Replication and the Experimental Ethnography of Science
By
Ryan D. Tweney
Department of Psychology
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH 43403
USA
419/372-2301
419/372-6013 (fax)
tweney@bgnet.bgsu.edu
[In press, Journal of Cognition and Culture]
2
Replication and the Experimental Ethnography of Science
Ryan D. Tweney*
ABSTRACT
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.
Introduction
In the popular imagination, the image of science is replete with material objects; bubbling
flasks, microscopes, sparking coils and the like, all presided over by a white-coated figure with
an expression of quiet confidence, passionate certainty, or – sometimes – sheer madness.
Indeed, with some of the facial expressions of scientists being a possible exception, the lab coat
does have its place in science, flasks and microscopes are still in use, and the sparking coils,
while anachronistic now, once did signal the forefront of electrical research. Clearly, science
occurs in a realm of materiality, a realm that has recently produced a huge outpouring of
scholarship by scholars. Clearly also, this materiality provides an important dimension of
inquiry for a cognitive anthropology of science.
*
Ryan D. Tweney, Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green,
OH 43403; email: tweney@bgnet.bgsu.edu. The author gratefully acknowledges helpful
comments on an earlier draft by Christophe Heintz and by an anonymous reviewer. This paper
has benefited greatly from earlier discussions with Elke Kurz-Milcke; she is of course not
responsible for any misuse of the ideas that originated in those conversations.
3
The present paper is an attempt to define how an experimental approach to a cognitive
ethnography can contribute to the understanding of scientific practices. By experimental
ethnography, I mean the attempt to understand scientific practices, both contemporary and
historical, using procedures that replicate the practices under study, in an effort to more fully
characterize their nature. Such methods are ethnographic insofar as they are meant to capture
the richness and cultural meaning of the practices in question, and they are experimental in that
the agency of the inquirer is used to directly create, manipulate, and participate in the epistemic
practices under examination.
There are two broad categories of such replication that I will consider in this paper. The first
stems primarily from cognitive psychologists and involves the attempt to isolate the essential
processes of scientific practice. The second grows out of recent work on “cognitive history” and
derives from earlier work on historical issues.
The goal in most laboratory research in psychology has of course been an abstractive one,
that is, one in which general laws of cognition and behavior are to be abstracted from the
particularities of actual behavior, usually the aggregated performance of statistically large
numbers of individual “subjects.” The historical emergence of the “subject” as a faceless
“object” of psychological investigation has been documented by Danziger (1990), who argued
that the clients of American psychology in the first half of the 20th century, primarily
bureaucratic elites in education, the corporate world, and the military, were not interested in the
inner workings or experiences of individuals and instead wanted the ability to predict and
control the behavior of large numbers of people. As a result, the goals of psychological science
shifted in the direction of seeking “nomothetic” laws instead of “idiographic” understandings.
This aggregative approach had its critics (e.g., Allport 1940), but nonetheless, by mid-century,
the dominance of an aggregative approach within psychology was overwhelming. Coupled with
the use of statistical analysis (in part as a legitimating procedure for psychology’s “scientific”
status, Tweney 2003), the reductive character of experimental psychological method opened a
large gap between psychology and the methods of ethnography. By the end of the century, the
contrastive “normative” rules of research given by Fetterman (1998) for anthropologists, versus
those outlined by Rosenthal & Rosnow (1991) for psychologists, reveal almost no common
4
ground. In the end, most anthropologists would consider the laboratory setting of psychological
tasks to be far too artificial, and hence useless as adjuncts to the methods of ethnography, while
most psychologists consider the methods of ethnography to be too limited as approaches to
nomothetic laws and as little better than anecdotal in character.
In an early signal that this division was perhaps too sharply drawn, Herbert Simon
(1967/1996) used the metaphor of an ant crossing a sandy beach. The ant is a relatively simple
behavioral system, but the geometry of its path across a beach is apparently very complex. The
complexity, however, resides in the environment, not the ant. Simon argued that a similar
consideration applied to human problem solving; the apparent complexity is in the symbolic
environment of thought not the thought itself which follows, according to Simon, a relatively
simple set of heuristic principles. For Simon, broadly general principles of problem solving
could be used to untangle the complex environmental manifestations of the problem solving of a
single individual. His approach was strikingly successful in such domains as chess playing, and
its reach has even been extended to include claims about scientific discovery (e.g., Klahr 2000;
Langley, Simon, Bradshaw, & Zytkow 1987; Kulkarni & Simon 1990). In contrast to most
psychological research, Simon and his colleagues tended to downplay the aggregative methods
of experimental psychology in favor of computer simulation, often based upon single-subject
protocols of great complexity.
Simon’s tradition of research has led others to a broader range of methods that begin to
resemble the ethnographic approaches that I consider in this paper. Thus, Kevin Dunbar (1999)
used laboratory analogs of real-world scientific experiments in genetics as a means of refining
the questions used in his in vivo studies of four molecular biology laboratories. These latter
were based upon extensive video recorded observations of lab meetings and interviews held
over an extended period. Some such studies within cognitive science have converged in scope
and richness with efforts in which computer models of scientific thinking have been based upon
instances of “real science” (often elaborated in a historical context), for example the studies of
Darden (1992) on the processes of theory change in modern genetics, or the simulations by
Kulkarni & Simon (1990) of the discovery of the ornithine cycle by Hans Krebs, a simulation of
experimental practice based upon a historical analysis of Krebs’s diaries (Holmes 1980; 2004).
5
In my own case, the work of my colleagues and I initially used laboratory-based “model
systems” and an aggregative approach as methods for the understanding of scientific thinking
(Mynatt, Doherty, & Tweney 1978; Tweney, Doherty, & Mynatt 1981). Having found, in these
studies, evidence for several heuristics involving the assessment of evidence, we sought to
confirm our findings in real-world contexts, an attempt that eventually led to my studies of
Faraday’s practices (described later in this paper). Our first efforts were conceived under the
assumption that the simpler environment of laboratory studies of science would prove superior
to a direct immersion in the messy world of “real science.” Thus, my first efforts to understand
Faraday (Tweney 1985; Tweney & Hoffner 1987) were essentially hypothetico-deductive in
character, in the sense that I was trying to test hypotheses derived from our laboratory work.
Only later did I realize that the messiness of Faraday (to take the example closest to my gaze at
the time) was only apparent. It appeared so only to one whose hypotheses-laden vision was
constricted to selected aspects of Faraday’s work. In fact, broader approaches were necessary.
In the present paper, I adopt a perspective that emerged from this experience, to wit, that
everything in the record left by Faraday – his publications, his diary, and now even his
specimens – is potentially relevant. The task of the scholar is to understand how to interpret this
record in the light of the best available theory, whether that theory derives from cognitive
science, from sociology, or from anthropology, and the methods must be at least in part
ethnographic in character.
The second broad category of research that I consider is based upon a historical-cognitive
approach within the history of science and cognitive science. Nancy Nersessian (1995)
introduced the term “cognitive history” to describe this body of work, characterizing it as an
attempt to understand the processes by which “vague speculations get articulated into scientific
understandings, are communicated to other scientists, and come to replace existing
representations of a domain” (p. 194). Here, the goal has been to use insights derived from
cognitive science to understand historical cases of scientific thinking and practice, as well as to
import findings from the history of science into cognitive science itself. For example,
Nersessian (1999) used Maxwell’s development of his field theory as a source problem for
6
claims within cognitive science about the generative role of analogy in scientific thinking. For
some in this tradition, the replication of specific historically relevant cases has played an
important role. For example, Gooding (1989; 1990) was able to understand some aspects of
Faraday’s 1821 experiments on the rotation of a current-carrying wire in a magnetic field by
replicating the procedures used by Faraday. In the process, he discovered that the apparently
straightforward discovery recorded in Faraday’s notebooks of circular motion (the result of
transverse forces rather than radial forces) actually must have involved a long series of
interactions between “eye,” “hand,” and “mind.” Only through replication was Gooding able to
reconstruct a path by which a seemingly chaotic phenomenon was gradually ordered and shaped
by the experimenter’s activity (Gooding & Addis 1999). In Gooding’s words, “Empirical results
are never completely independent of the practices that produce them. Facts are practice-laden as
well as theory-laden.” (1989, p. 64). Such examples of the implicitly ethnographic use of
replication will constitute many of my examples in the remainder of this paper.
Nersessian (1995) argued that the relationship between the disciplines of cognitive science
and the history of science was reciprocal; the findings and methods of cognitive science had a
great deal to offer history of science, but so also did history of science have much value for the
cognitive sciences themselves. Thus, one goal of the present paper is to expand upon the
examples of the second kind, to show that an experimental ethnographic approach can draw
upon the resources of historical case studies of science in ways that enlarge the scope of current
work on cognition itself.
Both kinds of research in cognitive history, the cognitive scientific research (like Simon’s),
and the cognitively minded historical work (like Gooding’s and Nersessian’s) suggest a need to
provoke discussion about the role of the active replication of scientific experiments and
scientific observations as a means of opening a window on otherwise invisible processes of
science. The intent is to recover the everyday practices of science from the mostly textual
representations of those practices found in published papers and books, in diaries, and in lab
notebooks. I argue further that, like an archeologist seeking the limits of pyramid-building
technology by “trying my hand at it,” replication of procedures is essential to understanding
what can and cannot be happening prior to the instantiation of scientific thought in text. Thus,
7
like research notebooks, the intent is to use replication as a means to open “particularly
powerful avenues of access to the microhistorical processes of scientific change” (Holmes,
Renn, & Rheinberger 2003, p. xii).
I begin with a case history of experimental ethnography, presenting some of my recent work
in which replication was used to uncover some of the experimental and theoretical aspects of
Michael Faraday’s research on the optical properties of gold. The project has historical
implications for the understanding of Faraday’s research, and implications for cognitive
approaches to the understanding of science in general. As a contribution to the history of
science, the case study documents an unusually complete record left by a great scientist, one
that forces certain reinterpretations of a portion of his work. These reinterpretations are aided by
the replications. As a contribution to cognitive science, the case study illustrates how scientific
discovery is imbedded in the concrete practices of a set of artifacts, requiring attention to the
entire dynamic cognitive system involved in scientific discovery -- the scientist, in a laboratory,
making and using artifacts. Here, replications contribute to the understanding of the dynamics
of cognition and action.
I. Understanding Scientific Artifacts using Experimental Ethnography.
In 1856, Michael Faraday (1791-1867) carried out an extensive program of research to explore
the properties of thin films of metallic gold (Faraday 1857; see also James 1985, for an overview
of Faraday’s research on optical phenomena). These films had long been of interest to him because
they possess the peculiar property of appearing gold in color by reflected light, but green by
transmitted light. Faraday therefore hoped that gold could serve as a model for the general
interaction of light and matter. Encouraged perhaps by his earlier finding that magnetic fields
could affect a beam of polarised light passing through a highly refractive substance, Faraday was
hoping for even more general phenomena by which the integration of field theory and chemical
theories of matter could be integrated (Faraday 1839-55). In the course of the research, Faraday
discovered the first metallic colloids and what is now known as the “Faraday Tyndall Effect”
(actually a case of Rayleigh scattering of light). Thus, although his major theoretical goals were
not realised, the investigation resulted in two important discoveries.
8
In attempting to construct cognitive psychological models of scientific thinking, Michael
Faraday’s extensive diaries (Martin 1932-36) had been an important resource for my own
investigations, as they have been for others (for examples, see Anderson 1994; Fisher 2001;
Gooding 1981, 1990; Steinle 1996; 2003; Tweney 1985, 1992). The stretch of diary covering his
work on gold, however, had long been puzzling, both to myself and to others. Thus, Faraday’s
principal modern biographer, Pearce Williams (1965), suggested that Faraday was beginning to
lose his grip in 1856, and that signs of ageing were apparent. Indeed, a reading of his diary for this
period made such a claim plausible, in that there is a seeming aimlessness about much of the
record. In fact, however, a recent discovery has cast a different light on Faraday’s efforts during
1856.
In the course of his experimentation on gold, which lasted nearly the entire year, Faraday
prepared a variety of specimens – colloids, precipitates, solutions, and so forth. Recently, in the
Museum of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, I discovered the nearly-complete set of metallic
specimens used by Faraday in his 1856 research on gold films, most of which are thin gold
deposits on ordinary microscope slides.1 A few of his colloids still survive (although too few to
permit much by way of additional interpretation of the diary), but the slides had been overlooked
until recently. The slide specimens are numbered and cross-referenced within his dated diary
records. When examined (Tweney 2002), they provided an amazingly complete record – over 95%
of some 700 of his slide specimens have been found, along with many other kinds of specimens –
dried deposits on watch glasses, heated tubes of metallic matter, and so forth. Simply viewing
these specimens in conjunction with reading the diary opened a new window on this entire year of
Faraday’s research. It is now clear that he intended the numbered and catalogued specimens as an
integral part of the diary. Indeed, “reading” the specimens and the diary together gave a kind of
“illustrated text,” an opening to an understanding of the research. Ronald Anderson (in press; see
also Steinle 2003) has recently elaborated the way in which Faraday “read nature” The specimens
1
I am deeply indebted to Frank A.J.L. James, Reader in History and Philosophy of Science and
Keeper of the Collections, Royal Institution of Great Britain, for his assistance in granting access
to the slide specimens and for much help in understanding their import.
9
+ diary now available makes clear how this can be reconstructed and read even more deeply. Such
a reading ruled out the possibility that Faraday was showing an age-related decline – the specimen
+ diary record can be interpreted and seen as a coherent and goal-driven enterprise by a mature
scientist pursuing an elusive goal (Tweney 2002).
So far, my description of Faraday’s researches on gold supports the notion that an ethnography is
possible. Even absent replications, the slides are a valuable addition to the historical case study in
question, subject to analysis, cultural artifacts like any others. However, in addition to studying the
specimens themselves, we have reconstructed some of Faraday’s chemical and electrical
procedures for making gold colloids, gold solutions, and thin gold film deposits. This has
permitted reconstruction of some of the “invisible” dimensions of his thought and practice in the
making of these “epistemic objects.” The replications thus constitute an experimental ethnography.
In general, and this will probably not surprise the reader, many of Faraday’s procedures turned
out to be surprisingly tricky to replicate. For example, Faraday used “deflagrating” (exploding)
gold wires in order to obtain fine particulate deposits of gold upon glass slides (wires can be
exploded or vaporised, rather than simply melted, if a sufficiently rapid current is passed through a
very fine wire). Replicating this seemingly straightforward process proved dependent upon aspects
of the specific electrical technology used by Faraday, aspects that were not evident in the diary
records. Thus, he used a source of current known as a Grove’s Cell to generate his currents
initially, later turning to a much more elaborate process in which a series of Leyden jars were
charged by an electrostatic machine. Both procedures would have been expensive and time
consuming for us to replicate – and for Faraday to implement as well! -- but we discovered the
hard way why Faraday had used them. In fact, although this is never stated in the diary, he needed
a source with a rapid “on time” and a very low internal resistance2. Our most economical way of
achieving this relied upon a bank of modern condensers charged by a lab bench power supply
plugged into the wall. This of course “cheats” in one sense, but the net result, an understanding of
how and why Faraday had used the sources he used was not affected. In the end, our slides
appeared to be exactly like his (cf. Tweney, Mears, & Spitzmüller in press). Note that our efforts to
2
Allan Mills (2003) recently described some of the technology of batteries during Faraday’s
time, and used replications to establish quantitatively the parameters of their function.
10
replicate Faraday’s procedures were not so apparatus-oriented as those of, for example, the group
at Oldenburg University; see, e.g., Heering (1994) and Sibum (2001), and the extensive catalog of
devices replicated at the Institute für Physik of Oldenburg University, best viewed on their web
site (Oldenburg 2004). Instead, we focused upon procedures that relied primarily upon simple
chemical apparatus, of the sort described in Faraday’s much earlier Chemical manipulation (1827).
Our goal was the reconstruction of practices and specimens, not apparatus as such.
In a few cases, what we had expected to be difficult turned out to be quite straightforward, for
example Faraday’s use of a phosphorus reduction technique to make thin gold films (Tweney in
preparation). As part of his research in 1856, Faraday needed to prepare exceptionally thin films of
gold metal, films even thinner than commercially available gold leaf. The technique he settled
upon (which he obtained from his friend Warren De la Rue) used the reduction of a gold chloride
solution to metallic gold using phosphorous vapour over a solution of phosphorus in carbon
disulphide. Contrary to our original reading of the diary, his somewhat opaque descriptions did not
conceal a particularly difficult procedure.3 One simply dissolves phosphorous in carbon disulfide,
placing a small amount of this in a watch glass. A flat glass surface to which a thin layer of gold
chloride solution is adhering is then inverted over the phosphorus solution. After ten minutes or so,
one can see a thin film of metallic gold forming on the surface of the gold chloride. The films can
then be floated off and washed in a bowl of water, picked up on a microscope slide, and dried for
observation. The films are so thin that they adhere nicely to the glass slide and are thus easily
examined and manipulated. We easily succeeded in making films very like Faraday’s (if not quite
so neatly mounted – a tribute to his magnificent dexterity!) Our prepared slides opened a new
window on the preparations Faraday used, allowing the kinds of risky manipulations that he
employed (heating, burnishing, and so on), manipulations that could not be carried out on the
museum originals. And, as a bonus for our efforts, we unwittingly found that we had also
replicated the circumstances of his discovery of colloidal gold, in that the pinkish solution that
remained after we had made the films (“the mere washing” as Faraday put it), proved to be a
3
Instead, what proved difficult was obtaining the materials and learning how to coordinate the
procedures with modern requirements for safe handling of hazardous substances. We are
especially grateful to Lawrence Principe for his assistance in navigating these tricky waters!
11
colloid and “caught our eye,” as it presumably had caught his. It is interesting to note that we were
unaware of this in our first experiments, simply because we had used a dark enamelled bowl to
hold the fluids. Only on our second run-through of the procedure (a “replication of the replication,”
carried out to allow an opportunity for photography of the results), did we notice the pinkish fluid
– because we inadvertently used a white ceramic bowl, in which the faint color could be seen.
One of our first replication attempts is especially revealing for the purposes of this paper,
because what began as a mere “warm up” exercise for myself and my students opened a
surprisingly rich view into how Faraday’s conceptualisations of gold affected the course of his first
experiments. In our first chemical manipulations, we thought that preparation of simple
precipitates of gold from gold chloride solution would give us the chance to firm up our lab skills,
test out reagents, and so forth (Tweney, Mears, Gibby, Spitzmüller, & Sun 2002). In fact, these
studies revealed to us the surprising complexity of gold and its compounds, and we found that
Faraday (who at our first reading also seemed to be “warming up” with these seemingly simple
initial preparations) was in fact confronted with a phenomenologically rich but theoretically
confusing realm. In this context, the appearance of his first colloidal preparations (the pinkish fluid
that is described in the previous paragraph) must have confused the picture even further.
Historically, our replication shed light on the way in which Faraday reconceptualized the domain
he was faced with, and the way in which his deepest theoretical notions about the nature of matter
was in play during these early experiments. Our conclusion was that Faraday was faced with the
need to construct a new hierarchical organisation of the various kinds of substances involved, one
that made sense only if he adopted a specific view about the particulate nature of matter.
Such cognitive reorganisations have been observed elsewhere in the history of science, for
example by Hanne Andersen (2002) in an analysis of changes in the history of particle physics,
and by Xiang Chen (2003), who argued that John Herschel failed to fully understand polarised
light in part because his concept of the phenomena related them to an object framework, rather
than an event framework. Using a dynamic frames approach (Barsalou 1992), Chen argued that
this cognitive dynamical explanation was relevant to larger questions in understanding the
reception of the wave theory of light. For our purposes, it is also relevant to the understanding of
the cognitive dynamics of scientific thinking.
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Our replications of Faraday’s precipitates, colloids, and solutions allowed a similar argument to
be made about the cognitive nature of Faraday’s reorganisation of knowledge. Thus, where the
traditional way to organise the differing substances grouped colloids and solutions in one category
and precipitates in another (because colloids and solutions are both transparent and do not “settle
out”), the new arrangement put colloids together with precipitates – because both scatter light. This
led Faraday to the theoretical claim that both precipitates and colloids were particulate gold,
although of differing sizes of particle. But why did he make this change? After seeing for ourselves
the complexity of the phenomena that Faraday was faced with, we were able to reconstruct a
plausible scenario about how this could have happened. In brief, Faraday must have been faced
with a series of “confusions,” by which I mean something a bit more primitive than the more
commonly studied notion of an anomaly.4 Elizabeth Cavicchi (1997) first alerted us to the
importance of this earliest of all phases of empirical work, the appearance of something that
simply appears chaotic and yet is taken as relevant to the larger goals of the project. Whereas an
anomaly must be defined with respect to an existing body of otherwise coherent and
“understandable” phenomena, a confusion is simply that – a set of appearances that simply make
no sense. These become coherent only after the fact, in the present case, only after we recognised
the reorganisation of the perceptual domain facing Faraday.
Cavicchi (1997) had noticed the importance of confusions while conducting two parallel research
programs, one aimed at replicating some of Faraday’s experiments on diamagnetism, and one
directed at understanding student confusions in learning about science. She argued that confusions,
like those she observed in her own mind while replicating Faraday, were an aspect of learning in
general. She found similar confusions when she compared her replications to the experiences of a
group of adult learners engaged in experimenting with magnets, wires, and batteries. In a later
paper, (Cavicchi 2003) she found similar results while replicating some aspects of the development
of induction coils in the late 19th century. In particular, she showed that there were periodic
4
For cognitive accounts of the role of anomalies in scientific thinking, see Darden (1992),
Gentner, Brem, Ferguson, Markman, Levidow, Wolff, & Forbus (1997), and Trickett, Fu, Schunn,
& Trafton (2000).
13
confusions at a number of levels in the long history of the development of such coils, confusions
that could be found even in many of the published textual materials available. Until her own
experience detected and resolved these confusions, she was unable to make progress in replicating
historically accurate coils.
In the case of our replications of Faraday’s precipitates, colloids, and solutions, note that the
entities that were reorganised were in some sense very close to a “basic level” of cognition – it was
the grouping by appearance of the colloids, precipitates, solutions that changed, and these changes
in turn allowed Faraday to focus upon what became anomalies (not confusions). Ultimately, he
was able to relate these anomalies to the changes in his theoretical understandings of the nature of
matter. We did not initially see these as anomalies, and neither did Faraday. Instead, what appeared
to us as confusions must have seemed so to Faraday as well, and must also have motivated his
continued involvement with these substances until he could properly frame the research questions.
In effect, the confusing appearance of colloids (why do they scatter light if they are just a kind of
solution?) became an anomaly instead; Why are colloids able to scatter light when there are no
visible particles? The answer to this question, which says roughly that colloids are particulate also,
is, in the end, the scientific resolution of the anomaly.
By the end of 1856, Faraday had enough evidence to publish his findings. He was remarkably
diffident in his expression of these results: “Those [results] I have obtained seem to me to present a
useful experimental entrance into certain physical investigations respecting the nature and action
of a ray of light. I do not pretend that they are of great value in their present state, but they are very
suggestive” (Faraday 1857, p. 393). Faraday’s diffidence is not hard to understand, given that his
original goal was to understand the interaction of light and matter in general terms. Although his
findings were “suggestive” that such interactions could be understood in ways consistent with his
field theory, he was not able to finally answer the larger questions, in spite of his success in
discovering new empirical phenomena.5
5
For an account of the relation of Faraday’s attempts to reconcile electric and magnetic fields
with his theory of matter, see Gooding (1982), James (1985), and Williams (1965) – the latter of
which, as noted earlier, downplays the significance of Faraday’s work on gold. Faraday
14
Issues for the Cognitive Ethnography of Science
In the introduction, I described two general trends that each lead to an ethnographic approach to
the understanding of science. First, there have been efforts by cognitive scientists that began with
laboratory studies, moved through an application of Simon & Newell’s (1972) theory of problem
solving, and has recently moved toward greater appreciation of field studies and approaches that
begin to appear ethnographic (e.g., Dunbar 1995). Second, there have been approaches to the
history of science that have emphasized the practices of science, many of which have used the
replication of historically significant apparatus and procedures. The two trends can be bridged by
the consideration of experimental ethnographies, as I now attempt to show. Two central issues will
be discussed: the role of context and the need for analysis of the “microstructure” of scientific
thought. While a full review of each issue is beyond the scope of the present paper, select
examples can highlight the way in which application of cognitive ethnography to scientific
practices is potentially interesting.
Context. While few would deny that context affects human thought and behavior, nevertheless
there are striking differences of emphasis in how investigators have accommodated this fact. For
the present purpose, the role of context can be approached by considering the work of practiceoriented historians of science, e.g., Lorraine Daston (2000), and by social scientists like Karin
Knorr-Cetina (1999). Both Daston and Knorr-Cetina assume the necessity of a contextualist
approach, Daston with a particular interest in the historical growth and development, the
“biographies,” of scientific objects -- dreams, atoms, society, and many others -- and Knorr-Cetina
with an eye toward an expanded notion of culture in which the patterns and dynamics of expert
practices are the focus, in order to enable a better understanding of knowledge cultures in the
modern world. By contrast, for much of cognitive psychology, accounts of scientific thinking have
often proceeded in the absence of explicit attention to a larger context. For example, Gentner, et al.
(1997) analyzed the conceptual change underlying Kepler’s account of planetary motion. Using
presented many of his views on the relation of matter and force in brilliantly clear fashion in a
series of juvenile lectures in 1859-60 (Faraday 1860). See also Faraday (1856).
15
concepts from the psychological understanding of analogical change, they described Kepler’s
reasoning as an instance of such reasoning. While the result is illuminating for some aspects of
Kepler’s understanding, the approach treats Kepler as if he could be isolated from the historical,
social, and cultural context of his work. In effect, the context of thought is in danger of becoming
just another “factor” to be “held constant.”
Within cognitive psychology, there have been a number of recent alternatives to such
approaches. Thus, Greeno, et al. (1998) characterized a “situativity” approach in terms that refused
to dissociate the context from the cognition. Greeno emphasized the need to study “intact activity
systems” in terms that closely resemble those used by ethnographers. He thus suggested
broadening the scope of certain cognitive concepts to reflect a more contextual focus. For example,
the standard concepts of schemata and procedures (or scripts, as they are more commonly called)
were assimilated by Greeno to two larger concepts, constraints and affordances. Greeno (1994)
argued that these concepts, first described by James J. Gibson (1966), could be formalized in ways
that allowed understanding and analysis of the interaction between agents and situations. Both
constraints and affordances were defined in terms of “If ... Then ...” relations, and they thus
superficially resemble the more familiar “production rules” used to model cognition in the standard
Newell & Simon (1972) approach. However, Greeno defined the broader terms across entire
systems of cognition, rather than as internal properties of an intelligent agent, arguing that the
problem space formalisms used by Newell & Simon were in fact too constricted to accommodate
the situations perspective. Goodwin (1997) used a similar approach to the understanding of the
perceptual practices in a field study of a laboratory group (see also Trafton, Trickett, & Mintz in
press, for a different approach to this issue, one closer to the Newell & Simon tradition).
Contextual grounding is of course necessarily part of any meaningful replicative process. Hence,
replication-based ethnographies must seek to provide an essential balance in this regard. One
powerful way to achieve that balance is to use a historical grounding. In historically-grounded
replication, the available evidence for such contextualization can be far greater than that available
for studies of “real time” science. This is because the passage of historical time permits, for some
cases, extended opportunities for coding, representing, and interpreting events at a variety of scales
from the macro level of political and economic context to the micro level of instrumental detail
16
and biographical insight derived from studies of “investigative pathways” (Holmes 2004). Rather
than an impoverished data base, then, an historically grounded experimental ethnography can
sometimes enjoy a richer data base than is available even for the student of an ongoing present
culture.
In the present case, for example, our knowledge of the history of physics after Faraday’s time
made it possible to see that his larger goal, to understand the interaction of matter and light, was
not possible in the way he envisioned, since too little was then known about the nature of light
itself. Further, given the diffidence with which he reported his results, it is likely that he himself
did not see the importance of the two discoveries that he did make, namely the first preparation of
a metallic colloid and the discovery that colloids could scatter light. Only later was it clear that
these were foundational steps in the history of colloid chemistry. Note also that the availability of
narrative detail available from Faraday’s later biographers provides a rich and essential context as
well. From this material, we can reconstruct his social interaction (with De la Rue and others), his
religious and political values and their impact on his views of the nature of matter (see Cantor,
1991), and even his larger epistemic goals, in ways that would not be possible for a living scientist,
for whom such intensive analyses have not been undertaken.
This consideration inverts a common misconception about historical cases (e.g., that voiced by
Klahr & Simon 1999), namely, that historical cases never provide as much information as do
concurrent cases. For some purposes, exactly the reverse is true.
It is interesting to note that Danziger (1996) has argued that investigative practices in
psychology, especially experimental practices, are especially prone to becoming “invisible.”
Indeed, his earlier analysis (Danziger 1990) of the historical emergence of the construct of the
“subject” in psychological research suggested that the objectification entailed by this term was in
the service of a prediction and control orientation that was willfully blind to the social context of
investigative practice in psychology. Within this tradition, context “effects” (e.g., the effects of
experimenter bias in conducting experiments, Rosenthal & Rosnow 1991) are simply problems to
be eliminated by careful experimental design. On my argument, however, exactly the situatedness
of psychological research that constituted a problem for traditional psychological approaches
17
seeking to marginalize context is in fact a virtue in an ethnographic approach. Thus, it is the
context sensitivity and the reflexivity of replication that gives it strength. The social dimensions of
practice, both that of the current investigator and that of the historically grounded “subject”
scientists, can become visible in such replication.
Thus, in the case of Faraday’s research on gold, we were able to reveal some of these previously
invisible practices. Just as Faraday’s diary records often reveal the course of his symbolic
representations of his research practices, so also, in this case, do the surviving specimens reveal
even more, and the surviving specimens, together with our replications of some of his practices
open up even more of the grounded context, the situativity, of his work. To see the potential
contribution to understanding, note first that, had Faraday had available color images of his
specimens (and been able to include them in his diary), much more could have been made of the
diary in the first place.6 But even such an “illustrated diary” could not reveal the invisible
dimensions of practice that our replications were able to detect. The material context of his
thought, one filled with equipment, chemical substances, and specimens of his own making (and
occasionally those made by others) is a dynamic one, a constantly changing cognitive system that
requires both diachronic and synchronic analysis. It is precisely this dynamic character that
requires replication to be understood.7 The “representational determinism” of cognitive artifacts
demands the analysis of the “psychology” of artifacts (Norman 1993; Zhang & Norman 1994). So
also does the understanding of scientific practices demand that at least some of these practices be
actually carried out – the artifacts alone tell only part of the story, and in this respect an
experimental ethnography is essential to the cognitive anthropology of science.
6
We are presently at work constructing an illustrated catalog of the surviving slide specimens;
Tweney, Friedrich, & Berg in preparation
7
Although length prohibits full discussion, our replications also allowed us to understand the
importance of Faraday’s relation to his friend Warren De la Rue, and hence contributed to an
understanding of the social context of his views on gold. This is discussed at more length in
Tweney, Mears, & Spitzmüller (in press).
18
The “Microstructure” of Science. Attention to the microstructural detail of scientific thinking,
which needs little justification for anthropologists, has been a contentious issue in the history of
science. The historical objections have been well articulated recently by Ursula Klein (2003). In
commenting upon a call for microstructural studies that permit the reconstruction of investigative
pathways of individual scientists (Holmes 1987; 2003; 2004), Klein wondered “how many
volumes will it fill?” (p. 229) and implied that one could easily become overwhelmed with the
sheer bulk of such material. In addition, Klein suggested that scientific thought was in fact an
emergent from the efforts of multiple individuals in a social context, and that studies of individual
pathways could only obscure the larger scale relationships. Such an emergentist view presupposes
a particular metaphysical position about the nature of scientific thinking, one that in effect
excludes the relevance of cognitive approaches (as these are understood by cognitive scientists), in
favor of a socially-grounded account of science.
Yet, metaphysical stances aside, there are strong epistemological arguments against Klein’s
conclusion. Taken literally, her objection challenges the validity of studies in experimental
ethnography, since she suggests that the very richness of detail obtained by these methods can
obscure the emergent properties of the social dynamic within which the “real” movement of
science occurs. Yet the historical analysis of objects and artifacts has already been shown to
contribute to the understanding of the history of science. In fact, this is one of the major claims
made by Klein herself, in her discussion of the role of “paper tools,” the chemical formulas first
developed by Berzelius which have become a standard mode of representation in chemistry. For
Klein, these tools were essential parts of her analysis of the history of the impact of Berzelius’s
research. Similarly, others have analyzed the explicit models of molecular structure used by Linus
Pauling (Nye 2001) and the use of paper models in the history of stereochemistry (Ramberg 2003).
For Klein, of course, even artifacts can be seen as emergent, inherently social, objects. This is in
fact her point. But from my perspective, this is not a necessary step, nor does it avoid the risk of
simply “defining away” the interesting cognitive dynamics, dynamics which can be successfully
studied using experimental ethnographic approaches. The paper models described by Klein, Nye,
and Ramberg must indeed be described from a social perspective -- but they must also be
described as cognitive artifacts.
19
But if this is so, then there can be no a priori reason why even internalized “cognitive tools”
should be read out of the endeavour. Science has many such tools -- the calculus, the long-term
memory of a scientist for a particular background literature, and so on -- and these grant exactly
the point at issue, namely, that there is a cognitive level that requires analysis for a complete
historical understanding. That such analysis is both possible and fruitful is shown by a growing
number of examples. For example, Kurz (1998) used a historical cognitive approach to analyze the
way in which experts use calculus in searching for a representational basis needed for a problem
solving task, and Kurz & Hertwig (2001) used replication to explore the context of an early
experiment by the psychologist Egon Brunswik. Cavicchi’s (2003) replications of Faraday’s
experiments make a similar point. An especially clear case is Lawrence Principe’s (1998) use of
replication to understand the “alchemical” practices of Robert Boyle. He showed by replication
that alchemical recipes once thought to describe only symbolic or allegorical states of mind were
in fact elaborately coded chemical procedures with determinate effects. Principe thus
“materialized” what had been seen as a purely verbal or textual discourse, and, in doing so, made
the history of alchemy and early chemistry open to a cognitive analysis. In a similar (if less
dramatic) fashion, our analysis of Faraday’s specimens and our replications of his practices
restores coherence to what had appeared as almost aimless wanderings by a somewhat senile
scientist.
For Klein, the danger of excessive use of microstructural detail resided in the danger of
overlooking the social and cultural context of science. In a recent paper, Heintz (2002) argued that
the history of mathematical concepts can be subjected to cultural analysis, showing, basing the
argument on a consideration of the development of calculus in 17th and 18th century France.
Heintz showed that the social interactions among mathematicians over the controversial issue of
whether or not to admit infinitesimals into mathematics can be understood if the dynamics of the
social and cultural process by which they were debated, instantiated, and institutionalized is taken
into account. On Heintz’s view, even so abstract and “reasoned” a topic as the emergence of a new
definition of a mathematical object is subject to social processes that account for its origin and
20
acceptance. Note that Heintz thus has shown the necessity of a social analysis, but he does not
argue its sufficiency -- unlike Klein, for whom the social analysis is taken to be sufficient.
In a sense, then, my argument proceeds in the reverse direction from that of Klein and of Heintz;
a social and cultural analysis alone is necessary but it is not sufficient. In the case of Faraday, the
way to keep the microstructure from overwhelming the account is to keep in mind the need to
work in both directions – from the wider context to the artifact (as Heintz and Klein have done),
and from the artifact to the wider context (as we have done in our studies of Faraday’s slides).
Conclusions
In a recent review, Klahr & Simon (1999) argued that experimentation can shed light on the
general processes of hypothesis formation and change in science. Thus, Dunbar (1995) was able to
establish a coordinated picture of the role of analogy in science by comparing his observations of
molecular biology labs to observations made in his own laboratory on college student subjects
given a simulated scientific inference problem. His observations of the in vivo laboratory
interactions, together with his experimental results, suggest that the great majority of analogies
used in scientific discussion among collaborators consist of “local” analogies that relate a given
result, whether surprising or unexpected, to closely similar situations. In a similar pattern of
generalization from the lab to the real world, the heuristics used by some of the scientist-subjects
described in the “artificial universe” studies of Mynatt, Doherty, & Tweney (1978) were later
observed by Tweney (1985) in Faraday’s diaries as well as by Dunbar (1995) in the molecular
biology labs. In particular, a sophisticated “confirm early/disconfirm late” heuristic was observed
in all of these situations, suggesting that early in the discovery or evaluation process tentative ideas
need to be evaluated using primarily confirming evidence. Only when such ideas have achieved a
basis of such evidence is it effective to seek to disconfirm them deliberately.
Yet generalizing the results of lab studies is a challenging process in psychology, in part because
the context of the psychology experiment itself is known to have substantial effects on human
behavior -- it is not always clear that these can be “corrected for” in the generalization. Egon
Brunswik (1956) was especially alert to this problem, arguing that there was a lack of
21
“representative design” in the usual psychological experiment. In general, the infatuation of
psychology for specific kinds of statistical analysis has further hindered its ability to deal with such
issues (see Gigerenzer 1993; Krüger, et al. 1987) Even so, the recent emphasis on the practices of
science by cognitive historians of science (like Gooding 1990), and the rebirth of detailed
individual analyses within psychology, e.g., the analysis of navigation by Hutchins (1995), of
design practices by Norman (1993), and the “in vivo” observations of science by Dunbar (1999)
suggests that a new attitude is emerging. Indeed, answering Brunswik’s objection is easier today
than in his day – the emphasis on cognitive artifacts is, in essence, one part of the answer. Just as
replication itself can bridge the gap between history of science and cognitive science, so also does
the study of scientific artifacts and practices bridge the gap between laboratory studies of scientific
thinking and the historical study of scientific practices and artifacts. Gorman (1992) has used a
cognitive “mental models” framework to analyze the technoscientific creativity involved in
Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone. Gorman showed how the laboratory study of
scientific thinking can be used as the basis for a deep understanding of thinking in a domain
closely related to that of scientific discovery. Like Cavicchi (1997), his work has used the
replication of objects in the service of both understanding and as a tool in education.
There are three kinds of artifacts recently described within the context of ethnographic
approaches in cognitive science and the history of science. Cognitive Artifacts (as used by
Hutchins 1995 and Norman 1993, for example; see also Zhang & Norman 1994) come closest to
the kind of cultural artifacts typically focused upon by anthropologists. Rheinberger’s Epistemic
Things (1997) expanded the scope of such artifacts, showing how cognitive artifacts become
specialized within communities of scientific practitioners. For Rheinberger, cognitive artifacts
become epistemic things in the course of social and cognitive processes: “Experimental
representation ... may be taken to be equivalent to bringing epistemic things into existence. In their
transiently stable forms, they may act as embodiments of concepts” (p. 107). As a result, epistemic
things become, in a sense, “uninteresting” to the scientist, according to Rheinberger: “They remain
interesting only as tools, as technical objects for constructing novel research arrangements.”
On my analysis, a third category is necessary, that of Epistemic Artifacts (Tweney 2002). These
constitute a beginning stage in which invented (but not yet conventionalized) artifacts serve an
22
agentive role in the investigative process. In this third case, “surprise” is a necessary element of a
cognitive description, making replication of these artifacts essential for the understanding of how
science can attain novel descriptions and understandings. Note that, in effect, we answer the
Brunswikian objection about the “naturalness” of the laboratory study by making the laboratory
study itself the object of our interest. The replication of scientific procedures can address many of
the shortcomings of the experimental psychological approach to science, constituting, in fact, a
step toward a new “experimental ethnography.”
Consider three roles that replication has taken in historical studies of science: (1) The replication
of instruments in the service of understanding key experiments in the history of science. For
example, Heering (1994) replicated Coulomb’s torsion-balance experiment and showed that the
published report of that experiment must have been either incomplete or fabricated. (2) The
replication of a series of experiments, as a means of understanding the practices of scientific
investigation. Our replications of Faraday’s experiments fit this description, as do Cavicchi’s
(2003) replications of some of Faraday’s experiments on electricity and magnetism. (3) Finally,
replication of observation and experiment is a way to understand the emergence of theory. Thus,
Gooding (1990) used replication to detail the steps by which Faraday progressed from “vague
construal” to a coherent portrayal of the seemingly chaotic movements of a magnetized needle
near a current-carrying wire. And our replications of Faraday’s gold research shows a similar
struggle (largely unsuccessful, in this case).
Our work showed that Faraday’s research was not a “merely empirical” exploration of puzzling
phenomena, nor was it a blind “stumbling around.” It was instead a theoretically driven
exploration of the nature of light and matter, but one in which his cognitive “discourse” with
nature depended upon his constructed specimens. Thought went on in close proximity to the
specimens, to their appearance, their tactile properties, their relation to each other and to other
kinds of artifacts. They are epistemic artifacts precisely because they are agentive entities that are
integral to the thinking process. We cannot imagine Faraday reaching his conclusions without
them, and, similarly, we would not have been able to imagine our final narrative account of
Faraday’s research had we not carried out these replications.
23
The full understanding of scientific practices suggested by these considerations greatly expands
previous attempts to understand science as a reflection of something that occurs “merely” in the
head of the scientist. In their absence, even a laboratory diary is a text that can hide its origins in
thought and action, a text that appears “finished” rather than alive with the dynamics of a cognitive
system at work. In this sense, the image of science -- replete with bubbling flasks, sparking coils,
and the active and passionate participation of the scientist -- is more right than we might have
imagined. The image, like the reality, is alive and dynamic, both cognitive and cultural to its
deepest roots.
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