Pickering’s “mangle” isn’t so much a theory, which would entail distinct predictions in some situations, as a change in perspective.
Think of it, to start with, as writing the same equations using a different notation. In math, this often has powerful effects—even though it shouldn’t, since you’re saying the same thing. But the new notation appeals to different intuitions, which may make it easier to think about the underlying situation.
The “mangle” term is a short word for “dialectic of resistance and accomodation”, where “dialectic” is itself a term of art among philosophers, for ideas which have some kind of generative quality. The concrete constituents of Pickering’s “mangle” are things like transposition, bridgding, filling, free moves and forced moves. These terms occur in an extended analysis of “thinking by analogy”. A good illustration is Pickering’s dissection of quaternions.
Very briefly, Hamilton starts out interested in extending complex numbers to three dimensions. This is a “free move”, and in a certain sense every analogy is a free move of that same type. You take something in one domain and “transpose” it to a different domain. In most cases this transposition isn’t direct and easy, for instance, Hamilton had to try several different ways of extending complex numbers before hitting on one that made sense.
You have to fiddle with your tentative first results quite a bit, in other words, and the “mangle” view is that this fiddling can be interpreted as your being acted on by reality, just as much as you’re acting on reality.
In this sense the mangle view predicts something: that in the history of ideas, whether scientific, artistic or political, we shouldn’t expect innovation to be direct and easy, but to be characterized by unexpected resistances and thinkers’ accomodation to such resistances.
One practical application for rationalists is to more readily distinguish truth from fiction in accounts of how a given idea was discovered. Actual accounts most often involve false starts, interventions by unlikely characters, etc. If the account is too glib, too much a just-so story where an idealized Scientist comes along and thanks to an act of Original Seeing discerns a truth which had eluded everyone before… it’s probably myth.
What does this predict?
Pickering’s “mangle” isn’t so much a theory, which would entail distinct predictions in some situations, as a change in perspective.
Think of it, to start with, as writing the same equations using a different notation. In math, this often has powerful effects—even though it shouldn’t, since you’re saying the same thing. But the new notation appeals to different intuitions, which may make it easier to think about the underlying situation.
The “mangle” term is a short word for “dialectic of resistance and accomodation”, where “dialectic” is itself a term of art among philosophers, for ideas which have some kind of generative quality. The concrete constituents of Pickering’s “mangle” are things like transposition, bridgding, filling, free moves and forced moves. These terms occur in an extended analysis of “thinking by analogy”. A good illustration is Pickering’s dissection of quaternions.
Very briefly, Hamilton starts out interested in extending complex numbers to three dimensions. This is a “free move”, and in a certain sense every analogy is a free move of that same type. You take something in one domain and “transpose” it to a different domain. In most cases this transposition isn’t direct and easy, for instance, Hamilton had to try several different ways of extending complex numbers before hitting on one that made sense.
You have to fiddle with your tentative first results quite a bit, in other words, and the “mangle” view is that this fiddling can be interpreted as your being acted on by reality, just as much as you’re acting on reality.
In this sense the mangle view predicts something: that in the history of ideas, whether scientific, artistic or political, we shouldn’t expect innovation to be direct and easy, but to be characterized by unexpected resistances and thinkers’ accomodation to such resistances.
One practical application for rationalists is to more readily distinguish truth from fiction in accounts of how a given idea was discovered. Actual accounts most often involve false starts, interventions by unlikely characters, etc. If the account is too glib, too much a just-so story where an idealized Scientist comes along and thanks to an act of Original Seeing discerns a truth which had eluded everyone before… it’s probably myth.