I definitely agree with you that there is something like a set of primitives or instructions (as you said, another metaphor) that used everywhere by humans. We’re not made to do advanced maths, create life-like 2D animation, cure diseases. So we’re clearly retargeting processes that were meant for much more prosaic tasks.
The point reminds me of this great quote from Physics Avoidance, a book I’m taking a lot of inspiration for my model of methodology: (p.32)
An unavoidable consequence of our restricted reasoning capacities is that we are forever condemned to wobble between seasons of brash inferential extension and epochs of qualified retrenchment later on. These represent intellectual cycles from which we can never escape: we remain wedded to a comparatively inflexible set of computational tools evolved for the sake of our primitive ancestors, rather than for experts in metallurgy. We can lift ourselves by our bootstraps through clever forms of strategic reassignment within our reasonings, but no absolutist guarantees on referential application can be obtained through these adaptive policies.
This is clearly the part of my model of methodology/epistemology that is the weakest. I feel there is something there, and that somehow the mix of computational constraints thinking from Theoretical CS and language design thinking from Programming Language Theory might make sense of it, but it’s the more mechanistic and hidden part of methodology, and I don’t feel I have enough phenomenological regularities to go in that direction.
Digging more into the Faraday question, this raises another subtlety: how do you differentiate the sort of “direct” reuse/adaptation of a cognitive primitive to a new task, from the analogy/metaphor to a previous use in the culture.
Your hypotheses focus more on the latter, considering where Faraday could have seen or heard geometric notions in context that would have inspired him for his lines of forces. My intuition is that this might instead be a case of the former, because Faraday was particularly graphic in his note taking and scientific practice, and so it is quite natural for him to convergently rediscover graphic/visual means of explanations.
Exploratory Experiments, my favoured treatment of Faraday’s work on Electromagnetism (though focused on electromagnetic induction rather than the lines of forces themselves), emphasizes this point. (p.235,241)
Both the denial of the fundamental character of attraction and repulsion, as well as the displacement of the poles of a bar magnet away from its ends, broke with traditional conceptions. It is important to highlight that these ideas were formed in the context not only of intense experimentation but also of successive attempts to find the most general graphical presentation of the experimental results—attempts that involved a highly versatile use of various visual perspectives on one and the same experimental subject.
[...]
In this development, Faraday’s engagement with graphical representations is again highly remarkable. His laboratory record contains no drawings of the experimental setups themselves, only the occasional sketch of the shape of the wire segment. Of much greater importance are his sketches of the experimental results. As before, these alternate easily between side views and views from above. The side views are less abstract. But even in these drawings Faraday had to add an imaginary post in the center of each described rotation, so as to distinguish front from back and thereby specify the direction of rotation. Again, his sketches served as working media in which he developed stepwise abstractions. They played a constitutive role in the evolution of his view.
(As a side note, Faraday’s work in Electromagnetism is probably one of the most intensely studied episode in the history of science. First because of its key importance for the development of electromagnetism, field theory, and most of moder physics. But also because Faraday provides near perfect historical material: he religiously kept a detailed experimental journal, fully published, and had no interest in covering up his trace and reasoning (as opposed to say Ampère).
So in addition to Exploratory Experiments mentioned above, I know of the following few books studying Faraday’s work:
Oh, that’s a great response!
I definitely agree with you that there is something like a set of primitives or instructions (as you said, another metaphor) that used everywhere by humans. We’re not made to do advanced maths, create life-like 2D animation, cure diseases. So we’re clearly retargeting processes that were meant for much more prosaic tasks.
The point reminds me of this great quote from Physics Avoidance, a book I’m taking a lot of inspiration for my model of methodology: (p.32)
This is clearly the part of my model of methodology/epistemology that is the weakest. I feel there is something there, and that somehow the mix of computational constraints thinking from Theoretical CS and language design thinking from Programming Language Theory might make sense of it, but it’s the more mechanistic and hidden part of methodology, and I don’t feel I have enough phenomenological regularities to go in that direction.
Digging more into the Faraday question, this raises another subtlety: how do you differentiate the sort of “direct” reuse/adaptation of a cognitive primitive to a new task, from the analogy/metaphor to a previous use in the culture.
Your hypotheses focus more on the latter, considering where Faraday could have seen or heard geometric notions in context that would have inspired him for his lines of forces. My intuition is that this might instead be a case of the former, because Faraday was particularly graphic in his note taking and scientific practice, and so it is quite natural for him to convergently rediscover graphic/visual means of explanations.
Exploratory Experiments, my favoured treatment of Faraday’s work on Electromagnetism (though focused on electromagnetic induction rather than the lines of forces themselves), emphasizes this point. (p.235,241)
(As a side note, Faraday’s work in Electromagnetism is probably one of the most intensely studied episode in the history of science. First because of its key importance for the development of electromagnetism, field theory, and most of moder physics. But also because Faraday provides near perfect historical material: he religiously kept a detailed experimental journal, fully published, and had no interest in covering up his trace and reasoning (as opposed to say Ampère).
So in addition to Exploratory Experiments mentioned above, I know of the following few books studying Faraday’s work:
Faraday To Einstein: Constructing Meaning In Scientific Theories
Experiment and the Making of Meaning)