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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.

Visualisation involves making and manipulating images that convey novel phenomena, ideas and meanings. It is central to the intellectual objectives of almost every area of science. It is therefore surprising that we still lack an understanding of how visual thinking works. Examples from different sciences illustrate how scientists interpret and explain phenomena by actively manipulating those patternlike features of the world that lend themselves to structural representation, and vice versa. The ability to move between two, three and four dimensions structures both imagination and analysis, enabling scientists to vary the complexity of each visualisation as its function changes during the process of discovery and communication. These findings suggest that there is a widely used visual method that relates human cognitive abilities to imaging practices in the sciences and the arts.

The sciences use a wide range of visual devices, practices, and imaging technologies. This diversity points to an important repertoire of visual methods that scientists use to adapt representations to meet the varied demands that their work places on cognitive processes. This paper identifies key features of the use of visualization in a range of scientific domains and considers the implications of this repertoire for understanding scientists as cognitive agents.

Traditional dualist assumptions about how humans acquire and represent knowledge of the world support theories that deal in second- or third-order representations of their subject matter, such as images, diagrams, equations and theories. These accounts ignore the processes whereby such representations are achieved. I provide examples from the work of Michael Faraday which show that abstraction, or discerning patterns and structure in phenomenological chaos depends on the development observational techniques, which I characterize as cognitive technologies. The examples also illustrate the importance of human agency to the process of making representations of the world which enable scientists to understand and think about it.

Faraday first encountered science in the books he bound as an apprentice. They introduced him to the fascinating world of natural phenomena and to the idea that these phenomena obey divinelyordained laws that we can comprehend. He therefore resolved to study science. What is so impressive is the strength of his resolve for during the next few years he thoroughly prepared himself for a career in science at a time when science offered few openings, particularly for somebody without inherited wealth or contacts. He commenced his studies by reading any scientific works he could find and by attending lectures at the City Philosophical Society. He also attended four of Sir Humphry Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution, with tickets donated by a customer at the bindery. Moreover, at the City Philosophical Society (see section 3.2) he met another young man, Benjamin Abbott, and they started a regular correspondence with the aim of self-improvement. We see from these letters how Faraday set about improving his mind, his letter-writing skills and his knowledge of chemistry. In the course of this correspondence he commented extensively on the lecturing styles of the lecturers he heard; this critical evaluation of others doubtless paved the way for his own polished performance in the lecture theatre.

In chapter two I showed how aspects of new phenomena are made accessible to experience and how their given-ness in experience is also constructed through a process of representing, or construing. I argued that observers’ agency is essential both to eliciting experiential possibilities and to rendering them as observerable features of nature. Rendering includes the invention of frameworks of activity. These and the outcomes of activity understood in terms of them, were represented by images such as Biot’s ‘circular contour’ and Davy’s ‘chords’. Making images is just as creative an activity when practiced by scientists as when practiced by artists. Faraday’s mnemonics may lack the aesthetic appeal of Leonardo’s sketches, yet they did a very similar job: they conveyed, through an image, aspects of experience that had been (or was being) made sense of.1

It is inevitable that language has, as Ian Hacking put it, mattered to philosophy.1 It is not inevitable that practices — especially extra-linguistic practices — have mattered so little. Philosophy has not yet addressed an issue that is central to any theory of the language of observation and therefore, to any theory of science: how do observers ascend from the world to talk, thought and argument about that world? The importance of practice is sometimes noticed by philosophers and historians of science.2 The more historically minded have persued it into the experimental coal-face where new experience is mined.3 One reason for neglect of observational practice is that scientists’ own accounts of experimental work support the disembodied view that philosophers tacitly endorse. Human agency is written out of these accounts; at best it appears in an appropriately deliberative and methodical role. This would seem to justify the philosophical practice of rendering observation in the passive form ‘X was observed in order to …’, as if observers have eyes, minds and theories but never hands in the matter. A second reason is that concepts and theories are found in texts: they are easy to write and talk about. The literary view of scientific concepts suits the linguistic turn in philosophy and conforms to wider cultural assumptions about the priority of head over hands. Yet many scientists spend most of their time solving problems of a different order, in a manner that is procedural and involves manipulations in the material world as well as the world of concepts.

To say that scientists can think through their apparatus or their fingers is not just a metaphor. Peirce’s observation is apt, yet Tyndall’s comment shows that his advice is not easily followed. Those “best trained in ordinary theoretical conceptions” found Faraday’s new view of electrostatics most difficult. They were also slow to adopt the changes in mensurative practice it implied. The new concept of electrostatic induction emerged from the investigation of electrical phenomena between 1833 and 1836. By 1836 induction was an heuristic principle rather than a possibility, but by November of 1837 when he published his first molecular theory of induction it was the first principle of a theory which would unify electrostatics, electrochemistry, electrodynamics and ordinary magnetism as well. His arguments introduced a new meaning for the term ‘induction’ into the vocabulary of natural philosophy.

Faraday is probably as well known as Newton, Darwin or Einstein and is probably a more popular scientist, yet he has never attracted as much scholarly attention as the other three. The number of new books published to coincide with his bicentenary year (Faraday was born in September 1791) is therefore small. Since Faraday has always been a favourite figure with popular biographers, one might have expected most of these books to be in that tradition. In fact the new books reflect a welcome diversity as to approach and selection of material. They range from short, accessible descriptions of his life, work and impact, to substantial discussions that address important issues about the nature of Faraday's science, if not of science in general. Several offer something new in the way of interpretation or source material. I shall begin with the more demanding books, which for some will also be the most rewarding ones, and move on to the more popular titles.

Epistemology has been socialised. Cognitive and social interactions between observers are now as important as their interventions into the course of nature. This contrasts with traditional views of how we get natural facts into our discourse about nature. These assumed the efficacy of individual observers’ causal interactions with the natural world, making their interactions with other observers irrelevant. Kant’s conclusion that empirical access depends also upon our concepts did not challenge the individualistic character of the epistemology of science. Observers’ agreement about their observations showed that each individual can have independent perceptual access to one and the same world.Historical and sociological studies of science show that social and procedural aspects of observation in the laboratory make an essential contribution to consensus about observations (see Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (1983) and Gooding (1985a).

We are used to thinking about Faraday as one of the greatest experimentalists who ever lived. The success and influence of his experiments has eclipsed the processes of experimentation, so that we still know very little about the latter. In this essay I want to redress the balance by answering the question ‘What was Faraday so good at doing’? The simple answer is that Faraday was good at learning how to do experiments. The simplicity is deceptive. We tend to identify ‘experimentation’ with ‘demonstrations’, interpreting experiments through results whose significance we already know through theory. This confines experiment to the traditional roles of supporting or refuting theories against their rivals and of making phenomena and data self-evident. But these uses depend as much upon mastery of the arts of construction and presentation as they do upon actual control of natural processes. As experimentalists are well aware, experiments rarely work at first, or as expected. When they do work, it is often for the wrong reasons. The technical and observational processes that constitute an experiment are reworked until it can be performed by any competent practitioner. Why is this necessary?

The idea of places set apart for experiment was well established by the early nineteenth century. Then, as now, some types of experiment could be made only at the site of special equipment, while others could be made only in unusually large spaces.1 Still others, such as the mapping of geomagnetic phenomena or testing the effectiveness of a vaccine, could not be made within the confines of a building at all.2 The legitimacy of reducing the scale of natural phenomena to get them inside the laboratory and of reproducing them by artificial means was still contested during the last century.3 None the less, natural science — already associated with ‘the laboratory’ — became increasingly identified with it during the nineteenth century. The importance of laboratory work to the development of science, to deciding technical issues in legal proceedings, to industry and to national security was widely accepted. The nation needed science and scientists needed places to conduct experiments.4 A book about such places would not be complete without an account of experimentation in them. This chapter addresses the recovery of experimental activity rather than the social, epistemological, architectural or other characteristics of the space in which it took place. My examples are a public trial by John Herschel in the lecture theatre of the London Institution in 1823 and some private, exploratory work done by Faraday in the basement laboratory in which he assisted Humphry Davy and Thomas Brande at the Royal Institution in 1821.