I’m unsure if that’s what you meant, but your comment has made me realize that I didn’t neatly separate the emergence of a new mechanism (pseudo or not) from the perpetuation of an existing one. The whole post weaves back and forth between the two.
For the emergence of a new mechanism, this raises a really interesting question: where does it come from. The examples I mentioned, and more that come to mind, clearly point to a focus on some data, some phenomenological compression as a starting point (Galileo, Kepler, and other’s observations and laws for Newton, say).
But then it also feels like the metaphor being used is never (at least I can’t conjure up an instance) completely created out of nothing. People pull it out of existing technology (maybe clockwork for Newton? definitely some example in the quote from The Idea of the Brain at the beginning of the post), out of existing science (say the use of the concept of field by Bourdieu in sociology from Physics) out of stories (how historical linguistics and Indo-European linguistics were bootstrapped with an analogy to Babel), out of elements of their daily life and culture (as an example, one of my friend has a strong economics background, and so they always tend towards economic explanations; I have a strong theoretical computer science background, and so I always tend towards computational explanations...)
On the other hand, I know of at least one example where the intensity of the pattern gave life to a whole new concept, or at least something that was hardly tied with existing scientific or technological knowledge at the time: Faraday’s discovery of lines of forces, which prefigures the concept of field in physics.
To go deeper into this (which I haven’t done), I would maybe look at the following books:
I will definitely be checking out those books, thanks, and your response clarified the intent a lot for me.
As for where new metaphors/mechanisms come from, and whether they’re ever created out of nothing, I think that that is very very rare, probably even rarer than it seems. I have half-joked with many people that at some level there are only a few fundamental thoughts humans are capable of having, and the rest is composition (yes, this is metaphorically coming from the idea of computers with small instruction sets). But more seriously, I think it’s mostly metaphors built on other metaphors, all the way down.
I have no idea how Faraday actually came up with the idea of force lines, but it looks like that happened a couple decades after the first known use of isotherms, and a few more decades after the first known use of contour lines, with some similar examples dating back to the 1500s. The early examples I can quickly find were mostly about isobaths, mapping the depth of water for navigation starting in the Age of Exploration. Plus, there’s at least one use of isogons, lines of equal magnetic inclination, also for navigation. AFAICT Faraday added the idea of direction to such lines, long before anyone else formalized the idea of vectors. But I can still convince myself, if I want, that it is a metaphor building on a previous well-known metaphor.
If I had to guess a metaphor for Newton, yes I think clockwork is part of it, but mathematically I’d say it’s partly that the laws of nature are written in the language of geometry. Not just the laws of motion, but also ray optics.
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:
I’m unsure if that’s what you meant, but your comment has made me realize that I didn’t neatly separate the emergence of a new mechanism (pseudo or not) from the perpetuation of an existing one. The whole post weaves back and forth between the two.
For the emergence of a new mechanism, this raises a really interesting question: where does it come from. The examples I mentioned, and more that come to mind, clearly point to a focus on some data, some phenomenological compression as a starting point (Galileo, Kepler, and other’s observations and laws for Newton, say).
But then it also feels like the metaphor being used is never (at least I can’t conjure up an instance) completely created out of nothing. People pull it out of existing technology (maybe clockwork for Newton? definitely some example in the quote from The Idea of the Brain at the beginning of the post), out of existing science (say the use of the concept of field by Bourdieu in sociology from Physics) out of stories (how historical linguistics and Indo-European linguistics were bootstrapped with an analogy to Babel), out of elements of their daily life and culture (as an example, one of my friend has a strong economics background, and so they always tend towards economic explanations; I have a strong theoretical computer science background, and so I always tend towards computational explanations...)
On the other hand, I know of at least one example where the intensity of the pattern gave life to a whole new concept, or at least something that was hardly tied with existing scientific or technological knowledge at the time: Faraday’s discovery of lines of forces, which prefigures the concept of field in physics.
To go deeper into this (which I haven’t done), I would maybe look at the following books:
The work of Nancy Nersessian in general
Forces and Fields by Mary B. Hesse
A lot of intellectual histories, especially of concepts that have proven successful.
I will definitely be checking out those books, thanks, and your response clarified the intent a lot for me.
As for where new metaphors/mechanisms come from, and whether they’re ever created out of nothing, I think that that is very very rare, probably even rarer than it seems. I have half-joked with many people that at some level there are only a few fundamental thoughts humans are capable of having, and the rest is composition (yes, this is metaphorically coming from the idea of computers with small instruction sets). But more seriously, I think it’s mostly metaphors built on other metaphors, all the way down.
I have no idea how Faraday actually came up with the idea of force lines, but it looks like that happened a couple decades after the first known use of isotherms, and a few more decades after the first known use of contour lines, with some similar examples dating back to the 1500s. The early examples I can quickly find were mostly about isobaths, mapping the depth of water for navigation starting in the Age of Exploration. Plus, there’s at least one use of isogons, lines of equal magnetic inclination, also for navigation. AFAICT Faraday added the idea of direction to such lines, long before anyone else formalized the idea of vectors. But I can still convince myself, if I want, that it is a metaphor building on a previous well-known metaphor.
If I had to guess a metaphor for Newton, yes I think clockwork is part of it, but mathematically I’d say it’s partly that the laws of nature are written in the language of geometry. Not just the laws of motion, but also ray optics.
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)