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Toward a Dynamic Theory of Graphing

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Book cover Uncertainty and Graphing in Discovery Work

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Abstract

Graphs and graphing are constitutive of the sciences. Although there are an increasing number of studies on graphing, few of these studies focus on graphs and graphing in the discovery sciences, where uncertainty is one of the core characteristics. The discovery sciences allow us to revisit existing psychological theories, which tend to theorize graphing as a mental skill and graphs as external representation. Graphing is bound up with the scientific inquiry as a whole and, therefore, cannot be understood independently of it when we take an cultural-historical activity theoretic stance. This theory was created to take into account the continuously changing nature of human activities. I articulate some categories that reflect this flow. If activity and everything is theorized to be in flow, this has consequences for theorizing everything else as well: graphs, tools, or subjects of activity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “At work” should be understood in both of the ways that this expression allows to be heard, that is, at work in the scientific laboratory and graphing doing its part in the overall work of doing scientific research.

  2. 2.

    The name of the model is suggestive of processes, whereby the world comes to be imaged on the retina and in the brain as if these were operating like a camera. Such a view is inconsistent with the fact that all perception involves efferent and afferent dimensions and cannot be understood as a simple, mirror- or camera-like process.

  3. 3.

    Anaerobic organisms do not need oxygen for growth; they may in fact die in the presence of oxygen.

  4. 4.

    There are 50 articles when a Boolean search is conducted in the entire Education and Educational Research database using “open inquiry ” and “science” as the search terms.

  5. 5.

    The noun culture and adjective cultural tend to be used indiscriminately to very different phenomena. Thus, there is talk about Western culture even though cultural practices even with respect to academia are very different in typically countries such as Canada, France, and Germany.

  6. 6.

    In cultural-historical activity theory , as in dialectical logic generally, the term moment is used to denote a part of a whole that cannot be understood independently of this whole and all the other parts that can be identified. In this book, I employ the term only in this way.

  7. 7.

    The asterisk is used to mark the transitional nature of the phenomenon denoted.

  8. 8.

    I agree with Wittgenstein (2000) that we do not need to term meaning because it gets into our way of appropriately describing how language actually operates and how it is deployed.

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  1. University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    Wolff-Michael Roth

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Roth, WM. (2014). Toward a Dynamic Theory of Graphing. In: Uncertainty and Graphing in Discovery Work. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7009-6_1

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