Invention, Design, and Discovery: A Transdisciplinary Quest

As a student at Occidental, a small liberal arts college, I (Michael Gorman) recalled seeing a sign on one of my fellow-students’ doors asking how C. P. Snow, in his lecture on the two cultures, could equate ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics with ignorance of Shakespeare. ¹ This indignant student illustrated Snow’s point—she knew nothing about the second law, but was sure it was a sacrilege to put it on an equal footing with Shakespeare.

Snow himself admitted that it was dangerous to reduce a complex intellectual landscape to two cultures—in particular, he noted that social scientists felt they belonged to neither culture, and he enumerated important differences between “pure” scientists and engineers. Recently, Latour, an anthropologist who studies technoscience (his term), argued that a similar distinction between nature and society is a myth; ² the actual practice of scientists and inventors reveals them to be masters at creating networks that link natural principles and human beings into a seamless web. To recast this in Snow’s terms (and oversimplify a bit), the scientific culture is the one that believes in the preeminence of supra-human natural laws; the humanistic culture is the one that believes that natural laws are interpretive frameworks created by human beings. Latour argues that this us/them division among cultures must be transcended: “We are not exotic but ordinary. As a result, the others are not exotic, either. They are like us, they have never stopped being our brethren. Let us not add to the crime that of believing that we are radically different to all the others” (127). If Latour is right, when one looks closely at the fine-grained activities of those who create technoscientific systems, the clear demarcation between nature and society will disappear, thereby undermining the premises on which the two cultures’ distinction is founded.

I. An Interdisciplinary, Collaborative Approach to the Study of Invention

For the past five years, Gorman has collaborated with a historian of technology (W. Bernard Carlson) in this sort of detailed study. This collaboration arose out of a team-taught course: when Gorman listened to Carlson talk about inventors, Gorman realized that concepts from the cognitive psychology of science, his specialty, could contribute to an understanding of the invention process; furthermore, applying these concepts to a new domain would force changes in the theory and methods used by cognitive scientists.

Carlson and Gorman collaborated on a series of successful grant proposals to the History and Philosophy of Science program of the National Science Foundation. They compared three early telephone inventors, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Elisha Gray, because there were good historical records and these three had never been compared in detail. ³ Undergraduates played an important role in this research, particularly engineering students who helped analyze the technical aspects of sketches and artifacts, and several have coauthored papers. ⁴ Therefore, this is a genuinely multidisciplinary effort, combining cognitive science, history, and engineering.

Invention, design, and discovery are activities that are ideally suited to study by multidisciplinary teams. ⁵ There are perils to this sort of approach—such teams are difficult to assemble and maintain, especially given that academic departments tend to reward those who do scholarship within the mainstream of a particular discipline. To create a multidisciplinary team, one must begin by crafting a common language and set of tools. Once crafted, such tools can be used by others in future cases.

In their project on inventors, Gorman and Carlson hoped to establish that the best way to make generalizations about technoscientific creativity is to conduct detailed, fine-grained studies of the processes of inventors and scientists using tools that facilitate comparison with other cases, including studies of modern scientists and inventors. ⁶ In collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Gorman has created a hypertext map of Bell’s path to the telephone that can be accessed via the World Wide Web. ⁷

Much of this work on telephone inventors is described in detail elsewhere. ⁸ For our purposes here...