Experimental Ethnography and the Epistemology of Historical Replication

1. Experimental Ethnography and the Epistemology of Historical Replication Ryan D. Tweney Department of Psychology J.P. Scott Center for Neuroscience, Mind, and Behavior Bowling Green State University tweney@bgnet.bgsu.edu Partial support from British Academy of Arts & Sciences, & NSF STS Award #0100112. Thanks to Frank A.J.L. James & the staff of the Royal Institution of Great Britain

2. “An ant, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The apparent complexity of its behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which it finds itself.” H.A. Simon, 1996/1969, Sciences of the Artificial, p. 52.

3. Lubbock (1881), Ants, Bees, and Wasps, p. 254

4. “Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.” H.A. Simon, 1996/1969, Sciences of the Artificial, p. 53.

5. A. Newell & H.A. Simon (1972), Human Problem Solving, p. 181

6. Edwin Hutchins (1995), Cognition in the Wild, p. 169: “Rather than watch a single ant for a few minutes, as psychologists are wont to do, let us be anthropologists and move in and watch a community of ants over weeks and months. … After months of watching … the environment is not the same. It is a cultural environment. Generations of ants have left their marks on the beach, and now a dumb ant has been made to appear smart through its simple interaction with the residua of the history of its ancestor’s actions.”

7. Psychology Afflicted with a Statistical “Epidemic” Kurt Danziger (1990), Constructing the Subject: Aggregating individual results in experimental and control groups creates artificial groups, “The collectivity … is one that is defined by laboratory practice rather than by social practice outside the laboratory” (p. 85). The result? Methodological Solipsism

8. Francis Galton (1877); Photograph, mounted on card (Galton Papers, UCL)

9. Galton’s Composite Photography was an attempt to reveal “typical” characteristics. • 16 Boston physicians, H.P. Bowditch (upper left), McClure’s Magazine, 1894

10. Henri Van Heurck, (1896), The Diatomaceae, Plate XXIII

11. An SEM diatom image (color courtesy Leila Hornick)

12. Ursula Klein ( 2003), Experiments, Models, and Paper Tools: Cultures of Organic Chemistry in the 19th century; Scientific thought is in fact an emergent from the efforts of multiple individuals in a social context, and that studies of individual pathways could only obscure the larger scale relationships. Such an emergentist view in effect excludes the relevance of cognitive approaches (as these are understood by cognitive scientists), in favor of a socially-grounded account of science. Nersessian (2004); “Sociocultural reductionism” Another kind of “Methodological Solipsism”

13. But Problems Remain; • Galison (1997) noted that experimental replications are notoriously more difficult than "replications" of the logical or mathematical derivation of an experiment's rationale. • Some physicists believed that simulation would be closer to derivations in this respect. • Simulation, however, like derivation, requires that all analysis be on a well-defined symbolic level. By contrast, experimental replications require an "eye-hand-mind" coordination that is not easily described or repeated.

14. Can we capture the “messiness” of practices? • Can we do justice to the symbolic level? • Can we integrate the two? • Does any of this help to understand how science works?

15. “Experimental Ethnography” An attempt to directly create, manipulate, and participate in the epistemic practices under examination. Apparatus: Coulomb’s Torsion Balance (Heering, 1994) Joule’s Calorimeter (Sibum, 1995) Practices: Faraday’s Electrical Rotations (Gooding, 1989) Boyle’s Alchemy (Principe, 1998)

16. Egon Brunswik (1956), Perception and the Representative Design of Psychological Experiments, p. 90.

17. Our replication of Brunswik (Athy, Delaney, Doherty, Friedrich, & Tweney, in preparation):

18. Nersessian (2004), “Integrating Scientific and Engineering Practices”: Flow loops in a BME lab referred to as “putting a thought into the bench top and seeing whether it works or not” (p. 46) I describe a similar case: • Michael Faraday spent nearly the entire year of 1856 working on the color of thin gold films. • Hundreds of his “bench top thoughts,” survive. • These are Epistemic Artifacts

19. Michael Faraday 1791-1867

20. Why Is Gold Interesting? Faraday mounted this large gold leaf on a plate, in order to use it in his lectures. It provides a nice way to see the alternate colors of gold in transmitted and reflected light!

22. The slides are carefully numbered and indexed, and keyed to the Diary record

23. The Specimens • Most of Faraday’s specimens are thin transparent metallic films mounted on ordinary 1” x 3” microscope slides. • All are numbered and the numbers are keyed to the Diary entry describing the slide and its use. • This is slide No. 42, a thin gold film, in reflected light.

24. Faraday’s Diary, 2 April, 1856: 14625. Films of Gold by Phosphorus. The transmitted light is almost always blue violet, not green. It was so with two superposed films—with three, No. 41 — with four, No. 42—with thirteen films, No. 51- the colour remains the same when the intensity is graduated. Many of these, as No. 42, resemble the colour of pale gold nearly.

25. Faraday’s Diary, 2 April, 1856: 14625. Films of Gold by Phosphorus. The transmitted light is almost always blue violet, not green. It was so with two superposed films—with three, No. 41 — with four, No. 42— with thirteen films, No. 51- the colour remains the same when the intensity is graduated. Many of these, as No. 42, resemble the colour of pale gold nearly.

26. Magnification makes the point clear

28. At 60x:

29. Replicating the Chemical Films • Faraday made his thinnest films using the reduction of gold chloride by phosphorous. • The technique was developed by his friend Warren De La Rue. • With help from Lawrence Principe (Johns Hopkins), we’ve replicated the technique.

31. Phosphorus (P) and Carbon Disulfide (CS2) P dissolved in CS2

32. Gold dissolved in Aqua Regia (A mixture of hydrochloric acid, HCl, and nitric acid, HNO3):

33. The gold chloride is on the BOTTOM of the Petri dish, and is placed over the watch glass with the Phosphorous Solution:

34. After 10 Minutes:

35. The Films are “floated” off the Petri Dish:

37. They can then be “lifted” with a slide:

39. And Dried ...

40. Ours (right) looks like Faraday’s

41. Two of our “Replicants”

42. Meanwhile, “A very fine red fluid is obtained …. The mere washing” [Michael Faraday, 6 Feby. 1856]

43. Faraday noticed the “ruby fluid” and wondered about it -- was it caused by gold? If not, what could have caused it? • Within days, Faraday noted that it did not settle (unlike a precipitate). But it could not be a solution -- he soon speculated on its particulate nature. • This event was later recognized as the discovery of metallic colloids

44. We saved ours into a jar, and noticed that it darkened continuously over the next few days, while changing to a violet color. • Faraday noticed similar instabilities. • He soon explored its properties in light more thoroughly

45. Passing a beam of sunlight through the fluids, he noticed “opalescent” reflec- tion (2 April, 1856) • Now known as the “Faraday-Tyndall Effect” • Tyndall later explained the blue of the sky by invoking similar scattering effects

46. Faraday’s Colloids • Faraday’s discovery of gold colloids is one of the major outcomes of the research. Only a few survive.

47. The Faraday-Tyndall Effect • The preceding image showed the liquids in ambient (“reflected”) light. • In “transmitted” light,Faraday noticed dispersion. • The left one turns out to be a solution, not a colloid.

48. Having seen part of what Faraday saw, we are in a position to account for his discovery of gold colloids. The discovery depended upon his “noticing” of the “ruby fluids”: 14321. A very fine red fluid is obtained by letting pieces of the evaporated phosphorus, with adhering Sulphuret of carbon, lie at the bottom of a pan containing a very weak solution of gold—the mere washing.

49. “If animal charcoal … be boiled in alcohol, and the latter, when cold, … [be] filtered, a minute quantity of solid matter passes with it in a state of such extreme division, as to remain for days and even weeks suspended in the fluid. ... When a ray of light is passed through this fluid, its course is shewn in the most beautiful manner by the illuminated solid particles, and nothing can equal the delicacy of the form and appearance of the cone of light, when the rays from a lens are thus made visible …” Faraday (1827), Chemical Manipulation (First Edition), p. 585. This entire section removed from the 2nd, 1830, edition!

50. What differed in 1856 from 1827? Many pathways converged on his 1856 research on “my old problem” (Faraday): • Continuous vs. Particulate Matter • Metals vs. Nonmetals • Light • Field Theory • Many Papers on Color in 1855 (Maxwell too!) These areDynamicandSynchronic (Long Duration)