Cognitive Process and Social Practice: The Case of Experimental Macroscopic Physics

Abstract

During the last twenty-five years, much disagreement has arisen over the primacy of social factors and epistemological/cognitive factors in determining scientists’ descriptions of the physical world. The present study seeks to contribute to the understanding of the cognitive processes involved in conducting research in the exact sciences, and of the relations occurring between such processes and social practices. This analysis will suggest that within networks of actions comprising research work, there exist nodes where cerebral and social events merge and function symbiotically. Here, the issue of social hegemony versus epistemological determinism pales. The essential force acting on social/epistemological nodes is their historical and contemporary efficiency in providing physical description that withstand measured skepticism toward the immediate research that generates them, and that prove consistent with most general extant descriptions of physical objects and their interactions.