Mind in the World: Cognition and Practice in the Invention of the Telephone

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 583-624

  Gorman, Michael E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992806383     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631297027004002     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. W. Bernard Carlson and Michael E. Gorman, ‘Understanding Invention as a Cognitive Process: The Case of Thomas Edison and Early Motion Pictures, 1888–1891’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 20, No. 3 (August 1990), 387–430
2. Gorman and Carlson, ‘Interpreting Invention as a Cognitive Process: The Case of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and the Telephone’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 1990), 131–164.
3. Phillip N. Johnson-Laird, in his seminal work Mental Models (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 397, used the term ‘mental model’ to cover a wide range of cognitive phenomena
4. Maria F. Ippolito and Ryan D. Tweney, ‘The Inception of Insight’, in Robert J. Sternberg and Janet E. Davidson (eds), The Nature of Insight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 433–62, at 434.
5. Peter Slezak, ‘Scientific Discovery by Computer as an Empirical Refutation of the Strong Programme’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 19, No. 4 (November 1989), 563–600.
6. Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 386.
7. Reese Jenkins, ‘Elements of Style: Continuities in Edison's Thinking’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 424 (1984), 149–62, at 63.
8. See Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi, ‘Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 101 (1995), 44–99, at 92
9. W.B. Carlson and M.E. Gorman, ‘A Cognitive Framework to Understand Technological Creativity: Bell, Edison, and the Telephone’, in Robert J. Weber and David N. Perkins (eds), Inventive Minds: Creativity in Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 48–79
10. see also Weber and Perkins, ‘How to Invent Artifacts and Ideas’, New Ideas in Psychology, Vol. 7 (1989), 49–72.
11. Michael J. Mahoney, ‘Psychology of the Scientist: An Evaluative Review’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 9, No. 3 (August 1979), 349–375
12. Ryan D. Tweney, Michael E. Doherty and Clifford R. Mynatt (eds), On Scientific Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981)
13. Peter C. Wason, ‘On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 12 (1960), 129–140.
14. Ryan D. Tweney and Susan T. Chitwood, ‘Scientific Reasoning’, in Stephen Newstead and Jonathan St B.T. Evans (eds), Perspectives on Thinking and Reasoning (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 241–60, at 255.
15. Karl R. Popper, In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years (London: Routledge, 1992).
16. H.M. Collins, Artificial Experts (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 108.
17. See Deepak Kulkarni and Herbert A. Simon, ‘The Processes of Scientific Discovery: The Strategies of Experimentation’, Cognitive Science, Vol. 12 (1988), 139–75, for examples of the hierarchy of heuristics used by a program that simulates the discovery of the ornithine cycle.
18. Lucy A. Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Interaction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
19. Jeff Shrager and Pat Langley, Computational Models of Scientific Discovery and Theory Formation (San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1990), 15.
20. Donald A. Norman, Things that Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (New York: Addison Wesley, 1993), 146.
21. John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 29.
22. Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 362.
23. Edwin Hutchins, ‘How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds’, Cognitive Science, Vol. 19, No. 3 (July-September 1995), 265–88, at 279.
24. For a good review of these lawsuits, see Frederic L. Rhodes, Beginnings of Telephony (New York: Harper & Bros., 1929).
25. Lloyd Taylor, ‘The Untold Story of the Telephone’ (Washington, DC: National Museum of American History, unpublished manuscript, 1946).
26. The phrase ‘reverse salient’ is borrowed from Thomas P. Hughes, ‘The Evolution of Large Technological Systems’, in Wiebe E. Bijker, Hughes and Trevor J. Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), 51–82, esp. 73–76.
27. The following account of the Bell/Gray controversy is based on M.E. Gorman, Matthew M. Mehalik, W.B. Carlson and Michael Obion, ‘Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray and the Speaking Telegraph: A Cognitive Comparison’, History of Technology, Vol. 15 (1993), 1–56.
28. A.G. Bell, The Bell Telephone: Deposition of Alexander Graham Bell (Boston, MA: American Bell Telephone Co., 1908).
29. J. Bailie, The Wonders of Electricity (New York: Charles Scribner, 1872), 140–143.
30. See W.B. Carlson, ‘Entrepreneurship in the Early Development of the Telephone: How did William Orton and Gardiner Hubbard Conceptualize this New Technology?’, Business and Economic History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter 1994), 161–92, for more on Hubbard's background and role in the telegraph industry.
31. Elisha Gray, Experimental Researches in Electro-Harmonic Telegraphy and Telephony: 1867–1878, reprinted in George Shiers (ed.), The Telephone: An Historical Anthology (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 7–96, at 8.
32. The Telephone Suits: Bell Telephone Company Et Al. v. Peter A. Dowd, Part I: Pleadings and Evidence (Boston, MA: Alfred Judge & Son, Law Printers, 1880), 124–125.
33. J.E. Kingsbury, The Telephone and Telephone Exchanges: Their Invention and Development (London: Longmans, Green, 1915), 103.
34. A.G. Bell, ‘Experiments made by A. Graham Bell’, Vol. I: Bell Family Papers, Library of Congress, Box 238, 1876b.
35. I have deliberately avoided a discussion of the huge and complex literature on analogies; for a good recent overview, see Keith J. Holy oak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995).
36. Other sources include: John Clement, ‘Experts and Science Students: The Use of Analogies, Extreme Cases, and Physical Intuition’, in James F. Voss, David N. Perkins and Judith W. Segal (eds), Informal Reasoning and Education (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 345–362
37. David Edge, ‘Technological Metaphor and Social Control’, New Literary History, Vol. 6 (1974), 135–147
38. David Leary (ed.), Metaphors in the History of Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
39. John C. Marshall, ‘Minds, Machines and Metaphors’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 7, No. 4 (November 1977), 475–488.
40. Robert Friedel, Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 238.
41. Misha A. Mahowald and Rodney Douglas, ‘A Silicon Neuron’, Nature, Vol. 354 (19/26 December 1991), 515–518
42. Mahowald and Carver Mead, ‘The Silicon Retina’, Scientific American, Vol. 264 (May 1991), 76–82.
43. K. Anders Ericsson and Herbert A. Simon, Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984)
44. Michael E. Gorman, ‘Confirmation, Discontinuation and Invention: The Case of Alexander Graham Bell and the Telephone’, Thinking and Reasoning, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1995), 31–53.
45. David Gooding, ‘Mapping Experiment as a Learning Process: How the First Electromagnetic Motor was Invented’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 1990), 165–201
46. Ryan D. Tweney, ‘A Framework for the Cognitive Psychology of Science’, in Barry Gholson, William R. Shadish, Jr, Robert A. Neimeyer and Arthur C. Houts (eds), Psychology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 342–366.
47. Bernard S. Finn, ‘Alexander Graham Bell's Experiments with the Variable Resistance Transmitter’, Smithsonian Journal of History, Vol. 1 (Winter 1966), 1–16.
48. Gregory J. Feist, ‘A Structural Model of Scientific Eminence’, Psychological Science, Vol. 4, No. 6 (1993), 366–371.
49. Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1973), 178.
50. John R. Piatt, ‘Strong Inference’, Science, Vol. 146 (16 October 1964), 347–353
51. R.D. Tweney, M.E. Doherty, Winifred J. Worner, Daniel B. Pliske, Clifford R. Mynatt, Kimberley A. Gross and Daniel L. Arkkelin, ‘Strategies of Rule Discovery on an Inference Task’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 32 (1980), 109–113.
52. David Klahr and Kevin Dunbar, ‘Dual Space Search During Scientific Reasoning’, Cognitive Science, Vol. 12 (1988), 1–48.
53. Howard Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1981).
54. For more on the role of error in scientific reasoning, see M.E. Gorman, ‘Error and Scientific Reasoning: An Experimental Inquiry’, in Steve Fuller, Marc De Mey, Terry Shinn and Steve Woolgar (eds), The Cognitive Turn: Sociological and Psychological Perspectives on Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 41–70.
55. See W.B. Carlson and M.E. Gorman, ‘Thinking and Doing at Menlo Park: Edison's Development of the Telephone, 1876–1878’, in William Pretzer (ed.), Thomas Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 84–99
56. Ralph O. Meyer, Old Time Telephones: Technology, Restoration and Repair (New York: TAB Books, 1995).
57. Gary Bradshaw, ‘The Airplane and the Logic of Invention’, in Ronald N. Giere (ed.), Cognitive Models of Science, Vol. XV (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 239–250.
58. David A. Hounshell, ‘Bell and Gray: Contrasts in Style, Politics and Etiquette’, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 64 (1976), 1305–14.
59. David Klahr, ‘Cognitive Psychology and Scientific Discovery’ (unpublished paper presented to the Society for Social Studies of Science in Charlottesville,VA, 19–22 October 1995)
60. Deanna Kuhn, ‘Children and Adults as Intuitive Scientists’, Psychological Review, Vol. 96, No. 4 (1989), 674–689.
61. See, for example, two papers from that issue: David W. Lewis and William F. Trimble, ‘The Airmail Pickup System of All American Aviation: A Failed Innovation?’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 22, No. 2 (May 1992), 245–262
62. But Edison was not afraid to hire mathematicians like Francis Upton, and a bit later in his career he admitted that one of the mathematically minded members of his staff ‘knows far more about [electricity] than I do. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that I never did know anything about it’: Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modem America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 60.
63. Ronald Finke, Creative Imagery: Discoveries and Inventions in visualization (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990).
64. Michael E. Gorman, Larry G. Richards, William T. Scherer and Julia K. Kagiwada, ‘Teaching Invention and Design: Multi-Disciplinary Learning Modules’, The Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 84, No. 2 (1995), 175–186.
65. Robert E. Rosenwein and Gorman, ‘Heuristics, Hypotheses, and Social Influence: A New Approach to the Experimental Simulation of Social Epistemology’, Social Epistemology, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1995), 57–69
66. Some of the best work in this area has been done by Janet Kolodner: see her Case-Based Reasoning (San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1993).
67. Andrew Pickering, ‘The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 99, No. 3 (1993), 559–589.
68. Sal Restivo, ‘The Rejection of Transcendence, Immanence and Psycholo-gism’ (Presidential Address, Society for Social Studies of Science, Charlottesville, VA, 20 October 1995).