Abstract
Graphs and graphing are quintessential images in and of science and scientific knowledge. However, as our research has shown, they constitute both an ideology—nature as understandable in terms of variables—and a representation of scientists as logical inquirers. However, when highly successful scientists are asked to interpret graphs in introductory textbooks of their own field, they often fail to provide the standard correct answers students in first-year university courses are expected to provide. That is, the science graphs and graphing practices that textbooks use to depict science processes and products do and require very different forms of knowledge than the ones that make good (successful) scientists. On the other hand, when they talk about graphs from their own or related work, the same scientists who fail to provide standard answers on textbook graphs exhibit the very knowledge and skills that lead to their successful research careers. Graphs in textbooks and the skills they require, therefore, contribute to the epic image of science rather than to science as practiced.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Lacan (1966) deconstructs the system developed by Saussure using the tools of the very system for doing so. Much of the philosophical literature denoted by the adjective “deconstructionist” took up this task (e.g., Derrida 1972). It is a mirror view of the world that has also been critiqued in philosophy (e.g., Rorty 1979).
- 3.
Derrida (1996) insists on the inherently social nature of all language: “We never speak but one language – and it exists asymmetrically, since it returns to the other, always for the other, from the other, kept by the other. Having come from the other, remaining with the other, returning to the other” (p. 70). It is therefore not surprising that scholars suggest reading to be a social process known through its achievement in the individual act of reading (Livingston 1995; Roth 2010a).
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There are also articulated and nonarticulated nonconstituents (Barwise 1988), which we leave out because they are not central to the present discussion.
- 5.
This issue was raised by some of the scientists who are used to situations where birthrates are calibrated in female, but death rates on entire (male + female) populations. As one theoretical ecologist pointed out, in the present case, it does not matter what the calibration is, for they all merely differ by a scaling factor.
- 6.
Washroom (toilet) doors marked “Gentlemen” and “Women” or that have the symbols of men (with pants) and women (skirt) precisely constitute such a re-inscription of language into the world, where, in the Western world, these have real effects of dividing streams of living beings with urgent needs into two, precisely men and women.
- 7.
Of course, these scientists did not have anything at stake in these graph-reading activities. Furthermore, to provide a situation where they could be as much at ease as possible without feeling like a “lab rat” (often mentioned early during our contacts with them), we refrained from pushing the respondents to provide at least some kind of answer.
- 8.
Reference is considered here not as an indexical relationship that a given signifier bears to formations outside of semiotic systems but rather as a relation that has cross-modal implications (e.g., Preziosi 1986).
- 9.
We use deconstruct in the way Derrida (e.g., 1981) proposed, not as destruction, but as a polysemic combination embodying Heidegger’s Abbau (taking apart an edifice) and Destruktion (dismantling).
- 10.
A microanalysis of this scientist’s interpretative work was provided in (Bowen et al. 1999).
- 11.
According to Eco (1984a), the “dynamic object,” the pulp of the material world, motivates signs. However, the material world cannot be rendered other than through the immediate object, that is, the content or interpretant of the sign. However, the form of the dynamic object is continuously mediated and changed through the formulations of immediate objects.
- 12.
- 13.
Because of this mediation, Eco (1984a) speaks of an “Immediate World,” which is always distinct from an inaccessible “Dynamic World” that provides the physical grounds of our existence, the world that we bodily inhabit.
- 14.
- 15.
We described such a process while studying the coevolution of signifying forms (scientific language, mathematical sign systems) and perception during high school students’ laboratory experiences (Roth 1996). As described above, it is during a phenomenological epoché that the entire process is inaugurated.
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van Eijck, M., Roth, WM. (2013). What Scientific Heroes Are (Not) Doing. In: Imagination of Science in Education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5392-1_2
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