Abstract
The sciences have been so successful in the course of recent human history because the (mathematical) representations they use articulate laws and relations independent of contextual particulars and contingencies of concrete situations. This allows verification anywhere and at any time, and, therefore, the objectivity of scientific phenomena. Decontextualization appears to come with a prize: There is evidence that scientists have difficulties interpreting graphs that have been abstracted from research contexts even if these graphs are integral part of undergraduate instruction in the scientists’ own discipline. In this chapter, I investigate the role of context in the understanding of data and graphs during scientific discovery work. I exhibit the effort scientists mobilize to reconstruct the context from which their data have been abstracted. Without recontextualization, scientists struggle making sense of the study results that emerge from their work. Scientists require familiarity with the settings from which the data derive and with the entire transformation process that produce graphical representations to be able to interpret the data.
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Notes
- 1.
Now referred to as Cartesian graphs simultaneously arose from the work of René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat, and were subsequently developed following the translation of Descartes’ La Géometrie into the scholarly Latin by the Dutch mathematician Frans van Schooten.
- 2.
In biology , such graphical models constitute a rather recent phenomenon developing especially during the twentieth century (Kingsland 1995).
- 3.
When research on graphs and graphing is conducted in schools, then cognitive deficiencies are mobilized for explaining why students fail to provide standard answers (e.g. Berg and Smith 1994).
- 4.
On a number of occasions, scientist members on our research team “re-wrote” the history of our project, when in conversations and email exchanges, they provided a posteriori explanations that differed what they and others had said initially. That is, the re-writing of history is endemic to science, just as Kuhn (1970) described it half a century ago.
- 5.
As pointed out in the introduction to Part B, the canon suggested that the porphyropsin levels (%A2) would drop from somewhere between 80–90 % down to around 5–10 % similar to the graph in Fig. 5.2. Thus, if the retina of coho has 30 % porphyropsin, the fishes are closer to what was thought to be the saltwater composition than to the freshwater composition.
- 6.
In other words, signs embody an inner contradiction . They do so because to stand in for something else, that is, to make something else present that currently is absent, signs have to efface themselves. When we stare at a graph or wonder about some sound or ink trace for which there is good reason to consider it as a word, then the sign, the sound or ink trace, is considered in its own right and no longer provides us with transparent access to that other thing that it is supposed to help us make present.
- 7.
In this regard, Bourdieu (1997) writes that “what is comprehended in the world is a body for which there is a world, which is included in the world but according to a mode of inclusion that is irreducible to a simple material and spatial inclusion” (p. 162).
- 8.
Life history theory suggests that the events in the life of an organism are of a temporal nature such that it reproduces the largest number of offspring. “Strategies” are those behaviors that are thought to maximize offspring and offspring survival.
- 9.
“Age class” refers to fish born in different years. Thus, in any river, there may be young coho salmon in their first year (referred to as “zero plus [0+]” a specified number of months) or in their second year (one plus [1+] some specified number of months).
- 10.
During my ethnographic research in the hatchery, I observed several such practices. For example, by increasing and decreasing the water temperature of the developing fishes immediately prior to or following hatching, fish culturists change the thickness of the growth rings observable in the otoliths (ear bones). Each hatchery has a specific sequence giving rise to a specific pattern that some of the personnel extracted from the ear bones of dead adults that had returned to the hatchery and surrounding rivers. The second practice of marking salmon involves the injection of a coded wire tag into the “nose” of the fishes. When adults are caught or found dead, a metal detector will indicate the presence of such a tag, which, once removed from the carcass, will reveal the origin of the specimen.
- 11.
Some hatchery workers conduct experiments to find out whether different release times yield higher return rates. Thus, for example, super smolts are fishes retained for up to an extra year prior to release into the rivers and the beginning of the ocean migration.
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Roth, WM. (2014). Undoing Decontextualization. In: Uncertainty and Graphing in Discovery Work. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7009-6_5
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