Making curves

Abstract

We saw in chapter 2 that practical activity is as important as observers’ intellectual activity in constructing new experience. In chapter 3 I argued against the privileged status of private experience and that what we take to be an individual’s experience owes a great deal both to what that individual does and to what other people do. Experience confined to disembodied minds has no significance for science. A theory of the construction of scientific language must recognize embodiment as well as the permeability of laboratory walls.¹ Successful experimentalists move easily between the laboratory and the world, drawing elements of the ‘outside’ world into the laboratory and disseminating them as properly constituted scientific phenomena. Analogy features prominently in this process. One of the main images of electromagnetic field theory — curves of force — emerged from activities, many of which would not be associated with the ‘context of discovery’ as this is usually understood. In this chapter I consider some places in which the language of electromagnetism was fashioned. This includes many more contexts of activity than the familiar, epistemologically privileged one, the laboratory.² The development of field theory was shaped by work done in places such as workshops, arsenals, lecture theatres, and demonstration rooms, and also by ideas and images expressed in the pages of journals, an encyclopaedia, textbooks and manuscripts.³

Using any word — whether the word be “good”, or “conscious”, or “red”, or “magnetic” — involves one in a history, a tradition of observation, generalization, practice and theory.

H. Putnam