-ordinated interaction between neural processes, bodily processes and manipulating written sentences. In section one I introduce Harris’ criticisms of ways in which writing has been said to restructure thought (Goody 1968; McLuhan 1962, 1964; Ong 1982). This will give us a preliminary idea about possible pitfalls for a cognitive integrationist account. The second section outlines, firstly, how integrated cognitive systems function. Secondly, the model is applied to a hybrid mental act where writing allows us to complete complex cognitive tasks. The final section outlines the sense in which, following Harris, there is “a more realistic picture of how writing restructures thought” [Harris, R., 1989. How does writing restructure thought? Language and Communication 9 (2/3) 99–106] that is concealed by the ‘romantic fantasies’ of theorists such as the above. This picture is one of writing providing an autoglottic space in which a new form of theoretical thinking becomes prevalent. The cognitive integrationist understands this in terms of the nature of the written vehicles and how we manipulate them.
What does a chessmaster think when he prepartes his next move? How are his thoughts organized? Which methods and strategies does he use by solving his problem of choice? To answer these questions, the author did an experimental study in 1938, to which famous chessmasters participated (Alekhine, Max Euwe and Flohr). This book is still usefull for everybody who studies cognition and artificial intelligence.
Cognitive science normally takes the individual agent as its unit of analysis. In many human endeavors, however, the outcomes of interest are not determined entirely by the information processing properties of individuals. Nor can they be inferred from the properties of the individual agents, alone, no matter how detailed the knowledge of the properties of those individuals may be. In commercial aviation, for example, the successful completion of a flight is produced by a system that typically includes two or more pilots interacting with each other and with a suite of technological devices. This article presents a theoretical framework that takes a distributed, socio-technical system rather than an individual mind as its primary unit of analysis. This framework is explicitly cognitive in that it is concerned with how information is represented and how representations are transformed and propagated in the performance of tasks. An analysis of a memory task in the cockpit of a commercial airliner shows how the cognitive properties of such distributed systems can differ radically from the cognitive properties of the individuals who inhabit them.
To account for the large demands on working memory during text comprehension and expert performance, the traditional models of working memory involving temporary storage must be extended to include working memory based on storage in long-term memory. In the proposed theoretical framework cognitive processes are viewed as a sequence of stable states representing end products of processing. In skilled activities, acquired memory skills allow these end products to be stored in long-term memory and kept directly accessible by means of retrieval cues in short-term memory, as proposed by skilled memory theory. These theoretical claims are supported by a review of evidence on memory in text comprehension and expert performance in such domains as mental calculation, medical diagnosis, and chess.
Many people assume that the claims of scientists are objective truths. But historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have long argued that scientific claims reflect the particular historical, cultural, and social context in which those claims were made. The nature of scientific knowledge is not absolute because it is influenced by the practice and perspective of human agents. Scientific Perspectivism argues that the acts of observing and theorizing are both perspectival, and this nature makes scientific knowledge contingent, as Thomas Kuhn theorized forty years ago. Using the example of color vision in humans to illustrate how his theory of âperspectivismâ works, Ronald N. Giere argues that colors do not actually exist in objects; rather, color is the result of an interaction between aspects of the world and the human visual system. Giere extends this argument into a general interpretation of human perception and, more controversially, to scientific observation, conjecturing that the output of scientific instruments is perspectival. Furthermore, complex scientific principlesâsuch as Maxwellâs equations describing the behavior of both the electric and magnetic fieldsâmake no claims about the world, but models based on those principles can be used to make claims about specific aspects of the world. Offering a solution to the most contentious debate in the philosophy of science over the past thirty years, Scientific Perspectivism will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of science.
In this powerful work of conceptual and analytical originality, the author argues for the primacy of the material arrangements of the laboratory in the dynamics of modern molecular biology. In a post-Kuhnian move away from the hegemony of theory, he develops a new epistemology of experimentation in which research is treated as a process for producing epistemic things. A central concern of the book is the basic question of how novelty is generated in the empirical sciences. In addressing this question, the author brings French poststructuralist thinkingânotably Jacques Derridaâs concepts of âdifféranceâ and âhistorialityââto bear on the construction of epistemic things. Historiographical perspective shifts from the actorsâ minds to their objects of manipulation. These epistemological and historical issues are illuminated in a detailed case study of a particular laboratory, that of the oncologist and biochemist Paul C. Zamecnik and his colleagues, located in a specific settingâthe Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital of Harvard University at the Massachusetts General Hospital of Boston. The author traces how, between 1945 and 1965, this group developed an experimental system for synthesizing proteins in the test tube that put Zamecnikâs research team at the forefront of those who led biochemistry into the era of molecular biology.
In 1839, when Michael Faraday was 48 and still in the full spate of his genius, he suffered an illness which prevented him doing any work for more than 3 yr. He never fully recovered from this illness and for the rest of his life (he lived to be 75) he complained of his bad memory and of recurrent attacks of giddiness and confusion. A probable cause of the ischaemic attacks could have been atheromatous lesions in the walls of the great vessels, throwing off platelet emboli. Between the ages of 30 and 40, Faraday spent much of his working time in the underground laboratory at the Royal Institution engaged in researches on steel and glass which involved the continual use of a furnace. There is no evidence that he ever suffered from acute carbon monoxide poisoning but exposure to low concentrations of carbon monoxide certainly seems a possibility and this, taken with the recent evidence that such exposure can cause arteriosclerosis affords an explanation for what may have been the initial pathological lesion in Faraday's case.
Cognitive-historical studies of science
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Faraday's Diary: Being the Various Philosophical Notes of Experimental Investigation Made by Michael Faraday
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The New Art of Memory
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