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Visual Cognition: Where Cognition and Culture Meet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

David C. Gooding
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Abstract

Case studies of diverse scientific fields show how scientists use a range of resources to generate new interpretative models and to establish their plausibility as explanations of a domain. They accomplish this by manipulating imagistic representations in particular ways. I show that scientists in different domains use the same basic transformations. Common features of these transformations indicate that general cognitive strategies of interpretation, simplification, elaboration, and argumentation are at work. Social and historical studies of science emphasize the diversity of local contexts of practice. However, the existence of common strategies shows that this diversity masks an important repertoire of cognitive strategies. Scientists use this repertoire to adapt their representations to meet the cognitive demands of different contexts of practice. This paper considers the implications of this finding for the notion of scientists as cognitive agents in distributed knowledge-producing systems.

Type
Cognitive Studies of Science: Vision, Models, and Agency in Scientific Cognition
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 73 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers. Edited by Miriam Solomon , December 2006 , pp. 688 - 698
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

This work has been supported by grants from the Royal Society, London, and by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Many thanks to Mike Gorman, Frank James, Chris Philippidis, Ciara Muldoon, and Ryan Tweney for stimulating discussion of this material.

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