Abstract
Taking the visual appeal of the ‘bell curve’ as an example, this paper discusses in how far the availability of quantitative approaches (here: statistics) that comes along with representational standards immediately affects qualitative concepts of scientific reasoning (here: normality). Within the realm of this paper I shall focus on the relationship between normality, as defined by scientific enterprise, and normativity, that result out of the very processes of standardisation itself. Two hypotheses are guiding this analysis: (1) normality, as it is defined by the natural and the life sciences, must be regarded as an ontological, but epistemological important fiction and (2) standardised, canonical visualisations (such as the ‘bell curve’) impact on scientific thinking and reasoning to a significant degree. I restrict my analysis to the epistemological function of scientific representations of data: This means identifying key strategies of producing graphs and images in scientific practice. As a starting point, it is crucial to evaluate to what degree graphs and images could be seen as guiding scientific reasoning itself, for instance in attributing to them a certain epistemological function within a given field of research.
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Notes
This tendency has long been regarded as a problem that arises out of the notion ‘normal’/‘normality’ itself. Accordingly, the inherent normativity of scientific strategies of comparing individual data to standardised statistical values led the scientific community to introduce a new terminology in the 1980s, e.g. ‘reference’, ‘reference level’ (Büttner 1997).
Nor will I elaborate on how biological processes (cf. life itself) are to be understood as bearing certain normative values. See Canguilhem (2006/1966) and also (2009/1965, 167): ‘La santé est précisément, et principalement chez l’homme, une certaine latitude, un certain jeu des normes et du comportement. Ce qui la caractérise c’est la capacité de tolérer des variations des normes auxquelles seule la stabilité, apparemment garantie et en fait toujours nécessairement précaire, des situations et du milieu confère une valeur trompeuse de normal definitive. L’homme n’est vraiment sain que lorsqu’il est capable de plusieurs normes, lorsqu’il est plus que normal. La mesure de la santé c’est le luxe de pouvoir tomber malade et de s’en relever’.
For an overview of the heuristic role and the epistemic power of representations and visualisations in biological research, i.e. see the editorial by Taylor and Blum (1991) within the realm of a themed issue of Biology and Philosophy on various forms of pictorial representation in biology. If one acknowledges the historicity of scientific standards, e.g. in anatomy or anthropology (see e.g. Hanke 2006), it becomes apparent that processes of standardisation—given that they go along with representational formats—are also driven by changing societal and scientific perceptions e.g. on aesthetics and style.
It is to be noticed, that scientists often tend to refer to supposedly aesthetic criteria if they are facing a ‘blind spot’ (= epistemische Leerstelle) in the process of evaluating scientific data from an epistemological point of view. This issue, of course, deserves further, more extensive treatment, which transcends the focus of this paper.
With in the realm of this paper I shall not elaborate on the technicity of representational formats and standards in science especially. Of course, current strategies of setting representational standards are mainly influenced by highly technified environments, e.g. measuring devices. Still, as this paper shows, the raise of representational standards in general and of canonical visualisations in particular is not restricted to the use of devices or the like (see also my conclusion).
Valerie Burri and Joseph Dumit have discussed the persuasive appeal of scientific visualisations around three issues, namely their production, their engagement, and their deployment (Burri and Dumit 2008). Within the realm of this paper, I do not address issues that relate to the deployment of scientific visualisations, for example, in how far images could be regarded as shaping social discourse. This is discussed by Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee within the realm of their book ‘The DNA mystique: the gene as a cultural icon’ (1995).
The Visual Human Project provides two 3D models of the human body. The project was conceived and realised by the US-National Library of Medicine. For the ‘Atlas of the Visible Human Male’, see Spitzer and Whitlock (1998), for further discussions about the generation of new anatomical norms on the basis of the VHP, see Waldby (2000).
Moreover, measuring devices, parameters of testing as much as scientific norms of reference themselves are subject to scientific flux that is shaped by technological progress and changes in the theoretical framework of a given field of research. Key questions that guide discussions on scientific standards are, for example, which measuring device or which parameter of testing informs us reliably about a phenomenon of interest.
To come up with the problem of defining what has to be regarded as a pathological state at all, see Kurt Goldstein’s conclusion in ‘Der Aufbau des Organismus’ from 1934 (Goldstein 1963/1934, 266): ‘One thing is certain: every illness represents an anomalous state, but not every anomalous state is a pathological one’. [Translation by L. Huber; see also the citation in German: „Es ist wohl sicher: jedes Kranksein ist eine Anomalie, aber nicht jede Anomalie ist eine Krankheit“.]
We would need to take the fact into account that in the English language ‘standardisation’ and ‘normalisation’ are commonly used synonymously. This usage suggests a specific relationship between processes of standardisation on the one side and processes of normalisation on the other. Obviously, here normalisation is to be understood in the first place as an essential strategy of standardisation in the sciences. Concurrently, the understanding of standardisation is shaped via scientific accounts of normalisation, namely the production of standardised reference (at least to a certain degree, as I like to suggest). In the French language one is faced with the conceptual vicinity of normalisation to processes of industrial standardisation. George Canguilhem (1966), and later Michel Foucault (cf. 1975) have developed their own readings of processes of normalisation that, of course, are dealing with this vicinity to a significant degree.
Given the scope of this paper I shall restrict my analysis to processes of (general) normalisation to scientific practices. Still, they are of course not restricted to this domain, but part of social life in general. As such, general normalisation plays an essential role in fostering the re-evaluation of individual or societal perceptions of things, habits and the like that once have been conceptualised as alien, exceptional or abnormal.
For further information see Levy et al. (2007)—and especially (p. 2114): ‘The individual whose genome is described in this report is J. Graig Venter, who was born on 14 October 1946, a self-identified Caucasian male. The DNA donor gave full consent to provide his DNA for study via sequencing methods and to disclose publicly his genomic data in totality.’
The Montréal Neurological Institute which is heavily engaged in the generation and validation of reference brains in the neurosciences reports of the case of a MNI laboratory member, Colin Holmes, who was scanned 27 times to create a very high detail MRI dataset of the brain (‘colin27’). For further information see Collins et al. (1998).
Also, the question arises on what grounds one decides what have to be regarded as normal at all: Goldstein (1934), for instance, would argue for an ‘individualised’ notion of normality (cf. his notion of ‘individuelle Normkonstanten’), statistical approaches (see above) would call for criteria such as representativeness or probability.
In general, defining norms of reference (normative or standardisation samples) is a necessary prerequisite of validating a given psychological testing—e.g. see Susana Urbina (2004, 2f.): ‘The collective performance of the standardization group or groups, both in terms of averages and variability, is tabulated and becomes the standard against which the performance of other individuals who take the test after it is standardized will be gauged’.
The generation of probability maps is mainly fostered by the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM), situated at the University of California, Los Angeles, see e.g. Mazziotta et al. (2001) and the official homepage of the Laboratory for Neuroimaging (LONI), http://www.loni.ucla.edu (10.02.2011).
Translation by L. Huber; see also the citation in German (Pörksen 1997, 27): ‘‚Visiotypie’ (…) ist der Hang zur Veranschaulichung. Ich gebrauche das Wort ‚Visiotyp’ parallel zu ‚Stereotyp’ und meine zunächst diesen allgemein zu beobachtenden, durch die Entwicklung der Informationstechnik begünstigten Typus sich rasch standardisierender Visualisierung. Es ist eine durchgesetzte Form der Wahrnehmung und Darstellung, des Zugriffs auf ‚Wirklichkeit’’.
See also Waldenfels (2008, 9): ‘There is a specific way of coping with foreign issues that is called normalisation. In adjusting itself to a normal order things are loosing their exceptional character’. [Translation by L. Huber; see also the citation in German: „Es gibt eine besondere Weise, mit dem Fremden fertig zu werden, die sich Normalisierung nennt. Was sich dem normalen Gang der Dinge einordnet, verliert den Charakter des Außergewöhnlichen.“].
See his historical study ‘The Mismeasure of man’ (first edition 1981; second revised and expanded edition 1996).
Besides, processes of normalisation are not only feeding the institutionalisation of techniques and protocols on the one side and of scientific products on the other; processes of normalisation are also correlated with the ‘disappearance’ of the technicity of scientific data and their graphical or image-based shaping. Here, to normalise means to generate phenomena that no longer reveal their technological or instrumental preconditions. Cf. Gugerli and Orland (2002) and also Borck (2001).
Cf. Porter (1986) and Hacking (1990). With regard to representational standards and the impact of Quetelet in this process, see Funkhouser (1937, 299f.): ‘He began his use of the graphic method in his second statistical publication (…) with an explanation that the method was almost the same as that adopted by the physicists for expressing the variations of the thermometer, and he continued to make large use of it throughout his long series of investigations of social phenomena (…). In 1846 QUETELET represented the results of the urn schemata as a symmetrical histogram, then showed that the limiting curve was the ‘curve of possibility’ (normal curve) (…). It was to this work of QUETELET’s in 1846 that GALTON was indebted for his knowledge of the properties of the normal curve’.
An historical account of the introduction of various forms of graphical, diagrammatic and pictorial representations of statistical data gives Funkhouser (1937).
See Funkhouser (1937, 296): ‘In discussing the application of the law of probability to the merits or demerits of inoculation against smallpox, he [de Moivre; L. H.] draws serveral curves of mortality which, however, are strictly hypothetical and not based on actual data (…). S. F. LACROIX gives detailed instructions for drawing the curve of mortality in the first and second editions of his Traité élémentaire du calcul des probabilités (Paris, 1816, 1822) but does not actually draw the curve’. And furthermore (1937, 298): ‘BESSEL, ENCKE, LITTROW, LEGENDRE, CAUCHY, BRAVAIS, PLANA, GAUSS, none of these writers, although they knew the correct formulation of the law, seems to have drawn at any time the graph of it. The first published use of the curve that the writer has been able to find is that of AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN (1806-1871) (…) who made numerous drawings of the curve in his essay on probabilities in 1838’. For the mathematical expression of the law of distribution of errors, see also Pearson (1920; 1924) and Patel and Read (1996).
Krohn (1991, 188). Quite similar issues are reported by Royston about the motivation of A.F·W. Crome: ‘The proportions of the different sizes can however be more easily seen and grasped if they are brought before the eye in the form of a drawing, because the imagination is thus stimulated, than if these merely appeared in the form of numbers, especially when these consist of may digits’ (Crome 1785—cit. after Royston 1956, 242).
For a general discussion see Lynch (1995); for the history of representational standards in research based on spectroscopy, see Hentschel (2002, 2): ‘(…) new modes of visual representations do not emerge as isolated innovations but within the context of larger cultural packages in which they are securely wrapped. These packages include components of theory as well as of practice, as becomes readily clear once we look at–or better still, try to use–older systems of representation, such as an astrolab or a navicula’. For the historicity of ‘objective’ representational standards, see Galison (1998).
This issue is famously addressed in Lynch and Woolgar (1990). See also Nordmann (2006f.—cf. his ‘collapse of distance’, 5f.): ‘If our representational tools become so persuasive and if we become so immersed in a representation that we take it for the thing itself, the representation ceases to be a representation and we are no longer speaking about the world but are caught up in a self-referential system. Modern science and philosophy of science produced artful constructions of immediacy that maintain the aboutness-relation if only by clearly specifying the conditions that allow us to speak of ‘agreement’. In contrast, the collapse of distance is a hallmark of technoscience and amounts to vague and half-acknowledged epistemological confusion’.
Galton (1886, 494f.): Galton’s presidential address to the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland illustrates quite well that he regards the normal distribution of human traits as an autonomous statistical law brought to light by the very shape of the normal curve. For an introduction in the institutionalisation and popularisation of statistical thinking in general, see Hacking (1990).
Galton’s mechanical device exhibiting stochastic behavior is also called ‘Quincunx’ or ‘Galton bord’. For an introduction see Chernov and Dolgopyat (2009).
Obviously, this issue deserves further treatment: Questions that may guide future research on this topic are: Do we have to face major epistemic costs that arise out of this interlacement (e.g. see above: Gould 1995)? On what grounds could we evaluate these costs reliably? etc.
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Huber, L. Norming Normality: On Scientific Fictions and Canonical Visualisations. Medicine Studies 3, 41–52 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12376-011-0066-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12376-011-0066-4