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Perceiving Other Planets: Bodily Experience, Interpretation, and the Mars Orbiter Camera

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Abstract

An emerging philosophical perspective called “postphenomenology,” which offers reflection upon human relations to technology, has the potential to increase our understanding of the functions performed by imaging technologies in scientific practice. In what follows, I review some relevant insights and expand them for use in the concrete analysis of practices of image interpretation in science. As a guiding example, I explore how these insights bear upon a contemporary debate in space science over images of the fossilized remains of a river delta on the surface of Mars. These considerations include an analysis of the ways that the objects of study are transformed by the mediating imaging technologies, such as the Mars Orbiter Camera.

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Notes

  1. My use of the term “transformation” to talk of the changes which an imaging technology renders to an object of study through the process of making it become visual comes from Don Ihde’s extensive analysis of transformations in his Expanding Hermeneutics (1998).

  2. As such, this essay contributes to the growing body of literature that uses insights from the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions of philosophy to describe and evaluate the use of imaging technologies in science, see e.g., Heelan (1983), Lynch (1985), Crease (1993), Rasmussen (1997), Kockelkoren (2007) and Ihde (in preparation). See also the special issue of Human Studies on “Representation in Scientific Practice” (Lynch and Woolgar 1988). The phenomenological discussion of scientific imaging is itself just a part of the larger conversation that includes researchers from philosophy of science, women’s studies, philosophy of technology, and science studies. Just a few of the representative works on this topic include Lynch and Woolgar (1990), Galison (1997), Jones and Galison (1998), Beaulieu (2001), Latour and Weibel (2002), Dumit (2004), Prasad (2005), Joyce (2006) and Engström and Selinger (forthcoming).

  3. For more in-depth summaries of “postphenomenology,” see Ihde’s introduction to this issue of Human Studies and also Ihde (1993, 2003), Verbeek (2005), Selinger (2006, forthcoming) and Rosenberger (forthcoming b).

  4. The examples I list here are instances of what Ihde (e.g., 1998, in preparation) has called “isomorphic images,” where the picture in some way resembles what is being explored. But the same structures of “multistability” and “hermeneutic strategies” which I review below apply as well to what Ihde calls “non-isomorphic images,” where the data produced by the mediating technology do not share any resemblance to the object of study (such as spectroscopy readings or a seismograph tape).

  5. Ihde’s analysis of “multistability” and “variations” occurs in his Experimental Phenomenology (1986).

  6. See Experimental Phenomenology for Ihde’s discussion of the “hermeneutic stories” that make possible different variations of multistability in the experience of perception (1986, p. 88). His program of “visual hermeneutics” is put forth in Expanding Hermeneutics (1998). For my advancement of the notion of “hermeneutic strategies” in the analysis of imaging technologies used in the field of neurobiology, see Rosenberger (forthcoming a, b).

  7. For Ihde’s foundational analysis of our experience of Necker cubes and other visual illusions, see Ihde (1986). For his analysis of the duck/rabbit illusion, see Ihde (2006) and Rosenberger (forthcoming a). In his expansion of the duck/rabbit illusion, Ihde suggests that the protrusions in the drawing that are commonly interpreted as either rabbit ears or a duck bill can also be interpreted as tentacles. In that case, the drawing can be reoriented to reveal a horizontally swimming squid, or a floating Martian with dangling tentacles.

  8. In this literature, the crater was first given the name “Holden NE,” since it sits northeast of a major crater named “Holden.” Recently, the crater was re-dubbed “Eberswalde,” named after a town in Germany by the International Astronomical Union. Both of these names, sometimes together, continue to be used in this literature.

  9. This MOC image mosaic, prepared by Malin Space Science Systems, is available in NASA’s Planetary Photojournal, http://www.photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/PIA04869. Figure 2 of this paper, which is a portion of Fig. 1, is also available at this website.

  10. An overview of the Mars Global Surveyor mission and technologies occurs in Malin et al. (1998), Albee et al. (2001) and Malin and Edgett (2001).

  11. An example of a 3-D Eberswalde image occurs in Pondreli et al. (2006).

  12. The observation that the delta’s extending features may once have been more extensive and have since eroded away was suggested by Jerolmack et al. (2004), challenged by Irwin III et al. (2005), and reviewed by the others.

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Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Sabrina Hom and Don Ihde for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, 213 Harriman Hall, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA

    Robert Rosenberger

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Correspondence to Robert Rosenberger.

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Rosenberger, R. Perceiving Other Planets: Bodily Experience, Interpretation, and the Mars Orbiter Camera. Hum Stud 31, 63–75 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9078-1

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