Abstract
Traditional dualist assumptions about how humans acquire and represent knowledge of the world support theories that deal in second-or third-order representations of their subject matter, such as images, diagrams, equations and theories. These accounts ignore the processes whereby such representations are achieved. I provide examples from the work of Michael Faraday which show that abstraction, or discerning patterns and structure in phenomenological chaos depends on the development observational techniques, which I characterize as cognitive technologies.. The examples also illustrate the importance of human agency to the process of making representations of the world which enable scientists to understand and think about it.
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Gooding, D.C. (2001). Experiment as an Instrument of Innovation: Experience and Embodied Thought. In: Beynon, M., Nehaniv, C.L., Dautenhahn, K. (eds) Cognitive Technology: Instruments of Mind. CT 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2117. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44617-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44617-6_13
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