TRANSFORMING NATURE

Ethics, Invention and Discovery

TRANSFORMING NATURE

Ethics, Invention and Discovery

Michael E. Gorman University 0/ Virginia

~.

" SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gonnan, Michael E., 1952 -Transfonning nature: ethics, invention and discovery / Michael E.

Gonnan. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4613-7589-0 ISBN 978-1-4615-5657-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-5657-2 1. Discoveries in science -- Social aspects. 2. Inventions -- Social

aspects. 3. Science -- Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. QI80.55.D57G67 1998 306.4'5--dc21 97-52148

elP

Copyright © 1998 Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, New York in 1998 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1998 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any fonn or by any means, mechanical, photo­copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written pennission of the

publisher, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC .

Printed on acid-free paper.

To Margaret, Philip, Stuart and Patrick

and Matt, my right hand

CHAPTER 1

DISCOVERY

1.1 Kepler 1.1.1 Will the Real Discovery Please Stand Up? 1.1.2 What Kepler Tells Us About Discovery 1.1.3 Why Discover?

1.2 Writing as Discovery

1

1 7

10 13

14

1.3 Discovery as Invention: Michael Faraday 20 1.3.1 Faraday and the Five Generalizations 26 1.3.2 Faraday as Hero 28 1.3.3 Creating a Computational Model of Faraday's Cognitive Processes 29

1.4 Discovery as Negotiation: The Great Devonian Controversy 31 1.4.1 The Great Devonian Controversy 31 1.4.2 Could a Computer Resolve the Devonian Controversy? 38 1.4.3 Murchison as Hero? 39 1.4.4 Discovery as Negotiation: The Five Generalizations 40

1.5 The Double Helix 43

1.6 The Canals on Mars 45

1.7 Understanding and Teaching Discovery: What Have We Learned? 49

CHAPTER 2

UNDERSTANDING DISCOVERY 51

2.1 The Emergence of A Sociology of Scientific Knowledge 51

2.2 The Scientific Method: Road to Truth or Superstitious Practice? 55 2.2.1 Ideological relativism 58

2.3 Cognitive Psychology of Science 62 2.3.1 Can Science Be Used to Study Science? 63

viii

2.3.2 Does Cognitive Psychology Presume Rationalism and Realism? 63 2.3.3 Computational Simulations of Scientific Discovery 65 2.3.4 If Machines can Discover, Do we Need a Sociology of Scientific Discovery? 67 2.3.5 In Vitro and In Vivo Studies of Scientific Thinking 70 2.3.6 Abstract Tasks 71 2.3.7 Tasks That Have the Look and Feel of Scientific Problems 82 2.3.8 Actual Scientific Problems 86 2.3.9 20th Century Biologists and 19th Century Geologists Compared 100

2.4 Metaphors and Analogies in Scientific Thinking 101 2.4.1 What Makes a Good Analogy 102 2.4.2 Analogical Reasoning in Science 104

2.5 Cognitive Psychology of Science in Perspective 106

CHAPTER 3

CREATING A NEW WORLD 112

3.1 The Etheric Force and Cold Fusion: When Discovery and Invention Don't Mix 113

3.2 Reverse Salients and Simultaneous Inventions 3.2.1 Who Invented the Telephone? 3.2.2 Multiple Telegraphy as Reverse Salient in the 1870s

117 119 120

3.3 A Cognitive Framework for Understanding the Invention Process 121

3.4 Competition over the Harmonic Multiple Telegraph 125 3.4.1 Elisha Gray's Multiple Harmonic Telegraph 127 3.4.2 Alexander Graham Bell's Path to a Multiple Harmonic Telegraph 131

3.5 The Error That Led to the First Telephone 136

3.6 Gray's Caveat for a Speaking Telegraph 139

3.7 Bell's Ear Mental Model 143

3.8 Bell's Patent and Gray's Caveat Compared 149

ix

3.9 BeD's Path to the First Transmission of Speech 150 3.9.1 The Liquid Transmitter 154

3.10 Bell and Gray's Liquid Transmitters in Perspective 160

3.11 After the First Transmission of Speech 161

3.12 Cognition, Invention and Discovery: The Five Generalizations 167 3.12.1 The Wright Brothers: A Dual-Space Analysis 169 3.12.2 Cognitive Styles: Flexibility, Visualization and Networks of Enterprise 170

3.13 What Invention Says to Cognitive Science 175

CHAPTER 4

ETHICS, INVENTION AND DISCOVERY 178

4.1 When Matter Becomes Energy 179

4.2 Virtue and Moral Reasoning 186

4.3 Moral Imagination 190

4.4 Towards a Sustainable Tomorrow 196 4.4.1 Sustainable Technological Growth 197

4.5 The Natural Step 204

4.6 Science, Superstition and Sustainability 210

4.7 Silicone nightmare 211 4.7.1 Development of the First Breast Implant 213 4.7.2 A "New and Improved" Implant? 214 4.7.3 Enter the ethicist 217 4.7.4 Junk Science? 224 4.7.5 Can the legal system act as guardian against pollution? 234

4.8 Design of an Environmentally Intelligent Fabric 237 4.8.1 The Making of an Environmental Manufacturer 238 4.8.2 The DesignTex/Rohner Textil Partnership 240

x

4.8.3 William McDonough's Contribution 4.8.4 Employee autonomy within a moral framework

4.9 Current solar income 4.9.1 A.C. Rich and Sun 4.9.2 Solar Electric Light Fund

4.10 Generalizations about ethics, invention and discovery

242 247

250 251 262

272

CHAPTER 5

TEACHING ETHICS, DISCOVERY AND INVENTION 276

5.1 What Students and Practitioners Need to Learn 276

5.2 Using Abstract Simulations to Teach Scientific Thinking 279 5.2.1 SIMSCI 280 5.2.2 Social and cognitive processes in SIMSCI 283 5.2.3 Using SIMSCI to Explore Evidence Ambiguity 284 5.2.4 Educational Implications of SIMSCI 286 5.2.5 Virtual SIMSCI? 287

5.3 Turning active leaming modules into case-studies 289

5.4 Turning Students into Inventors 290 5.4.1 An Active Learning Module Based on the Telephone 290 5.4.2 A Course on Invention and Design 294 5.4.3 A student group tackles the photophone 295 5.4.4 Turning secondary students into inventors 303 5.4.5 Advice from an Inventor on Working in Groups 306

5.5 Cases that Combine Invention and Ethics 310 5.5.1 Case-studies of creative inventors and discoverers 310 5.5.2 Combining ethics and invention 311

5.6 Ethics case dilemmas 313 5.6.1 DesignTex 313 5.6.2 Rohner Textil 314

5.6.3 American Solar Network 5.6.4 Solar Power in the Developing World

xi

321 324

5.7 Using Active Learning Modules to Teach Environmental Invention 325

5.7.1 The environmental challenge: An active learning module for secondary students 326

5.7.2 Evaluation ofthe Course for Gifted Secondary Students 329 5.7.3 Turning students into ethical entrepreneurs 331 5.7.4 An intelligent notebook 336

5.8 Implications for Educational Reform

5.9 Implications for managing innovation 5.9.1 Generalizations about Managing Innovation 5.9.2 Leadership style and innovation

5.10 Why do we not act to save the world?

5.11 Of Loons, and a Lake

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

337

339 345 348

349

353

357

383

FIGURE 1 .................................................................................................................. 6 FIGURE 2 ................................................................................................................ 23 FIGURE 3: .............................................................................................................. 29 FIGURE 4 ................................................................................................................ 34 FIGURE 5 ................................................................................................................ 75 FIGURE 6 ................................................................................................................ 76 FIGURE 7 ................................................................................................................ 94 FIGURE 8 ................................................................................................................ 95 FIGURE 9 .............................................................................................................. 129 FIGURE 10 ............................................................................................................ 134 FIGURE 11 ............................................................................................................ 135 FIGURE 12 ............................................................................................................ 137 FIGURE 13 ............................................................................................................ 141 FIGURE 14 ............................................................................................................ 145 FIGURE 15 ............................................................................................................ 147 FIGURE 16 ............................................................................................................ 152 FIGURE 17 ............................................................................................................ 156 FIGURE 18 ............................................................................................................ 159 FIGURE 19 ............................................................................................................ 257 FIGURE 20 ............................................................................................................ 297 FIGURE 21 ............................................................................................................ 301

Preface

This book is but the draft of a draft, as Melville said of Moby Dick. There is no prose here to match Melville's, but the scope is worthy of the great white whale. No one could possibly write a comprehensive, authoritative book on ethics, invention and discovery. I have not tried to, though I hope my bibliography will be a useful starting point for other explorers, and the cases and ideas presented here will keep people arguing for years.

Although this book is nothing like a textbook, it is written for my students. I was trained as a teacher of psychology in graduate school and ended-up, by one of those happy chances of the job market, teaching psychology to engineering students rather than psyche majors. My dissertation and early research were in the psychology of scientific hypothesis-testing (see Chapter 2). When I team-taught a course with W. Bernard Carlson, a historian of technology, I saw how cognitive psychology might be applied to the study of invention. Bernie and I received funding from the National Science Foundation for three years of research on the invention of the telephone; a portion of that work is described in Chapter 3.

My research is closely linked to my teaching. I created a course on Invention and Design which began with a module on the invention of the telephone (see Chapter 5). I also created a course on Scientific and Technological Thinking, which I now give to first-year honors students at the University of Virginia. Their questions made me think again about the topic of discovery (see Chapter 1).

I also direct and teach a fourth-year course for all engineering students at the University of Virginia which includes an ethics component. A few of my students asked why they got ethics only in the last semester of their senior year. I set out to remedy that, with help from my colleague Patricia Werhane, the Ruffin Professor of Business Ethics in the Darden School of Business here at the University of Virginia. She and I received funding from the National Science Foundation to create a set of cases that showed how ethics, particularly environmental ethics, can be integrated with design (see Chapter 4). It became obvious to me that one could not teach discovery and invention without bringing in ethics, so I started to use these new materials in those classes as well.

xvi

The chapters in this book are ordered in a more logical fashion than my own intellectual trajectory. Chapter 1 begins with analysis of several cases of discovery, and attempts to make generalizations from them. Chapter 2 combines psychology, sociology and philosophy of science in an effort to determine whether and how science can be studied. Psychology receives the heaviest emphasis, in part because it is my parent discipline and in part because of all the meta-sciences it is the least organized and needs someone to devote the extra time to it.

Chapter 3 is about invention and the story of the telephone is at the center, though I include other cases as well. Chapter 4 brings ethics, discovery and invention together in the case of the atomic bomb, then goes on to treat new ethical technologies like the development of a compostable furniture fabric and the introduction of photovoltaics into developing countries. Chapter 5 considers how to teach ethical discovery and invention, and includes a section on management as well.

Before I begin the thanks, let me say a word about factors that hindered the book. In Chapter 2, I talk about computers as a model of the mind. During the course of writing, I experienced many instances where I had to reconstruct files and references that were lost by the computer--not lost in the sense that I did not store them properly, but lost in the literal sense that faulty software and, in at least one case, computer virueses wiped-out important information. The program Endnote, which I used to format my bibliography, deserves special mention--it repeatedly wiped-out all page numbers associated with quotations. I hope I have managed to restore them all. Our current computer technology comes closest to modeling a brain-damaged idiot savant, who is capable of great feats of memory and calculation, but who blacks out frequently, losing portions of his memory.

This book owes its existence to many people, none of whom bear responsibility for its flaws. I can only thank a few here. The Shannon Center for Advanced Study provided a summer fellowship. Edgar Shannon, President of the University of Virginia from 1959 to 1974, was the kind of ethical leader I discuss in Chapter 5. After four students were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State in 1970, Shannon met with 4000 University of Virginia students and urged them to write their senators and denounce our "agonizongly slow" disengagement from the Vietnam War. This act earned him condemnation from conservative critics, but kept the University open, preserved free speech and reflected his deeply-held beliefs. He was also a leader in bringing both co-education and racial integration to the University.

xvii

The Division of Technology, Culture & Communication provided a half­year sabbatical, during which I began the book. I am particularly grateful to my chair, Ingrid Soudek, for her help in obtaining both the sabbatical and the Shannon fellowship, and to our Divisional staff - Timothy Radcliffe re-did several of the figures and Vanessa Pace helped with manuscript preparation.

The Batten Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership in the Colgate Darken Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia provided funding for an editorial assistant in the final stages of the project, and also partially-funded a number of the cases reported in Chapter 4. Aspects of the research reported in the book were funded by the National Science Foundation, particularly the programs in Ethics and Values Studies and History and Philosophy of Science. The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Lemelson Foundation also provided important support for specific projects.

I am also grateful to colleagues who have collaborated with me on projects discussed in this book. As noted above, W. Bernard Carlson worked with me on invention and Patricia Werhane on ethics; both deserve more thanks than I can give. Greg Feist and I wrote a major article on psychology of science and undoubtedly some of his thinking is reflected in Chapter 2. Robert Rosenwein, of Lehigh University, worked with me on the SIMSCI project described in Chapter 5. Gary Tabor and I have wandered through the wilderness for years; he helped me frame some of the conclusions in Chapter 5.

Students have also been collaborators and colleagues. Most noteworthy is my lone PhD student, Matthew M. Mehalik, who did an undergraduate thesis with me and then came back for more punishment some years later after trying almost everything else. He has contributed case-studies on the telephone inventor Elisha Gray as well as on the creators of an environmentally intelligent fabric that embodies a new way of looking at sustainable product design. He has also helped me troubleshoot computers, write grants, has been my assistant in classes and somehow kept his sense of humor through all of it. Julie Stocker, a recent Masters graduate in Systems Engineering, provided important material on Dow Coming, and Scott Sonenshein, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, provided material on the Solar Electric Light Fund. Students in various classes have read parts of this book and provided valuable comments. I would like to particularly thank Seyenie Yacob and Sarah Diersen, who helped with manuscript preparation and my wife Margaret, who provided valuable advice.

This book would also have been impossible without assistance from informants, who gave their time to answer our questions about their thinking and networking. William McDonough, our Dean of Architecture and the only person

XVlll

ever to receive the United States Presidential Award for Sustainable Development, gave us access to his network of contacts and colleagues and provided constant inspiration. If there is a new industrial revolution, he will deserve much of the credit. Albin Kaelin of Rohner Textil was a gracious host in Switzerland, giving us access to his mill and design philosophy. Susan Lyons of DesignTex and Michael Braungart and his colleagues at the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency have rendered invaluable assistance. Barle Carmichael of Dow Corning has answered every request for more information. I cannot call Alexander Graham Bell on his invention, but I can revisit his notebooks whenever I need inspiration.

Michael E. Gorman Charlottesville, Virginia

CHAPTER 1 DISCOVERY

If a philosopher were writing this book, we would begin by defining the terms discovery and invention (or perhaps dismissing them as useless concepts because they are so hard to define). Instead of beginning with definitions, I will offer examples illustrating discovery and invention. I will use the same examples to introduce most of the other concepts we will use throughout the book. Then in Chapter 2 we will take a more rigorous look at these terms, using the cognitive science literature. But the primary goal of this chapter is to give us a sense of the diverse range of activities to which labels like discovery and invention are applied.

1.1 Kepler

The roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as the matters themselves (Kepler, quoted in Gentner et al., 1997, p. 403)

Kepler prop'ped himself against the wall and watched the goatish dancers circlmg in a puddle of light from the tavern window, and all at once out of nowhere, out of everywhere, out of the fiddle music and the flickering light and the pounding of heels, the circling light and the Italian's drunken eye, tnere came to him the ragged fragment of a thought. False. What false? That principle. One of the whores was pawing him. Yes, he had it. The principle ijf uniform velocity is false. He found it very funny, and smiling turned' aside and vomited absent­mindedly into a drain. (Banville, 1981, p. 72)

The above quotation comes from the novel Kepler by John Banville. It is a classic romantic account of discovery--the flash of insight that leads to Kepler's Second Law comes in the midst of a drunken revel. The false principle of uniform velocity refers to the widely-held assumptions that each planet orbited

Discovery

the Earth, or the Sun in the Copernican system, at a constant speed in a circular orbit. Kepler's Second Law states that if you draw an imaginary line between a planet and the sun, then look at the area swept out by that line at two equal intervals anywhere on the planet's orbit, the areas will be equal.

Banville's novel is based on Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers (Koestler, 1963), in itself an inspiring, romantic account of Kepler's tortured path to his discoveries. Kepler developed an early model of the solar system in which the five Pythagorean perfect solids could be put in the five intervals between planetary orbits: in between the spheres of Saturn and Jupiter he placed a cube, between Jupiter and Mars a dodecahedron, and so on. This model gives us an insight into the view of the solar system Kepler had to transcend. We think of planets as having orbits through space, but before Kepler's time, they were thought to ride on giant spheres; therefore, the orbits had to be perfectly circular} Kepler's perfect solids were therefore inserted between these spheres.

This geometric relationship served Kepler as a mental model of the solar system. In the next chapter, I will discuss the psychological literature on mental models at length. For now, it will suffice to say that a mental model is a three­dimensional representation of a system that a scientist or inventor can manipulate in his or her imagination. Frequently, this sort of model is also sketched or prototyped. Kepler convinced Frederick, Duke of Wittemberg, to have his silversmiths create a drinking cup based on Kepler's nested spheres and geometric shapes; when the Duke agreed, Kepler created a paper model. Plans for the drinking cup expanded into a clockwork planetarium. In the end, it was never built (Koestler, 1963). But this hands-on experience is an important aspect of mental models, which are tactual. One of the themes of this book will be the way in which the hands and devices built with them serve as extensions of the mind.

Mental models differ from formal theoretical models in their incompleteness, their fuzziness; they represent the kind of system a discoverer hopes to find, or an inventor hopes to create. Even though the geometric model failed to fit the data and Kepler abandoned its literal form, it still survived as a mental model of what he was trying to achieve. Kepler later added the possibility of a correspondence between musical harmonies and planetary orbits; he explored quite a number of relationships and thought to the end that this approach held promise (Stephenson, 1994). Kepler was convinced there was an underlying harmony that governed the planetary orbits, and that it depended on the sun, which was the center of the solar system in more ways than one: it served "as the mathematical center in the description of celestial motions; as the central physical agency for assuring continued motion; and above all as the metaphysical center, the temple of the Deity" (Holton, 1973, p. 81).

1 Aristotle thought of circular motion as primary and perfect. Copernicus subscribed to circularity, as did Tycho and Kepler himself until after his Second Law. But Tycho rejected the celestial spheres. For more on this controversy, see (Job Kozhamthadam, 1994).

2

TRANSFORMING NATURE

Beginning in 1600, Kepler worked at the observatory of Tycho Brahe, first as Tycho's collaborator and then, when Tycho died after eighteen months, as Imperial Mathematicus. Tycho had the best observational data on the positions of the planets, data Kepler had to cajole out of him in little pieces until Brahe died. The most perverse of the planets was Mars. Kepler struggled for five years to fit four of Tycho's observations of Mars into a circular orbit. Then, when he finally succeeded, he managed to wrestle two more observations from Tycho, and these did not agree. The amount of error was only eight minutes of arc, but for Kepler it was enough to disconfirm his current orbital model: "he refused to accept an error of 8 minutes of arc because he believed Tycho's observations were a gift from God and hence deserved to be given utmost importance" (Job Kozhamthadam, 1994, p. 88).

Here again the Kepler case allows us to preview an issue that we will take up at greater length later. The philosopher Karl Popper argued that science advances not by embracing new truths, but by a ruthless willingness to discard old ideas which no longer fit new data (Popper, 1959). Much of the work of discarding is done as a group process: one scientist or group of scientists adheres strongly to an idea, another seeks to disprove it, and so the idea either holds up or is discarded. But successful discoverers and inventors have to do a certain amount of their own testing--have to be willing to abandon cherished hypotheses. 2

Kepler had already thrown out uniform motion. Circular motion followed, but not before he arrived at his Second Law:

Since I was aware that there exists an infinite number of points on the orbit and accordingly an infinite number of distances [from the sun] the idea occurred to me that the sum of these distances is contained in the area of the orbit. For I remembered that in the same manner Archimedes too divided the area of a circle into an infinite number of triangles (Kepler quoted in Koestler, 1963, p. 329).

According to Koestler, Kepler knew that his assumptions about area and circular orbits were not quite right, but he claimed they canceled each other out, allowing him to propose the Second Law.

Now he returned to Mars' orbit; if it were circular, three observations should suffice to determine its path. But the path suggested by one set of three observations did not agree with the path suggested by another, indicating that the orbit was not a circle. He rejected the possibility that the observations were in error. An oval fit the orbit better, though even that was not perfect (Job Kozhamthadam,1994).

2 In hindsight, this appears easy--why wouldn't Kepler simply throw out circular orbits? One has to realize that circularity was not just a hypothesis in Kepler's time. For many astronomers, planets moved on a complex series of interconnected spheres (Margolis, 1993). Brahe's observations and Kepler's conclusions threatened to shatter the spheres.

3

Discovery

For Kepler, observational reasons were never enough--there had to be an underlying model that explained the planetary orbits. Here he came up with another mental model based on an analogy with a ferry (Gentner, et aI., 1997). The current supplies the main force, in a way analogous to the sun, but there were forces originating from the boat itself--the ferryman's rudder, the cord and pulley connection to the shore. Just as the clever ferryman could guide his in a circular path by using the rudder to take advantage of the currents, so the planets could move in circles while being swept by the power emanating from the sun.

But planets have no ferryman and no rudder. So Kepler evolved yet another analogy. He imagined the planetary orbit as a kind of 'magnetic river', with the poles of the planet alternately attracted to and repelled from the sun (Gentner et aI., 1997; Job Kozhamthadam, 1994).

The point is, Kepler's evolving mental model of planetary motion had come to preclude the possibility of a circular orbit. If a planet is alternately attracted and repelled by the sun, then its orbit cannot be a circle. He settled on an oval, which did not perfectly fit the data, but gave results superior to a circle. He knew this was not entirely satisfactory, however, and spent another eighteen months wrestling before he realized that the orbit could be described by the equations governing an ellipse. The result was his First Law, discovered after his second.

Kepler published his two laws in 1609 in a work boldly entitled "A New Astronomy Based on Causation or a Physics of the Sky." The title reveals Kepler's other heresy. The laws or principles governing what we would now call the physics of the heavens were supposed to be totally different from those that operated on Earth. Kepler thought differently; as we have seen, his evolving mental model presumed not only a geometric regularity to the planetary orbits, but a physical connection between the planets and the sun: "so intense was Kepler's vision that the abstract and concrete merged." Here we find the key to the enigma of Kepler, the explanation for the apparent complexity and disorder in his writing and commitments. In one brilliant image, Kepler saw the three basic themes or cosmological models superimposed: "the universe as physical machine, the universe as mathematical harmony, and the universe as central theological order." (Holton, 1973, p. 86). Of particular note here is the combination of the abstract and the concrete into a powerful mental model that guided his effort.

The Third Law emerged from this mental model. "He had been searching for this Third Law, that is to say, for a correlation between a planet's period and its distance, since his youth. Without such a correlation, the universe would make no sense to him; it would be an arbitrary structure. If the sun had the power to govern the planet's motions, then that motion must somehow depend on their distance from the sun; but how? Kepler was the first who saw the problem--quite apart from the fact that he found the answer to it, after twenty-two years of labor. The reason why nobody before him had asked the question is that nobody had thought of cosmological problems in terms of actual physical forces." (Koestler, 1963, p. 395) Briefly put, the resultant law states that the cube of a planet's

4

TRANSFORMING NATURE

distance from the sun will be proportional to the square of its orbital period around the sun.

According to Job Kozhamthadam (Job Kozhamthadam, 1994, p. 8), Kepler "announced this law without providing any clear clue as to how he arrived at it." According to Koestler, Kepler discovered it by 'patient slogging'.

Recently, a group of researchers in Artificial Intelligence have created a computer program called BACON that, among other things, discovered Kepler's Third Law via the same sort of patient slogging--or what the program's authors call 'data-driven discovery' (Langley, 1987). Essentially, the program takes two columns of data, one containing the distance of a planet from the sun (D) and another its period of revolution (P), and applies a set of heuristics to this data.

A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a shortcut that one can use to reduce the size of the problem space when seeking a solution. Obviously, there are hundreds of possible relationships that could be used to link two columns of numbers; one needs either a mental model, or a set of heuristics, or both to reduce the possibilities to a limited solution space. In the next chapter, we will say more about the cognitive literature on heuristics.

The earliest version of BACON used three heuristics, which are shown in

Figure 1.

5

Data:

Distance (D)

Period (P)

New Terms:

Figure 1

D if

Discovery

Is One Term a Constant?

Do Two Terms Increase Together?

Does One Term Increase as Another

Decreases?

Yes" Stop

Yes Compute Ratio

Yes Compute Product

BACON.l's Heuristics. Adapted from Michael E. Gorman, Simulating Science (1992) with the permission of the Indiana University Press.

6

TRANSFORMING NATURE

Each of these heuristics was applied whenever its conditions for execution were met. As indicated in Figure I, the second heuristic was applied first, resulting in the ratio DIP, then the third heuristic was applied twice to produce D21P and D31P. This last ratio is a constant. Voila! BACON had discovered Kepler's Third Law in a matter of seconds, leading Herbert Simon, one of the architects of BACON, to wonder why it took Kepler so long.3

Furthermore, four out of a sample of fourteen students, given the same two columns of numbers but no information about heuristics, made the same discovery (Qin, 1990). The solvers included a graduate student and an undergraduate in physics, and a graduate student and an undergraduate in chemical engineering. All the students were allowed to use calculators, and their processes were described at length. None of them knew the data had anything to do with Kepler's laws. The authors concluded that data driven discovery "was found to proceed in the same manner as many other problem-solving processes that have been studied and described. We believe that this result can be generalized to cover most, perhaps all, of the processes of scientific discovery" (Qin,1990,p.308).

Here we have the first hint of how students can be turned into discoverers like Kepler--make them into good problem-solvers. Of course, making students into good problem-solvers is not trivial; we will talk more about this issue later in the book. But no special genius or magic is required for discovery.

1 .1.1 Will the Real Discovery Please Stand Up?

The portrait of Kepler that emerges from historians and novelists resembles one of the mythical heroes described so eloquently by Joseph Campbell 4, involving several stages: a call to adventure, that takes the hero (or heroine) away from the ordinary world; a journey into the unknown, in which the hero is required to perform superhuman feats; and a return bearing a boon that benefits her tribe or, in some cases, the entire planet.

3 Simon made this remark at a provocative seminar he gave at Michigan Technological University on November 20, 1988 entitled "Knowledge and search in expert systems: Applications to scientific discovery". There have been at least five versions of BACON since the first, each more complicated and sophisticated, adding features like the ability to handle a certain amount of noise in the data. But the overall workings of the program and its assumptions are clearly illustrated by BACON. I.

4The brief summary that follows merges a number of variations on the hero's journey discussed by Campbell (Campbell, 1968). His pantheon of mythological heroes naturally included no scientists, but the mythic patterns he derived from his research are used to describe modem heroes as well as ancient ones; consider, for example, the way Freud and his followers recast his life as this kind of mythic journey, in which he answered a call, battled ignorance and superstition, and returned with a new understanding of the human condition, one that was initially rejected by most. Sulloway (Sulloway, 1983) has shown that much of this view was at best an exaggeration. There is no evidence that Kepler deliberately sought to build himself into such a mythic figure, but Koestler (Koestler, 1963) does.

7

Discovery

Like Arthur and his knights, Kepler begins with a vision of a Holy Grail, a model of the solar system that could be nested in a silver cup. But this is a fleeting vision; like the knight-errant, he has go on a long journey, with Brahe as both helper and tormentor and Mars as a kind of monster he has to battle. After twenty-two years of struggle, he returns with his three laws, which Newton uses to create a new model of the universe.

If we adopt this perspective, students will need to become more than good problem-solvers to become discoverers; they will have to go on the kind of hero (or heroine's) journey discussed by Campbell.

The portrait that emerges from machine discovery is different. If a computer program can discover, then it diminishes the heroic, mythical stature of the human discoverer. It took poor old Kepler years to do what a machine does in seconds, and a science student with a calculator does in an hour or so--the data was right there, in a form anyone could recognize.

But what about finding the problem? Can we not give Kepler credit for realizing that there had to be a regular pattern of the form suggested by his third law? After all, he was not given two columns of numbers and asked to find the relationship. Qin & Simon counter that,

It is sometimes argued that the real problem of scientific discovery is not to find laws in the data, but to defIne the problem and to discover the relevant data. But it has just been seen that defining the problem and discovering the data were not Kepler's primary contribution. He inherited tfie problem of describing the heavens parsimoniously from a long line of predecessors, and the data, as explained above, were mainly inherited from Brahe and Copernicus. His merit was that he converted the data into a form that revealed the geometry of the heavens and laid the foundation for Newton's inertial and gravitational explanation. From a scientific standf'oint, his attempts to provide "physical" explanations for his empirically derived laws are now only historical curiosities (Qin, 1990, p. 306).

One of the questions raised by this book will be whether beliefs like Kepler's faith in a geometrical relationship between the sun and the planetary orbits are central to discovery, or whether they are epiphenomenal. To put it in other terms, was Kepler's mental model simply irrelevant, perhaps even a distraction? Was his discovery really just about number-crunching and curve-fitting?

Qin & Simon pose Kepler's problem as 'describing the heavens parsimoniously'. That is, of course, too broad a statement to narrow the problem space significantly. Instead, Kepler created a new problem: how to discover a relationship based on geometric and/or musical harmonies between the sun, planetary distances, and periods of revolution.

8

TRANSFORMING NATURE

No one else had put the problem in this form. Copernicus did locate the sun more centrally than the Earth but the actual center of the solar system was a point near the sun. Copernicus also believed in perfectly circular orbits with planets moving at uniform speeds. Brahe still believed in an Earth-centered solar system, with several planets circling the sun, which in tum circled the Earth. Kepler, in contrast, put the sun at the actual center of the solar system. This made his problem of 'describing the heavens parsimoniously' different from Copernicus', or Brahe's, or anyone else's at his time. As Simon himself said, "solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent" (Simon, 1981, p. 153).

BACON represents the problem as finding a relationship between two columns of data, using heuristics that dictate the relationship will resemble Kepler's third law. It could be programmed to search for a different kind of relationship. Collins (Collins, 1990) argued that discoveries like BACON's only work if one narrows the choices to Third Law or no law and if one has perfectly accurate data. Kepler's original data regarding Mercury did not fit his Third Law with complete precision (Stephenson, 1994) but he was convinced of the relationship on theoretical as well as empirical grounds and therefore did not abandon his new hypothesis. If one introduces the possibility of small errors into BACON's data, then it increases the probability that a program armed with more heuristics could discover other numerical relationships.s

In Kepler's day, there was serious argument about whether scientific theories were primarily heuristic devices for describing the results of calculations or whether they corresponded to underlying realities. Cardinal Bellarmine, who eventually condemned Galileo, put it this way:

To say that the supposition that the earth moves and the sun stands still all the appearances are saved better than on the assumption of eccentrics and epicycles, is to say very well-there is no danger in that, and it is sufficIent for the mathematician: but to wish to affirm that in reality the sun stands still in the center of the world, and that the earth is located in the third heaven and revolves with great velocity about the sun, is a thing in which there is much danger ... Gob l<ozhamthadam, 1994, p. 114)

This argument presaged the later debate between Max Planck and Ernst Mach, the former holding that theories did correspond to an underlying reality and the latter that they were merely useful human constructs, valuable for mathematical calculations and as a way of summarizing results (Matthews, 1994).

To put this issue in simpler terms, BACON does not know what it has discovered. It is BACON's creators who comprehend the significance of the discovery. So who is the real discoverer, human or machine? The answer is both are part of a system, or a network, to use the term preferred by sociologists (Law,

5 BACON was eventuaIly modified to handle certain kinds of error. But Harry Collins makes the point that often these smaIl errors can be made to fit another mathematical pattern (Collins, 1990).

9

Discovery

1987). Indeed, more sophisticated versions of their BACON system could serve as expert assistants to scientists searching for relationships among data. This is exactly the role played by sophisticated statistical packages like SPSS and SAS: they allow social scientists to explore data. But to make certain that relationships discovered are not chance alignments of numbers, some theory or model is necessary--even an imperfect one.

1.1.2 What Kepler Tells Us About Discovery

1. Discovery depends on finding a problem significant enough to be labeled an important achievement.

According to Keith Noll, a planetary scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, "One of the hardest things about being a scientist is selecting a problem that's small enough for you to actually attack and pursue as a project yet big enough to add something significant to what's already known" (Sobel, 1996, p. 87). In Noll's case, he settled on the study of the four moons of Jupiter that were discovered in 1610 by Galileo. Since then, spacecraft and the Hubble have found many more moons. Noll brought a new instrument to their study--the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble telescope; he among other things, he has found evidence of an oxygen atmosphere around Ganymede, one of the four.

Similarly, the astronomer Margaret Geller spent a year at Cambridge thinking about the problem of the universe's structure. Galaxies were thought to be distributed at random. The first survey, encompassing only a few hundred galaxies, had found a great empty area in the constellation Bootes, but even Geller thought that was probably an error. Geller decided there needed to be a survey that would reach deeper into the universe, searching for large patterns like the apparent void in Bootes. It was she who discovered the structure often referred to as 'the stick man': "The distribution of galaxies looked like a child's drawing of a somewhat bowlegged person. It's a whimsical name for a grand figure: the stickman extended 500 million light years across the universe. Its torso was composed of hundreds of galaxies, a massive congregation known to astronomers as the Como cluster. Its arms were two more sheets of galaxies streaming across the night sky" (Taubes, 1997, p. 54).

Like Kepler, Geller now had data that suggested one of the fundamental assumptions or dogmas about the structure of the universe was wrong. Unlike Kepler, she had generated the data herself. The solution to her riddle is still a work in progress; she is one of the astronomers leading projects that will map even more of the universe, in an effort to find a Keplerian pattern in the structure of galaxies.

In all three cases, Kepler's, Geller's and Noll's, improved instrumentation produced new data that led to discoveries. All three found a problem they could

10

TRANSFORMING NATURE

attack, given their background and equipment, and that would also make a real contribution to science. In Kepler's case the contribution was revolutionary. Thomas Kuhn has proposed that science evolves by going through periods of revolution, or crisis, in which the reigning paradigm or world-view goes through a dramatic shift (For more on Kuhn's view, see 2.1 below and Kuhn, 1962). Consider Kepler's discoveries. The reigning paradigm, or world view, was that planetary orbits were circular--even the Copernican solar system included them. Tycho's data constituted what Kuhn has called an anomaly--a result that does not coincide with the current paradigm. According to Kuhn, anomalies cause the period of crisis that leads to a revolution. Kepler was the only one who saw this anomaly; it certainly precipitated a crisis in his thinking! His three laws became part of a new paradigm; Newton used Kepler's laws in the creation of his theory of gravity (Kuhn, 1957).

2. Discovery depends on transforming that problem into a form that suggests a promising path to solution.

A key aspect of this is formulating or having a powerful mental model, one that sets up a creative tension between the ideal--what the discoverer expects or hopes will happen--and the real. Kepler began with his geometric solids; the failure of that model created a tension, a need to replace it with some other geometric order.

It would be premature to argue at this point that mental modeling is an essential part of this process of transformation. In physics, for example, some scientists seem to rely on it6, while others have almost a horror of visualization, preferring purely mathematical transformations (Miller, 1989).

6Por a similar use of mental modeling, consider the modem physicist Richard Peynman's attempt to solve the problem of how liquid helium would behave when it was rotated rapidly in a glass tube: He lay awake in bed one night trying to imagine how rotation could arise at all. He imagined a liquid divided by a thin sheet, an imaginary impermeable membrane. On one side the liquid was motionless; on the other side it flowed. He knew how to write the old-fashioned Schrodinger wave function for both sides. Then he imagined the sheet disappearing. How could he make the wave functions join? He thought about the different phases combining. He imagined a kind of surface tension, energy proportional to the surface area of his sheet. He considered what would happen when an individual atom moved across the boundary-oat what point the rising and falling wave of energy the surface tension would fall to zero and the atom would be able to move freely. He was starting to see a surface divided into strips of glue, where the atoms could not mix, and other narrow strips where atoms would be able to change places. He calculated how little energy it would take to distort the wave function until the atoms would be held back, and realized that the strips of free motion would be no more than the width of a single atom. Then he realized that he was seeing lines, vortex lines around which the atoms circulated in rings. The rings of atoms were like rings of children waiting to use a playground slide. As each child descended--the wave function changing from plus to minus--another would slip into place at the top. But the fluid vortex was more than just a two-dimensional ring. It also wound back on itself through the third dimension--like a smoke ring, Peynman concluded, twenty years after he led an impromptu investigation of smoke-ring dynamics in his high school physics club. These quantum smoke rings, or vortex lines, would circle about the tiniest conceivable hole, just one atom's width across (Gleick, 1992)

This mental model was only the starting point for a multi-year program of experimental research. While Peynman's visualizations succeeded for this superfluid problem they failed to yield the solution

11

Discovery

3. Discovery depends on finding good data.

Again, a powerful mental model can play an important role here, suggesting what data is relevant. But one also needs resources and connections to get at the data. Kepler had to maneuver to get his appointment to Brahe's observatory. Modem astronomers still have to compete for access to observatories, though the internet is making access to good astronomical data much less problematic.

4. Discovery depends on a combination offlexibility and stubbornness

In other words, a willingness to discard a hypothesis on the basis of negative evidence, while keeping what the philosopher Imre Lakatos (Lakatos, 1978) called the 'hard core' of a research program. No amount of negative evidence would have persuaded Kepler to shift the sun from the center of the solar system. 7

These generalizations, vague as they are, do suggest that discovery is not totally mysterious. Nor is it easily reduced to a set of algorithms, BACON notwithstanding. Unfortunately, at this point, we can offer only the most general advice on how to discover. Furthermore, our advice would be too dependent on a single scientist working on a particular kind of problem. To improve these generalizations and broaden the sample on· which they are based, we will apply them to:

(1) Further examples of discovery: The rest of this chapter will include two cases of discovery that differ from Kepler's in important respects. The great Devonian controversy will provide us with an example of a discovery that emerged out of the interactions among competing research teams of geologists. Michael Faraday had to build the apparatus that generated his data; he could not collect his numbers from another source. In order to discover, Faraday had to invent.

(2) Invention: We will also explore whether generalizations about discovery can be applied to invention. Once again, vie will begin with a case--the invention of the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell had to discover in order to invent. Since I have spent much of the last five years studying Bell and his competitors, this section will set up one of the cases we will come back to again and again.

(3) Recent research on the cognitive psychology of science and technology: Even the three cases cited above are an inadequate base upon which to make generalizations, particularly as all three are historical. Fortunately, the literature

to the problem of superconductivity.

7 One could argue that Kepler never had to give up his heliocentric model because it was right, but consider the fact that he never totally abandoned the idea that musical harmonies could describe the relationship between planetary periods, distances and the sun, even though the data did not quite fit any of the models he proposed (Stephenson, 1994). He also knew that he had never succeeded in proving such a relationship.

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TRANSFORMING NATURE

on cognitive psychology of science includes modem practitioners and students. It will also allow us to refine our tentative generalizations in the light of the latest research. Chapter 2 will focus on psychology of science, and Chapter 3 on invention.

1 .1 .3 Why Discover?

All this talk about how discovery works does not, of course, answer the question of why. This book will only touch on what motivates discoverers and ihventors. Certainly, fame and fortune are an important part of the puzzle. But Kepler gives us a hint of another motive:

Sagan in Silesia, in my own printing press, November 6, 1629: When the storm rages, and the state is threatened by shipwreck, we

can do nothing more noble than to sink the anchor of our peaceful studies into the ground of eternity" (Kepler quoted in Koestler, 1903, p. 422).

Kepler lived during the time of the thirty years war. In 1611, his imperial patron Rudolph had to abdicate the throne of Bohemia; his favorite son died, followed shortly by his wife:

Numbed by the horrors committed by the soldiers, and the bloody fighting in the town; consumed by despair of the future and by an unquenchable longing for her lost darling .. .in mefancholy despondency, the saddest of all states ol mind, she gave up the ghost (Kepler, 1963, p. 381).

Kepler had just finished his Dioptrice, his major work on optics, so at this point he was experiencing the contrast between the eternal order he was discovering and the chaos of human affairs. Kepler was not a man who withdrew from the world; he did try to reconcile Calvinists with Catholics, but usually ended-up offending both.

So, one of the motives behind Kepler's discoveries was a desire to glimpse the eternal. Like the Arthurian knights, Kepler was on a quest for a Grail. Glimpsing the Grail did not guarantee temporal success-it was a spiritual goal, to De achieved by one who had risen above all ordinary desires. Einstein asked why some have chosen to enter the Temple of Science. The answer is not easy to give, and can certainly not apply uniformly. To begin with, I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strangest motives that lead persons to art and science is flight from the everydailife, with its painful harshness and wretched dreariness, and from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. One who is more finely tempered is driven to escape from personal existence and to the world of objective observing and understanding. This motive can be compared with the longing that irresistibly puns the town dweller away from his noisy, cramped quarters and toward the silent high mountams, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and traces the calm contours that seem to be made lor eternity.

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Discovery

With this negative image, there goes a positive one. Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world, and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative f!hilosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this image ana its formation, he places the center of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity that ne cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling, personal experience (Holton, 1978, pp. 231-2).

For Einstein, the Grail is 'a simplified and lucid image of the world'. Scientists often portray themselves as disinterested pursuers of truth for its own sake. Kepler was drawn to Einstein's 'silent mountains'--but he was also motivated by a desire to surpass Brahe and Copernicus. Recognition is the coin of science (Barnes, 1985) and part of this glory is attained by passing one's peers. Scientists know discovery is the road to recognition, and inventors hope their new technologies will lead to fortune--witness the bitter battles over priority and patent rights.

1.2 Writing as Discovery

Kepler's accounts of his discoveries were usually in the form of a narrative, following the twists and turns of his thought processes, pausing for a burst of rapture when he thought he had made a discovery. This form of writing made it very difficult for Newton and others to find the three laws of planetary motion in Kepler's work.

In contrast, Newton transformed a narrative account of his experiments on optics into a more logical, inductive account in order to publish it in the Transactions of the Royal Society in 1672. In 1666, he organized fifty experiments with a prism in a kind of exploratory format, with one experiment suggesting another. Newton's first draft of an article on this topic, submitted to the Transactions, rigorously followed BACON's maxim: "What the sciences stand in need of is a form of induction which shall analyze experience and take it to pieces, and by a due process of exclusion and rejection lead to an inevitable conclusion" (Newton quoted in Bazerman, 1988, p. 91). Newton wrote his article as if he had followed this method while he was conducting his experiments, carefully articulating, testing and rejecting hypotheses until he arrived at the only possible explanation.

In fact, had he written a Keplerian narrative of the research, the order in which the experiments were conducted and the reasons for moving from one to another would have been different. The inductive format allowed Newton to organize the experiments into a logical chain visible only in hindsight. Bazerman is careful to point out that this reorganization might not be a deliberate strategy; Newton's memory of experiments done six years earlier may have been gradually transformed to correspond with how, in hindsight, he felt the research ought to

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TRANSFORMING NATURE

have been done, a common cognitive phenomenon (Neisser, 1982). But it is likely that the act of writing at least catalyzed this transformation.

Newton's article ended with an invention: the reflecting telescope, which he claimed to derive from his discovery that different colors were refracted differentially when they passed from one medium to another. Actually, such a derivation was unnecessary, since Cassegrain independently made the same invention. Furthermore, at least part of Newton's derivation was in error, though his invention was sound. Here we see the beginning of one of the classic myths: the best inventions are derived from scientific discoveries.

Bazerman goes on to describe the letters Newton wrote, strengthening his argument in response to criticisms. This led to a new style in the first book of his Opticks, which Bazerman calls a 'juggernaut of persuasion'. Newton's experiments now play a supporting role in an axiomatic framework. The audience's questions and doubts are anticipated and dealt with, so that no alternate interpretation seems possible. As Bazerman (Bazerman, 1988, p. 124) says, "in Book I of the Opticks, Newton powerfully grabs hold of our reason and experiences until we have seen exactly what he wants us to have seen, in both the concrete and cognitive senses of the word."

Although Bazerman is more concerned with the persuasive elements of Newton's discourse, it is clear that these revisions led Newton to a more coherent, theoretical understanding of his own discovery. Writing can also spark discovery. One of the best examples comes from Larry Holmes' work on Antoine Lavoisier and Hans Krebs. Holmes argued that "it is from finely detailed case studies of the investigations of highly creative scientists that we are most likely to reach eventually a clearer understanding of the general nature of creative imagination in science" (Holmes, 1985, xvii). He conducted a detailed study of the Antoine Lavoisier's work in (what we would now call) organic chemistry over a twenty­years period. One of the major insights to emerge from this work is that the act of writing is itself part of the discovery process.

The extent to which Lavoisier develo{'ed his thought while writing his memoirs suggests a function for sCIentific papers that is not often emphasized. Scientific papers are characterizea in many different ways: as reports of completed research, as announcements of discoveries, as vehic1es for knowledge claims, as the end products of a process of "inscription," as the prime manifestation of the "context of justification," and as the necessary prerequisite for recognition as a {,racticing scientist. It has become commonplace to point out that as histOrIcal accounts of the discoveries they report, publisfied scientific papers are misleading. For the actual pathway of tfiought and experiment they substitute tfie best combination of argument and evidence that the author can muster to justify the conclusions he has already reached. When, however, we have been able through laboratory records to approximate more closely the real historical course, we can perceive the relation between that course and its representation in the published paper in a more positive light. Although a sCIentific paper is everything that IS implied in the above fabels, it is, or at least for Lavoisier it was, far more. He was not merely contriving

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Discovery

idealized or distorted versions of investigations, of which true versions already existed. He was transforming open-ended clusters of ideas and operations into organized, bounded investigative units. Not until he had chosen what to inc1ude and to exclude, clarified, linked together the parts, and rationalized what he had done did a coherent, completed investigation exist. Sometimes, as we have seen, he very nearly created an investigation on paper by bringing together experiments that had formerfy been part of other investigations. Producing his scientific papers was, in short, not a matter of reporting accuratelr or inaccurately on something he had previously done, but an integra part of the creative process (Holmes, 19E5, p. 488).

For example, Holmes traced changes in Lavoisier's thinking across several drafts of a manuscript he eventually presented to the Academy of Sciences in May of 1777. In the early drafts, he hypothesized that the portion of the air absorbed in respiration (what we now call Oxygen) gives a red color to the blood, just as this same portion of air gave a red color to metals with which it combined (producing what we now call rust). Lavoisier wrote happily, "I believe that the theory of respiration has now been established" (Lavoisier quoted in Holmes, 1987, p. 223).

By the next draft, he was already tempering this conclusion and in subsequent drafts he scribbled and worked over an alternative hypothesis: that this new kind of air (which he called dephlogisticated air and we now call Oxygen) was converted to fixed air in the lungs. It was this hypothesis that became one of his most important discoveries. Holmes is careful to note that "We cannot always tell whether a thought that led him to modify a passage, recast an argument, or develop an alternative interpretation occurred while he was still engaged in writing what he subsequently altered, or immediately afterward, or after some interval during which he occupied himself with something else; but the timing is, I believe, less significant than the fact that the new developments were consequences of the effort to express ideas and marshal supporting information on paper" (Holmes, 1987, p. 225).

Holmes also conducted a detailed study of Hans Krebs' discovery of how urea is synthesized from ammonia and carbon dioxide, a closed circle of reactions referred to as the ornithine cycle. When Krebs began the experiments that led to this discovery, he was not proceeding according to the hypothetico-deductive method. After finishing medical training in 1925, he worked as a research assistant for the distinguished biochemist Otto Warburg, who "had developed methods for measuring, with sensitive manometers, the rates of respiration of thin slices oftissue places in a fluid medium" (Holmes, 1989, p. 60). In 1931, Krebs began his own research program and looked for problems he could solve with his new tools. Within nine months, he had discovered the ornithine cycle, a process that has been emulated by a computer program called KEKADA (Kulkarni, 1988). While BACON focused on discovery processes occur after data has already been gathered, KEKADA attempted to simulate the process by which Krebs generated new data. The program could not actually conduct an experiment, but it could propose one, and the experimenter could provide the result.

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TRANSFORMING NATURE

KEKADA was programmed with a wide range of heuristics. Some of the heuristics were ones Krebs himself mentioned, including "a standard biochemical strategy: if a given compound exerts some particular action, check whether derivatives of that compound have similar actions" (Kulkarni, 1988, p. 146). Most were inferred from Holmes' detailed accounts of his processes. Kulkarni & Simon arranged these heuristics in a hierarchy, from those that were general and could be used across a wide variety of problem domains and those that were restricted to biochemistry. They also classified them into nine types, including 'problem choosers', 'experiment-proposers', expectation-setters' and 'hypothesis­modifiers'. The two classifications of heuristic were potentially independent, but in fact, the problem choosers identified by Kulkarni and Simon were all general and the hypothesis-modifiers were mostly domain-specific.

The 'standard biochemical strategy' noted by Krebs was classified as domain­specific, and a modified version of it was included in a hypothesis-generating heuristic:

If a surprising outcome occurs involving A as one of the reactants, then hypothesize that there is a class of substances containing A (or its derivatives) that will produce the same outcome (Kulkarni, 1988, p. 156).

An example of a general or weak heuristic from the problem generator category is:

If the outcome of an experiment violates expectations for it, then make the study of this puzzling phenomenon a task and add it to the agenda (Kulkarni, 1988, p. 153).

This problem generator can trigger the hypothesis generator noted above. KEKADA was also equipped with background knowledge about a variety of substances and their expected reactions. On each cycle, the conditions of each of KEKADA's heuristics were matched against working memory. When a heuristic was selected and ran, it altered the contents of working memory, and another cycle began. Kulkarni & Simon also distinguished between those heuristics that determined the next hypothesis and those that determined the next experiment. Both of the heuristics noted as examples above searched the hypothesis space. These experiment proposers include a variety of specific heuristics to follow up on the class of substances containing A, depending on KEKADA's specific hypotheses about how the reaction works. For example, if A and B react to form C , then the experiment proposer suggests experiments on A and B separately and in combination. The results of these experiments would be supplied by the programmer.

One of the most interesting features of KEKADA is its capacity to follow-up on surprises generated by violations of the expectations it started with. The initial experiment with Ornithine produced a surprising amount of urea; Krebs dropped everything else to pursue this surprise. If BACON had been equipped with this

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Discovery

capability, it might have been possible to have it start with circular orbits, then propose additional observations when its expectations were violated.

KEKADA clearly models more aspects of discovery than BACON, and illustrates the potential for heuristic-based analyses of scientific discovery. However, the program does not simulate two key aspects of Krebs' discovery: his acquisition and use of a tissue-slicing technique that became his 'secret weapon' (Kulkarni, 1988) and the role of writing. While discussing his 1932 paper reporting the discovery of the ornithine cycle, Krebs remarked that,

I spent a lot of time on writing, but usually while the work was still going on. And I find in general only when I try to write it up, then do I find the gaps. I cannot complete a piece of work and then sit down and write the paper (Holmes, 1987, p. 226).

Let us see how our four generalizations about discovery fare after this brief consideration of the cases of Lavoisier and Krebs.

1. Discovery depends on finding problem significant enough to be labeled an important achievement.

Lavoisier and Krebs both began with problems that were considered significant by major practitioners in their fields.

2. Discovery depends on transforming that problem into a form that suggests a promising path to solution.

Lavoisier had his own unique way of framing the problem in terms of "conceptual structures that were novel, deep and persistent, in the context of the state of the fields he entered" (Holmes, 1989, p. 63). Krebs was less conceptual and more empirically opportunistic--he followed surprising results. In the course of explaining them, he did have to formulate and test novel hypotheses. But the Krebs case suggests that a scientist who possesses good methodological techniques and problem-solving heuristics may be able to create opportunities for data-driven problem transformations.

Interestingly, both Lavoisier and Krebs at points held contradictory views of an important problem. At one stage, Lavoisier entertained both the idea that respiration worked (a) by absorbing one of two parts of air or (b) by removing 'fire matter' (heat) from the air. When exploring this new ornithine effect, Krebs had to grapple with the fact that ornithine seemed to be both catalyst and product of the reaction. Similarly, Kepler seemed to maintain for a time both the view that orbits had to be perfect circles and that they could not be circular. Holmes argues that, "in moving from an existing conceptual framework to a new one, scientists often cannot make a single leap from one coherent mental framework to another. They may have to endure, for extended periods of time, deep fissures within their mental worlds" (Holmes, 1989, p. 53).

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TRANSFORMING NATURE

3. Discovery depends on finding good data.

Because Lavoisier and Krebs were both experimenters, they had to manufacture or invent the data they used. Lavoisier had to choose his experiments more carefully than Krebs, and showed a greater tendency to dismiss anomalous results as errors. Much of this difference may be accounted for simply by the fact that Krebs worked in an age of bigger science, where laboratories had more sophisticated equipment and there was a greater opportunity to carry out multiple experiments. Therefore, Krebs was able to create new data more rapidly than Lavoisier, and may also have felt more secure about eliminating sources of error (Holmes, 1989).

This generalization ought to be modified, then:

3. Discovery depends on finding or inventing good data.

Invention as used here does not mean creating fake data; rather, it reminds us that experimental scientists have to manipulate nature, and that manipulation depends on technologies and techniques that need to be invented.

4. Discovery depends on a combination offlexibility and stubbornness.

Lavoisier modified his theories based on experimental data, but "Lavoisier did not give in easily when his results appeared not to fit his expectations. He regularly guessed at possible sources of error and made whatever corrections he thought reasonable to bring the results more closely in line with his theoretical needs" (Holmes, 1989, p. 58).

Krebs displayed great flexibility in following surprising results. It is less clear where stubbornness plays a role in his work. Perhaps his case suggests a modification of our generalization:

4. Discovery depends on a combination of flexibility and stubbornness, depending both on the individual scientist's cognitive style and on the nature of the problem.

Style and problem interact, here, because scientists often choose problems that suit their styles. As a result of Holmes' work on both Lavoisier and Krebs, we will have to add a fifth generalization:

5. The act of writing is part of the discovery process.

For Lavoisier and Krebs, writing was critical to formulating their discoveries. Even Kepler's narratives doubtless helped him clarify his thinking.

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Discovery

James Gleick, in his biography of Richard Feynman, reports an exchange between a historian, Charles Weiner, and Feynman concerning Feynman's scientific notes. Feynman claimed that he "actually did the work on the paper." Weiner countered that the work must have been done in his head, with the record appearing on the paper. Feynman responded, "No, it's not a record, not really. It's working. You have to work on paper ... " (Gleick, 1992, p. 409).

We don't know to what extent re-shaping his arguments for publication affected Feynman's understanding of his discoveries. Gleick notes that "he wrote in astonishing volume as he worked--Iong trains of thought, almost suitable to serve immediately as lecture notes." Furthermore, these lecture notes were often published. It would be interesting to know more about Feynman's process of revision as he turned notes into lectures.

At any rate, the Feynman example provides further support for the idea that writing plays a central role in discovery. As with the previous generalization about stubbornness, individual scientists differ in their writing style--for some, major conceptual changes can be seen in the notes, others in draft manuscripts, still others in both.

1.3 Discovery as Invention: Michael Faraday

Like Kepler's discovery of the planetary laws, Michael Faraday's discovery of electromagnetic fields played a key role in a scientific revolution.s Oddly enough, it was a revolution that countered an important feature of the Newtonian synthesis. Gravity was a force that acted in a straight line and was transmitted instantaneously over the space between bodies; this phenomenon was referred to as 'action at a distance'. Kepler would have been horrified by the idea; he thought in terms of a real force emanating from the sun, contacting the planets like light and sweeping them around their orbits.

Newton's gravity became one model for how forces might operate in other domains. By the late eighteenth century, it was clear that the attraction and repulsion of electrical charges followed an inverse square law. Perhaps electricity was another instance of action at a distance.

This viewpoint had its critics, among them Michael Faraday, who rejected both the primacy of matter and the notion that electricity operated 'at a distance'.

8Por now, I am deliberately avoiding the debate over whether there are really any revolutions in science. In hindsight, one can see dramatic changes in scientific models and explanations of the way things work; as one studies the historical details carefully, however, continuities emerge. Similarly, when one looks closely at the evolution of a discovery, 'flashes of insight' tum out to be fewer and less dramatic. However, it is clear that both Kepler and Paraday knew that what they were proposing was dramatically different than what had gone before.

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TRANSFORMING NATURE

The examples of Faraday's problem-solving processes described in this section are distilled from detailed, fine-grained cognitive studies by Tweney (Tweney, 1989a) and Gooding (Gooding, 1990a). "For him [Faraday], fields of force were the primary reality, and 'matter' a secondary or derived phenomenon. To understand his creative life, then, we must acknowledge his position as a revolutionary, as someone who demonstrates the practicality of a world view completely different from the prevailing one, and who does this, not by metaphysical argument, but by· a series of compelling experimental demonstrations of such conceptual force that they could not be ignored" (Tweney, 1989a, pp. 94-5).

In 1816, Faraday saw electricity, magnetism and gravity as properties of matter; they accounted for cohesion and affinity, were responsible for attraction and repulsion and the same forces accounted for both chemical and physical phenomena (Tweney, 1985). Faraday's evolving mental model contained within it the possibility that the three forces could be unified (Nersessian, 1984).

Faraday was not an armchair speculator, however. His motto was, "il faut savoir de MANIPULER' (Tweney, 1985, p. 196). In 1820, Hans Christian Oersted showed that when a current passes through a wire, it acts as if it were a magnet. Furthermore, the force was directed transversely, at right angles to the wire--a major difference from gravitational force, which was directed radially. To understand what Oersted had discovered, Faraday repeated his experiments, varying conditions to explore the phenomenon. In the course of this research, he discovered that current through a wire could make a magnetic needle circle around it. In order confirm and demonstrate this discovery, Faraday invented the first electromagnetic motor.

David Gooding has reproduced this process in exquisite detail, replicating many of Faraday's experimental manipulations. Gooding believes that Faraday progressed via "a convergence of successive material arrangements (the apparatus) and successive construals (or tentative models) of the manipulation of the apparatus, and its outcomes" (Gooding, 1990b, p. 187). A construal corresponds roughly to what I am calling a mental model. Gooding's point is that, for Faraday, ideas, physical manipulations and objects are closely linked.

To find out how this linkage occurs, let us look more closely at what Faraday did. On September 3, 1821, Faraday began by exploring how magnetized needles behaved in the presence of strong currents. Humphry Davy, Faraday's mentor, and others predicted that a wire could be made to revolve or 'rotate'. To explore this possibility, Faraday built a new apparatus, consisting of a wire put through a cork which floated in water. The wire made contact with globules of Mercury at both ends; hence, he now had a wire that could rotate. He observed that the magnets thrust the wire form side to side: lateral motion, instead of rotation (Gooding, 1990a, p. 128). Then he bent the wire and discovered that repeated applications of the poles of the magnets produced a circular motion, if he looked down from above on the bent wire.

21

Discovery

This account sounds simple and straightforward, as discoveries always do, after the fact. Gooding has shown how difficult it is to reproduce Faraday's result and how dependent it was on his construals (Gooding, 1990a).

At the end of the day, Faraday proposed building a new apparatus in which a magnet would be stuck upright in wax in a cup of mercury and a piece of wire allowed to circle around it when a current was applied. Faraday eventually produced a model of this experiment that could be shipped to other scientists so that they could replicate Faraday's results, given careful instructions on what to do.

22

TRANSFORMING NATURE

---,-"_- cork seal

wire

glasstube~

mercury

-----SOft iron pole

Figure 2

Faraday's demonstration apparatus, which he sent to other scientists. All one had to do was add mercury and hook up a battery, and the wire would rotate. Reprinted with Permission of the Indiana University Press from Gorman (1992) Simulating Science, Fig 7-1, p. 143.

23

Discovery

In effect, Faraday had created what W. Bernard Carlson and I call a 'mechanical representation'. We created this term because we noted that inventors seemed to have sets of familiar moves or operations that were embodied in specific components. For example, Edison took a drum cylinder from his phonograph and used it to rotate the film on the first motion picture camera (Carlson, 1990). According to Jenkins (Jenkins, 1984, p. 153), "Any creative technologists possesses a mental set of stock solutions from which he draws in addressing problems." This drum cylinder was part of Edison's repertoire of stock solutions: when faced with a new problem, he drew on them.

These familiar mechanical moves are representations because they can be run in the imagination as well as on the bench top. Not only can we manipulate the physical world, we can form mental representations based on our manipulations and run these representations in our imaginations. As Gooding says, "These mechanical representations can be retained in memory; moreover, they are so well understood that their use will be consistent and the implications of their properties for other components of a device can readily be worked out" (Gooding, 1990b).

For Faraday, the motor shown in Figure 2 served as a mechanical representation, even though his goal was understanding the phenomenon discovered by Oersted rather than inventing a new technological system. Any theoretical account of induction would have to incorporate the behavior of this device. Faraday shipped it to others to in order to persuade them to incorporate his mechanical representation into their thinking.

Latour (Latour, 1987) discusses the role of a strategy called 'black boxing' in the development of technoscience (he uses this term to refer to the fact that the boundary between science and technology is fuzzy at best). Once a device or an experiment or a finding is black-boxed, it is treated as an unquestionable fact: no one needs to look inside that particular black box again. Gooding does not discuss whether Faraday's demonstration motor became a black box for others, but mechanical representations can evolve into shared certainties, used by multiple inventors and scientists to embody knowledge and procedures.

In my analysis of Kepler's discovery processes, I remarked on the delicate balance between stubborn adherence to a hypothesis and willingness to abandon or alter it in the face of negative evidence. In an 1818 lecture, Faraday argued that 'mental inertia', by which he meant stubborn adherence to one's ideas, was both a blessing and a curse. A certain amount of such inertia saves one from discarding promising ideas prematurely, but an excess prevents one from recognizing when an idea or approach no longer works.

On August 29, 1831, Faraday found that a transient current was generated in one coil of wire wound around an iron ring when a battery was connected to, or disconnected from, a second coil wound around the same ring. This experiment did not appear 'out of the blue'. Faraday was engaged in a variety of experiments

24

TRANSFORMING NATURE

directed at transient effects. Faraday's electromagnetic experiments were part of a larger 'network of enterprises', a term coined by Howard Gruber (Gruber, 1981) to explain the way in which Darwin's diverse research interests connected, and also the motivations for his work. Darwin's work on topics like barnacles and pigeon breeding facilitated the development of his theory of evolution. Similarly, Faraday's efforts to take a variety of transient effects and make them visible were all part of his network of enterprises.

Faraday's first attempts to find electromagnetic induction can be seen in his notebook as early as 1822 where he outlined an experiment surprisingly similar to ones he would conduct in 1831. Why the delay? The answer, according to Tweney (Tweney, 1989b), is that in 1822 Faraday did not realize the magnetic induction effect could be transient. Whereas by 1831, he had developed heuristics for making transient effects visible.9 He had also read recently about new ways of obtaining powerful effects using large horseshoe-shaped electromagnets (Tweney, 1985). So on August 29th, 1831, when Faraday connected a coil to a battery and observed a brief deflection of the needle, this was more than a chance or 'serendipitous' discovery. He was returning to an old idea with a new mental model that highlighted the importance of transient effects and new heuristics for producing them.

In his 1831 experiments, Faraday followed the same pattern as in his 1821 experiments that led to the motor kit: he began with construals and exploratory experiments, then moved to hypotheses and demonstrations. He showed the same combination of stubbornness and flexibility that characterized Kepler. From August 29 to October 28, he attempted to use both electromagnets and permanent magnets to induce a current. Overall, he obtained positive results only 40% of the time. The bulk of the negative results came with the permanent magnet. At this point, he exhibited an appropriate mental inertia--he did not discard his hypothesis concerning magnetic induction in the face of a few negative results. Like any good experimenter, Faraday was aware of the possibility of noise or error in results, especially given that he was trying to obtain a transient effect.

On October 28, he switched to a more powerful electromagnet at a colleague's house and the proportion of positive results rose to 80%. Now he was beyond the exploratory phase and on to reliable demonstrations. Faraday gradually evolved a sophisticated mental model of the lines of force that were generated by a magnetic

9Tweney uses the term 'script' for the kind of mental representation Faraday acquired. The classic example of a script is knowing what will happen when one goes into a restaurant--the script indicates that one will be shown to a table, be given a menu, presented with a bill at the end, etc. Scripts structure expectations. Similarly, Tweney argued that Faraday gradually acquired a script involving the accumulation of small effects to make a larger, often transient, effect visible, and this script played a crucial role in the 1831 experiments. But it is not clear why one would prefer the term script to heuristic in this case. In general, I have tried to avoid the confusing multiplication of terms that seems to occur so often in cognitive science by sticking to a few concepts. The downside of this strategy is that it glosses over important differences in forms of representation.

25

Discovery

or an electrical current; these ideas culminated in his concept of fields of force, which were given mathematical expression by Maxwell (Nersessian, 1984).

1.3.1 Faraday and the Five Generalizations

With this brief coverage of Faraday, let us turn to the generalizations we have carried over from past cases.

1. Discovery depends on finding a problem significant enough to be labeled an important achievement.

Faraday certainly selected one of the most important 'cutting-edge' problems of his time: how magnetism could be used to induce electricity.

2. Discovery depends on transforming that problem into a form that suggests a promising path to solution.

James Clerk Maxwell referred to Faraday as a "mathematician of a very high order" (Gooding, 1994, p. 4), even though Faraday rarely used equations. But Faraday did use what he called a 'rough geometrical method', a kind of mental modeling. We saw an example of this above in his work on electromagnetic rotations that led to a prototype motor. The same kind of careful, rigorous mental modeling led gradually to his mature idea of fields, or lines of force. Gooding describes Faraday's method as follows:

(i) represent particular behaviors of magnets, illuminated lines of induction, diamagnets, crystals and light rays in terms of patterns; (ii) use changes in pattern or arrangement to guide the development of structural models of the interactions of forces; (iii) try tliese by running them in the imagination or by simulated and real experiments; (iv) explore limiting cases by real- and thought-experimentation that invokes practical kriowledge of the geometry and topology of lines of force (Gooding, 1994, p. 22).

As Maxwell noted, Faraday provided "a method of building up an exact mental image of the thing we are reasoning about" (Gooding, 1994, p. 21). Kepler provided us with an example of a scientist who translated the results of his own mental modeling into equations. In Faraday's case, the equations were developed by James Clerk Maxwell, whose mathematical discovery played a critical role in the development of Einstein's theory of special relativity. An account of the interplay of visualization and formal mathematics in these discoveries lies beyond the scope of this book (Nersessian, 1984). It will suffice to say that Faraday's lines of force did play an important role in one of Kuhn's great scientific revolutions: the shift from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian world view.

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TRANSFORMING NATURE

3. Discovery depends on finding or inventing good data.

Faraday's invention of the first electromagnetic motor suggests the way in which he created mechanical representations in order to discover.

4. Discovery depends on a combination of flexibility and stubbornness, depending both on the individual scientist's cognitive style and on how she or he represents the problem.

Faraday's lecture on mental inertia suggests the way in which he reflected on the problem of flexibility and stubbornness. Late in his care~r, Faraday began another investigation that indicates the way in which he was careful to maintain just the right balance. He still adhered to the idea that the three main forces were all manifestations of a single, underlying force. He had demonstrated the intimate relationship between electricity and magnetism. Now he sought to demonstrate gravitational induction. To accomplish this, he dropped electrical coils down through cylindrical 'shot towers' to see if movement through an electrical field would induce an electric current in the coil. Initially, results confirmed his expectations--a current was produced. But true to his own advice, Faraday looked carefully for evidence that could disconfirm his explanation. The shot towers, it turned out, contained small amounts of magnetic material; therefore, the effect was simply another example of magnetic induction. But Faraday never abandoned his gravitational hypothesis, because he also knew the effect he was looking for could be very weak--perhaps he needed a far longer tower with much more gravitational mass.

5. The act of writing is part of the discovery process.

Lavoisier and Krebs revised and re-organized ideas that became discoveries in the course of writing them up for publication. Faraday's similar space of re­organization and revision seems to have been his notebooks: "he left us records of about 30,000 experiments, both successful and unsuccessful, as well as a large number of speculative idea books, bibliographies, indexes, scrap-books, etc., etc." (Tweney, 1991, p. 301). Faraday's notebook served as:

1) An external memory aid. Here the goal was to faithfully record results and ideas in a form that facilitated retrieval. Faraday experimented with a number of such schemes. He began with a static alphabetical index, but it was hard to add appropriate categories as the material grows, so he adopted a scheme of John Locke's, in which each entry is indexed by its first letter and first vowel. He also experimented with numbering schemes. Faraday spent a great deal of time organizing his external memory.

2) A space for speculation and exploration. Faraday also kept idea books, that were not dated and were full of blank spaces, for use in recording additional ideas on the same theme. Sometimes entries were crossed out. Faraday also used loose slips that contained a brief description followed by numbers corresponding to a

27

Discovery

diary entry. Tweney speculated that Faraday was using these to create an equivalent of a modem database.

1.3.2 Faraday as Hero

Is Faraday a hero, in the Campbellian sense? He was certainly treated as a hero by his contemporaries; as the Duke of Somerset wrote to Charles Babbage in 1835, "the story of Faraday is just one that is sure to make a great noise. There is something romantic and quite affecting in such a conjunction of poverty and passion for science ... he comes out as the Hero of chemistry" (Schaffer, 1994, p. 41).

Like Kepler, Faraday had a religious faith that the universe was orderly and comprehensible. Faraday belonged to a group of Christians who referred to themselves as Sandemanians. But whereas Kepler believed in a mathematical harmony, Faraday believed the 'book of nature' was comprehensible to anyone who had the patience to read it slowly and carefully--higher mathematics were unnecessary:

Since the Sandemanians accept that the Bible is written in a plain style we would expect them to attribute similar characteristics to nature. Indeed, Faraday assumed that nature possesses an inner coherence and simpliCIty. For example, he accepted that nature was governed by a set of God-given causal laws. These laws were not merely the result of God speaKing his will at the creation, they were also the work of a wise Creator who, avoiding unnecessary comrlexity, constructed the world on simple, plain principles. Faraday's belie in the indestructibility of force-­all phenomenal forces being manifestations of a more basic conserved force--can likewise be interpreted as an instance of this more general principle of simplicity (Cantor, 1985, p. 73).

Faraday's struggle to read this book therefore does not seem like a struggle, only the result of patient, careful experimentation. Genius is supposed to come in sparks, leaps and insights--it is a product of imagination, not mere manipulation. But Faraday illustrates that scientific revolutions can come from intimate, experimental contact with Nature--genius is in the hands and their products as well as in propositions and equations.

One of the scientists in C. P. Snow's novel The Masters (Snow, 1951) talks about how intoxicating it is to make Nature 'sit up and beg'. Faraday was such a scientist. However, in the case of a truly great experimenter, one might also argue that nature is making the scientist 'sit up and beg': the two are locked in an intimate dance. Faraday is a hero because he did not just read the book of nature­-he wrote a part of it by slowly and carefully exploring the relationships between forces. This characteristic of Faraday's is captured by the computer program created to emulate his discovery processes.

28

TRANSFORMING NATURE

1.3.3 Creating a Computational Model of Faraday's Cognitive Processes

Like Kepler and Krebs, Faraday has inspired computational research. In this case, instead of writing a program that emulates Kepler, (Gooding & Addis, 1990, Gooding & Addis, 1993) created a new computer tool called CLARITY which allows users to create diagrams that represent programs in a functional database called FAITH. CLARITY converts these diagrams into FAITH programs.

Instead of relying on computer scientists to model cases of discovery, CLARITY makes programming tools available to scholars like Gooding, who are studying science. As Gooding and Addis note, "CLARITY diagrams make hypotheses about inference and learning processes accessible; they can be discussed and criticized more readily than computer code and are therefore open to revision and experimentation in ways that most code-based modeling is not" (Gooding & Addis, 1993, p. 8).

For example, Gooding can use Clarity to generate graphs of Faraday's cognitive processes like the simple one shown in Figure 3. In this simple graph, we see Faraday begin with a goal, to make the wire move continuously, then decide to build an apparatus with which he will try to make the wire move. Triangles are used to denote goals, circles to represent mental outcomes and squares to represent physical ones, including observations.

Goal: Make the wire move continuously

Figure 3:

Build

Set up

Model the apparatus

First version of apparatus

Try The wire moves

A problem behavior graph depicting the beginning of the experiments that led to Faraday's electromagnetic motor. Adapted from (Gooding, 1990, p. 180).

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Discovery

This simplified diagram does not do justice to the complexity of Gooding's scheme, which allows him to characterize hierarchies of goals by the way he shades the arrows and show embodied cognition by superimposing circles and squares. Gooding was able to graph whole sequences of Faraday's experiments in this manner (Gooding, 1990a).

CLARITY could allow other scholars to do the same, and also permit them to see the assumptions underlying the graph. One could even draw CLARITY diagrams while interviewing a scientist, and run them to see if the results corresponded to elements of the actual discovery process. Such graphs would facilitate for more rigorous comparison of the cognitive processes of different discoverers.

CLARITY can be viewed as a compromise between top-down, algorithmic models like BACON and KEKADA that specify processes in terms of rules and bottom-up approaches typified by connectionist systems that learn from examples (Waltz, 1988). The functional approach allows one to create top-down models of discovery processes, but also to build them from the bottom up, looking closely at the fine-grained activities of the scientist.

An intelligent reader might ask at this point, "Who cares about all these computational simulations?" The central problem of cognitive science is that it is impossible to directly observe the mind in action. Therefore, one approach is to build a model of the mind, run it, and see if, given the same inputs as a discoverer, it produces the same outputs. Indeed, most cognitive scientists have accepted that any theory of human mental functioning should be expressed as a computer program of some sort (see Gorman, 1992 for a counter-argument). The danger is that more time will be spend building discovery programs than studying discoverers and further, that the languages and concepts of those doing the studying will be very different from those doing the modeling. CLARITY shows promise of being a computer tool that will encourage collaboration between modelers and scholars who do not have a computational background. So far, CLARITY has been tested only on Faraday, who was already the object of extensive study. To prove its promise, CLARITY needs to be tried on other cases.

In particular, the program's creators recognize that they need to come up with a "multi-agent model of the interactions of individuals and groups of practitioners, particularly the dynamics of consensus-seeking and of controversy in science" (Gooding & Addis, 1993, p. 99). In other words, Gooding and Addis recognize that discovery is a social process. Hitherto, we have talked mostly about the mind of the individual discoverer. Before we tum to a closer look at the literature on the psychology of discovery, let us cover at least one case that clearly illustrates how discovery involves multiple 'agents'.

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TRANSFORMING NATURE

1.4 Discovery as Negotiation: The Great Devonian Controversy

The MacArthur Foundation's 'genius' awards embody the classic Campbellian myth: the way to make great, positive changes in the world is to locate individual heroes, give them a million dollars, and let them be creative. In contrast, the Nobel Prizes are frequently awarded to more than one person; these awards seem based on the idea that discovery can be a collective effort.

For example, Watson and Crick shared the Nobel prize for the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. But as even Watson's entertaining, irreverent account of their discovery showed, they relied heavily on the work of others who were close on their tails (Watson, 1968) and there were other good candidates for inclusion in the award (Portugal & Cohen, 1977).

Similarly, Banting and Macleod were both awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin--and each promptly selected another colleague to share the award. Furthermore, the major paper announcing the discovery actually had seven authors (Bliss, 1982).

The negotiations among scientists about who deserves credit are frequently acrimonious; each of the original recipients of the insulin award thought the other did not deserve it, and the battle continued long afterwards. To find out more about the nature of the negotiations that lead to and follow up on a discovery, we once again need a case that has been studied in sufficient detail.

1.4.1 The Great Devonian Controversy

This controversy concerns the discovery of what we now call the Devonian period in geological history. The name comes from Devon, in England, where the strata that came to typify the Devonian sequence were first identified. This discovery grew out of an often acrimonious set of negotiations among at least ten major participants (Rudwick, 1985). In the interests of simplification, we will stick to a few main characters and a sub-set of the full story.

Roderick Murchison was a gentleman who had taken up geology because it afforded him a respectable hobby that could be combined with the pleasure he took in hunting. His mentor was another gentleman geologist, Adam Sedgwick, a respected president of the prestigious Geological Society. Murchison succeeded him in that post.

One of the controversies in the geology of the 1830s concerned the relative importance of two methods for dating strata: fossils and rock types. Murchison, who did his fieldwork in the Yorkshire, became impressed with the heuristic value of using fossils to date strata.

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Discovery

In contrast, Henry De la Beche, secretary of the Geological Society under Murchison in 1831, tended to favor rocks over fossils. As of 1831, younger and more recent strata were relatively well understood, but below the Carboniferous group was a large, undifferentiated area known as the Greywacke, the upper part of which was an area of "Transition limestone". Between the two was an area known as the "Old Red Sandstone".

In 1831 Murchison had an Eureka insight when he found a place where the Transition passed conformably into the Old Red. Actually, the Eureka was a myth; Murchison and at least one other geologist had observed this phenomenon before. Successful discoverers are also good at myth-making.

By 1834, Murchison had developed a hypothesis: that the Old Red Sandstone was divided into three parts, the middle of which had fish, but no plants; below that, the Transition also had sea fossils, but most of the Greywacke below had none. This hypothesis had economic implications in the search for coal, which--if Murchison were right--had to exist above the Old Red.

What appeared obvious in one area of England might look entirely different in another. When De la Beche did a survey in Devonshire in 1834, he found evidence to accord with his presuppositions--that fossil plants existed throughout the Greywacke, and therefore coal could be found in Greywacke as well.

Murchison and De la Beche had been sparring in letters already, but now the controversy broke into the open at a meeting of the Geological Society in December of 1834. Essentially, Murchison focused on fossils--if De la Beche had found Carboniferous fossils, then he had Carboniferous strata. De la Beche, who had actually studied the rocks, felt they looked like Greywacke. Indeed, he wrote a letter to another geologist in which he depicted himself confronting Murchison and his colleagues and, pointing to his nose, announcing, "This, Gentlemen, is my Nose," to which they responded:

My dear fellow--your account of yourself generally may be very well, but as we have classed you, before we saw you, among men without noses, you cannot possibly have a nose (Rudwick, 1985, p. 104).

De la Beche initially won Sedgwick's support, in part on the grounds that Murchison had found no distinctive Greywacke fossils and therefore his case hung on the absence of fossils, rather than on the presence of a distinct variety. Murchison then back-tracked a bit, claiming there were distinct fossil plants in the Old Red, although they were too poorly preserved for clear identification.

In 1835, Murchison, working in his Welsh Borderland area, labeled his Transition strata Silurian and confirmed that they contained no plant fossils. He also found a place where De la Beche had mistakenly applied the label Greywacke to Carboniferous coal-bearing strata. This piece of evidence was crucial in converting De la Beche's chief backer, Sedgwick, into a supporter of

32

TRANSFORMING NATURE

Murchison's view. While Murchison was discovering the Silurian system, Sedgwick was discovering the even older Cambrian system. Murchison referred to these groups of strata as systems because he was convinced that they were general and could be found anywhere in the world where erosion, eruption or other local disruptions had not erased them.

In July of 1836, Murchison and Sedgwick 'invaded' De la Beche's home ground, North Devon. They had hoped to find evidence of a discontinuity from the Carboniferous coal-bearing strata to the older Greywacke, caused by the way the strata were folded and had eroded. Instead, they found support for De la Beche's claim that there was a gradual transition. Despite the puzzling lack of an obvious discontinuity, they hypothesized a great trough of Carboniferous coal measures in the center of North Devon, which made an abrupt, unconformable transition to Silurian on the north side and Cambrian on the south.

In August of 1836, they presented their findings at a meeting of the British Association in Bristol. By the time of the meeting, Murchison had added a fourth band, or system, of strata, which he labeled 'Devonian'; on his map, these Devonian strata appeared between the Silurian and Cambrian systems north of the great Carboniferous trough in Devon. Sedgwick re-Iabeled these strata 'Upper Cambrian'. At this point, Murchison and Sedgwick obviously felt there was something different about this transition from Silurian to Cambrian, but they weren't sure what. Figure 4 compares De la Beche's hypothesis to Sedgwick and Murchison's.

33

Discovery

E X MOO R OARTMOOR

~ i "1 M ... '~~ ~ //~\\'~\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\d]~~\%\'§27T~~ A \ I '

G R A\ U W A I C K E \~ \ \~

,I ,-" / ----

B CAMBRIAN \OEVONIAN\L.SIL. \ COAL MEASURES (CULM) ",1 GRANITE

a b \ c d \e f \g h h g",J \

Figure 4

" '- .... _-----

;' -' /'

Competing hypotheses about the structure of the same geological strata. A corresponds to De la Beche's view, B to Sedgwick and Murchison's. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Chicago Press from (Rudwick, Fig. 7.6, p. 164).

34

TRANSFORMING NATURE

De la Beche was given an opportunity to respond at the meeting. "I was taken most deucedly in the flank:, my ammunition being in my magazines, and my guns dismantled, expecting nothing but peace, I made my retreat in the best manner I could" (Rudwick, 1985, p. 166). He conceded the plausibility of the Murchison­Sedgwick re-interpretation of the north Devon strata, but argued that there was nowhere any evidence of the unconformity that should have been observed. Later, he objected to this 'slapdash' introduction of new systems into Devon by geologists who had not studied the rock as carefully as he had. He was the one professional geologist in this group, hired to do the survey--his job was on the line, as well as his reputation.

Then a local geologist in Devon discovered plant fossils in strata Murchison and Sedgwick had labeled Lower Silurian. Murchison had claimed there would be no plant fossils this far down. He resolved this apparent anomaly by re­classifying these Silurian strata as Old Red Sandstone. Sedgwick laughed-off this interpretation and chided Murchison for relying too heavily on fossils. Though both authors agreed that De la Beche's hypothesis was wrong--and by this time, even De la Beche agreed it needed modification--they could no longer agree on all the details of their own hypothesis. The sticky problem of the missing unconformity remained unresolved.

Fossils from the strata in contention showed strong parallels with the Carboniferous but with some additional, new fossils, none of which were from the Silurian. Nor did these fossils seem characteristic of the few that had been found in the Old Red. These fossils were found by Austen, one of the large group of talented amateur geologists who entered the controversy, and were identified by fossil specialists in London. In other words, a broadening network of actors was playing a role in this controversy, which was featured prominently in William Whewell's Presidential address to the Geological Society in February of 1838.

That summer, Sedgwick read a paper which focused primarily on his Cambrian system, which had few fossils, therefore making a correlation across regions particularly difficult. Sedgwick conceded that there was no unconformity in North Devon, which meant post-Cambrian and post-Silurian strata had to go down much farther than either he or Murchison had proposed previously. Sedgwick still claimed that the bulk of the strata of Devon were upper Cambrian, but only in one location in Cornwall was he absolutely sure, and from that location he derived a few fossils characteristic of the Cambrian. In a subsequent field trip, he found these characteristic fossils in other places he had identified as Cambrian, but also ones characteristic of later periods.

Shortly afterwards, Murchison published his magnum opus on the Silurian System; towards the end, he speculated that the Old Red Sandstone might be a system like the Silurian, which could be found all over the globe. As yet there were no characteristic fossils. No coincidence, De la Beche published the report of his survey shortly afterwards, and criticized the idea that local arrangements of

35

Discovery

geological strata represented systems valid globally. Furthermore, fossils were as local as strata, in the sense that a species that flourished at one time in England might flourish under the same conditions centuries or even epochs later in another part of the world. For De la Beche, the fact that species characteristic of the Carboniferous appeared in rocks he labeled Greywacke did not mean these were more recent strata; it simply meant that these species had flourished at different times in different places.

Murchison had paved the way for a solution to the Devonian problem with his suggestion that the Old Red might be a system. Perhaps the questionable strata in Devonshire belonged to the Old Red. However, this new hypothesis meant making three major concessions to De la Beche:

1) There was no unconformity below the Carboniferous in Devon; instead, Carboniferous passed conformably into Old Red.

2) The fossils in the proposed Old Red in Devon were not identical to those found in the Old Red elsewhere, which meant that Murchison would have to agree that fossil evidence was not totally reliable, that there were important local variations which could make using the fossil record problematic.

3) De la Beche had even hinted that there might be Old Red sandstone in Devon, although his overall interpretation of their place and role differed from Murchison's.

Finally, there was another problem. Sedgwick objected to this Old Red idea because it corresponded to strata he had labeled Cambrian--the amount of Cambrian in England was shrinking, and with it the possibility of finding more than a handful of distinctive fossils so it could be extended world-wide, like the Silurian.

Murchison persuaded Sedgwick to adopt this new hypothesis and the two published a paper written by Murchison in the Philosophical Magazine. Instead of conceding his debt to De la Beche, Murchison attacked him for using parts of their re-analysis of Devon without giving him credit--and then appropriated some of De la Beche's views as if they had been his own! Specifically, Murchison pointed-out that he and Sedgwick had discovered the coal- measures trough in central Devon, but also claimed they noticed how it passed conformably into strata below, giving De la Beche no credit for this discovery.

Then Murchison made a classic rhetorical move. He gave the widely­recognized fossil specialist William Lonsdale credit for realizing that "the South Devon rocks would be found to occupy an intermediate place between the carboniferous and Silurian systems" (Rudwick, 1985, p. 283). Indeed, Murchison chastised himself for not reaching the obvious solution sooner, and claimed he had relied too heavily on the character of the rocks and not enough on the fossils! This was a total rewrite of the actual history of the controversy to make it appear

36

TRANSFORMING NATURE

that the solution had been obvious all along and that it was really proposed by an authority outside of the controversy. The end of the article proposed a new Devonian system equivalent to the Old Red Sandstone that lay between Carboniferous and Silurian. Murchison conveniently glossed over many of the remaining difficulties, including the fact that there were no clear Silurian strata under the new Devonian system in Devon, nor did the new system have any truly characteristic fossils. The article was a brilliant polemic.

Murchison canvassed members of the Geological Society shortly afterwards, and happily concluded that if De la Beche attempted an angry rejoinder, "we have enough powder and shot in our tumbrils to sink him" (Rudwick, 1985, p. 287} Murchison eventually apologized for some of his more pointed remarks, but made no concessions regarding the new system, which he now traced to an even more respected elder, the fossil specialist William Smith. Murchison had now placed himself firmly 'on the shoulders of giants', to adopt Newton's felicitous phrase. He conveniently ignored the contributions of lesser, Devon geologists like Robert Austen who provided much of the fossil evidence.

The leading participants began to reach a consensus on this new point of view­-even De la Beche conceded that the Devonian hypothesis had merit, especially as he felt the new synthesis vindicated some of his earlier views. But consensus was by no means universal, and could only be achieved by looking for the Devonian elsewhere. Murchison and Sedgwick traveled to the continent, where they were assisted by able European colleagues. "In the course of their long expedition, Murchison had turned most of the ancient Greywacke of the Rhineland into Devonian, only to find himself forced by the fossil evidence to turn much of it back into Silurian, leaving his confidence in the Devonian precarious if not collapsed. Sedgwick has seen his potential Cambrian annexed by the Devonian but later at least partially restored. He had totally lost confidence in the Devonian interpretation, of which he had been the nominal co-author only six months earlier. But whatever their differences, it would have been clear to both geologists that their best hope of resolving the Devonian problem, after almost five years of controversy, lay packed inside the boxes they had been sending back to London" (Rudwick, 1985, p. 329).

The newly discovered Devonian system was now on its deathbed--Sedgwick renounced it, Murchison had doubts, and others would soon follow. But Lonsdale and the other fossil experts showed that there was indeed a unique, intermediate group of fossils--that some of what Murchison and Sedgwick thought was Silurian was in fact Devonian. The difficulty was that there were Silurian fossils in the Devonian strata, in addition to other new fossils that promised to be characteristic of this system. Even with this evidence, Murchison had to work hard to persuade others. He took the campaign to Russia, where he found further evidence of the three systems and found evidence for a fourth, the Permian system.

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Who discovered the Devonian? Clearly Murchison became its champion, the one who really persuaded others that it was a system--indeed, the one most responsible for the widespread adoption of the idea of a geological system. But if one asks who ftrst found the evidence that pointed towards a new set of strata in Devon, then the picture becomes more complex: Lonsdale; Austen, Sedgwick and even De la Beche can be said to share part of the glory. In particular, after Lonsdale's fossil analysis resurrected the Devonian, geologists moved quickly to give him credit for discovering the system. Murchison and Sedgwick had to mount a counterattack to salvage their own claims, showing that not just fossils but fteld evidence played an essential role in establishing the Devonian.

The point is, the Devonian emerged out of a complex set of negotiations involving a number of actors. In contrast, the Silurian was more clearly a Murchison discovery and the Cambrian more clearly attributable to Sedgwick.

1.4.2 Could a Computer Resolve the Devonian Controversy?

The three discoveries discussed so far have been modeled or simulated on a computer. No one has done this with the Devonian case, but Paul Thagard (Thagard, 1988) has simulated the resolution of a number of other controversies, including the oxygen/phlogiston debate and the controversy over whether a comet caused the extinction of the dinosaurs (Thagard, 1990). He used a connectionist algorithm in which a theoretical position is represented as a network of connections among hypotheses and pieces of evidence. A connectionist model of Murchison's Devonian hypothesis, as he presented it in the Philosophical Magazine, might include positive connections to the hypothesis that there were global geological systems, to evidence to the conformable passages in the Devon strata and to some of the fossils, but negative links to other fossil evidence and to the fact that there were no Silurian fossils. De la Beche's Greywacke alternative would have positive links to the conformable strata, but negative links to fossils and to the idea of global systems. If we ran a Thagard-type program, Murchison's hypothesis would doubtless win.

But note that we set up the links in this connectionist simulation from Murchison's perspective. If we took De la Beche as the primary viewpoint, any links to a universal system would be negative because he was suspicious of this idea, and links to fossil evidence would be at best neutral. As Thagard admits, one can set up a connectionist simulation so any side in a controversy wins, depending on whose perspective one takes.

The real value of Thagard's simulation is that it could allow one to experiment with what evidence might change a participant's point of view, if they were evaluating the evidence rationally. For example, what would a simulation built from Murchison's perspective do if one added a negative link between the Devonian hypothesis and the first geological evidence from the Continent, which

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suggested there were no Devonian strata? Would this be enough to cause the weights for the Devonian hypothesis to fall below a critical threshold? Could one also add in a negative weight for the defection of his main collaborator, Sedgwick, and see how that affected the result? . All the weighting would be somewhat arbitrary, of course, but the point would be to play with the various connections and combinations, as a means of getting new hypotheses about the resolution of the controversy. Unfortunately, instead of seeing his connectionist simulation as a tool for play and exploration like Gooding and Addis' expert system, Thagard has argued that his simulation proves the correctness of his own philosophical position regarding the resolution of controversies (Gorman, 1989(a». The point is, you could create a simulation from another perspective and show that worked as well--but it would work differently, and that is where the fun begins.

There is still no multi-agent simulation that will allow us to create different agents with different agendas, run the simulation, and gain a new perspective on how the different actors in the controversy might have interacted under different circumstances.

1.4.3 Murchison as Hero?

Is Murchison the hero in this controversy? If so, he is a different kind of hero than the 'disinterested pursuer of truth' that has been our guiding heroic metaphor to date. Murchison is more like a general, with his frequent references to campaigns and artillery. His goal is to defeat De la Beche and then conquer the world with his and Sedgwick's geological systems. De la Beche also uses military analogies to describe his reversals in the battles.

Contrast this competitive picture of the motives for doing science with the following, "If someone, for example, Charles Darwin, becomes fascinated by science, the work itself draws him on; if he works hard it is because the task is hard and he is engrossed in it ... If he seems ascetic, it is because no jewel is more beautiful than the atom, no luxury cruise more fascinating than a voyage of discovery. The simple idea of task involvement provides the basis of understanding the organization of purpose of the working scientist" (Gruber, 1989, p. 250).

The exciting and frustrating thing about human beings is that, unlike billiard balls, we have multiple motives. It is no contradiction to seek a scientific truth in order to flatten an opponent. Indeed, this sort of competition may be critical to the advancement of science. Murchison alone could not have discovered the Devonian system. He needed to recruit allies, fight opponents and in the course of this, alter his own views to accommodate those of others, all the while denying any significant change in his position.

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Could a multi-agent computational simulation have achieved the same result without these 'hot' motives? In the next chapter, we will consider a simulation with human beings that might help answer this.

1.4.4 Discovery as Negotiation: The Five Generalizations

Let us see how the Devonian case affects our generalizations about discovery.

1. Discovery depends on finding a problem significant enough to be labeled an important achievement.

The problem of the geology of Devon was certainly of local significance. Murchison deserves some credit for turning it into a problem of global significance by claiming that systems should be universal. A discoverer can play an important role in establishing the significance of a problem. Therefore, this generalization should be modified:

1. Discovery depends on establishing that a problem is significant enough to be labeled an important achievement.

If there is already a consensus that a problem is important, then a scientist needs to establish that herlhis work is relevant to the problem.

Sometimes others establish this relevance post-hoc and even post-mortem. Consider the case of Gregor Mendel. According to the heroic myth, his 1865 paper on cross-breeding of traits in peas across successive generations was so revolutionary no one understood it at the time. In fact, it was well-received because, as Sir Ronald Fisher pointed out,

Each generation found in Mendel's paper only what it expected to find: in the first period, a repetition of the hybridization results commonly reported, In the second, a discovery in iriheritance supposedly difficult to reconcile with continuous evolution. Each generation, therefore, ignored what did not conform to its own expectations (Brannigan, 1981, p. 102).

Indeed, others in the mid 1800s had found results similar to Mendel's. In fact, Fisher argued that Mendel's ratios were too perfect, suggesting that he knew what results he ought to get, and that influenced his classification of the peas. The mantle of discoverer was awarded to Mendel by a later generation; Gregory Bateson and others established him as champion of the view that inheritance depended on combinations of dominant and recessive genes. Mendel certainly raises these issues in his paper, but it is not clear that even he saw their full significance for the evolutionary debates raging at the time (Brannigan, 1981).

The first of the 're-discoverers' made a move similar to Murchison, who attributed the discovery of the Devonian to Lonsdale. Similarly, Hugo DeVries cited Mendel in a 1900 paper as an after-thought because DeVries immediately

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became involved in a priority dispute concerning the discovery of the laws of segregation and dominance. Correns, one of DeVries' competitors, realized he was going to lose the priority dispute and so neutralized that loss by speculating that DeVries owed his discovery to a close reading of Mendel's paper (Brannigan, 1981). Similarly, one might label Lonsdale the discoverer of the Devonian system only because Murchison established the significance of his fossil work and used his name to neutralize opponents.

2. Discovery depends on transforming that problem into a form that suggests a promising path to solution.

Murchison and others had to agree on the nature of the problem in North Devon before it could be solved. Was there really a problem at all? If so, what should be the role of fossils and rock types? Was one looking for a universal system or a local one? Whose expertise should weigh heaviest in debates? Problem creation and transformation often depend on intense negotiations among scientists. Again, the Mendel example is relevant--the significance of his work was transformed by other, later scientists.

3. Discovery depends on finding or inventing good data.

The Devonian case illustrates that what constitutes data is often the outcome of a process of negotiation. De la Beche's analysis of the rocks in Devon--as obvious to him as his nose--was dismissed by Murchison because he regarded the evidence from fossils as more important. But when it appeared everyone would take Murchison's rhetorical move seriously and label Lonsdale the discoverer, Murchison had to appeal to rocks to restore his own claim.

BACON was given the data that was produced by the long set of negotiations between Kepler, Brahe and others. Similarly, one could give a program-­perhaps Thagard's--the picture of the data that emerged as a result of the controversy, and show that the program would reach the same conclusion as the participants. But the conclusion, at this point, would be embedded in the data.

Here generalizations two and three begin to merge. Transforming the problem transforms the data; transforming the data transforms the problem. So we could synthesize these two generalizations:

2. Discovery depends on transforming that problem into a form that suggests a promising path to solution, which includes locating and transforming the necessary data.

This is a much more controversial generalization than the previous one, as we will see in the next chapter, when we consider the cognitive literature on scientific problem-solving.

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4. Discovery depends on a combination of flexibility and stubbornness. depending both on the individual scientist's cognitive style and on the nature of the problem.

The Devonian controversy shows how patterns of flexibility and stubbornness occur partly as a function of negotiations among participants in a controversy. Murchison appeared the most stubborn partly because when he changed his mind, he disguised the fact, as much as he could, to establish that his view was, and always had been superior to his rival De la Beche's. In contrast, De la Beche, who publicly made much greater concessions than Murchison, stuck to his view that there was a continuous series of conformable strata in Devon and in private, ridiculed Murchison. Sedgwick was perhaps the most flexible, beginning as an ally of De la Beche's, then shifting strongly to Murchison, gradually and reluctantly allowing the Devonian to supplant his Cambrian system in Devon.

One could argue that Sedgwick was the most secure of the three, in terms of his reputation, social position and employment. Murchison was out to make a name and carve out a new career, but had independent income. De la Beche's primary source of income was the survey, so he had to proceed in a way that antagonized as few geologists as possible.

So, this generalization places too much emphasis on the individual. We might re-word it as follows:

4. Discovery depends on a combination of flexibility and stubbornness, depending on the cognitive styles and career trajectories of the scientists involved and on how they represent the problem ..

We could list a great many more factors in this generalization, but these few words will give the flavor. Whereas Faraday had to work hard to maintain the right balance between mental inertia and flexibility, it is possible in a controversy for some participants to adopt a more stubborn cognitive style, with flexibility emerging grudgingly out of competition. 'Career trajectories' can include relative eminence in the field, strategies for improving one's position and current or expected sources of funding. Problem representation can include theoretical commitments, like Sedgwick's desire to see his own Cambrian writ large-­therefore, part of his problem in Devon became finding Cambrian fossils, which colored his perception of the strata.

5. The act of writing is part of the discovery process.

The act of writing in the Devonian controversy is an intimate part of the negotiations. Indeed, were it not for letters, there would be no detailed study of this controversy! Therefore, this controversy adds a type of writing to our list, which now includes letters--or e-mail in modem times--alongside notebooks and drafts of articles.

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The four surviving generalizations suggest that discovery is not entirely mysterious, and that it can be taught, or at least encouraged. We hope to make them more precise by going more deeply into the relevant psychological and sociological literature in the next chapter.

1.5 The Double Helix

These generalizations are also based primarily on a sample of 'classic', pre­twentieth century discoveries, although we have made occasional references to more recent discoveries. The kind of intense negotiations that went on in the Devonian case also characterized the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, though the pattern of negotiations was different. Our Murchison and Sedgwick in the DNA case are Watson and Crick, but whereas the former were gentlemen of science, Watson was a post-doc and Crick a Ph.D. student at the Cavendish laboratory. Furthermore, whereas Murchison and Sedgwick eventually took credit for discovering separate systems, Watson and Crick shared the credit for DNA. Still, both discoveries emphasize the importance of collaborative teams.

Watson and Crick took Linus Pauling's methods for finding the helical structure in a complex protein and applied them to the structure of DNA. Initially, they came up with a triple helical structure, but Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin quickly convinced them that this model was incorrect. Here Wilkins and Franklin played roles similar to figures like De la Beche and Austen in the great Devonian. Franklin, in particular, supplied a critical photograph that suggested the double-helical structure, and also important constraints the model had to satisfy. While Watson and Crick received the credit, one could argue that Franklin, Wilkins and others in the small scientific community focusing on this problem deserve some of the credit, just as the small community of geologists played a major role in discovering the Devonian period.

A quick skate through the list of four generalizations suggest that they could be applied to the discovery of the double helix, though we should remember that the primary source is the recollections of one of the discoverers and such recollections are not totally reliable (Ericsson & Simon, 1984).

1. Watson and Crick targeted a problem that was recognized as very important.

2. They transformed it into a form that suggested the path to solution and found or were given the appropriate data. According to Weisberg, the most significant problem transformation was the first one, suggested by Pauling: "There were thus several discontinuities in Watson and Crick's discovery: the change from three to two strands, the change in position of the backbones, and the change from parallel to antiparallel backbone chains. All of these discontinuities came about without restructuring; both alternatives existed as possibilities throughout the

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work because Watson and Crick had decided DNA was helical" (Weisberg, 1995, p. 60). However, if the other transfonnations or re-structurings were so trivial, one might ask why other researchers like Franklin, Pauling and Wilkins did not solve the problem. Watson and Crick had to do a great deal of physical modeling in an effort to find the correct sequence and structure, literally building the DNA sequence out of cardboard. This kind of modeling was favored by Pauling, but was anathema to Wilkins and Franklin.

The amount of transfonnation necessary to discovery varies from case to case. Consider an astronomical example: the location of the optical source of a pulsar. The transfonnation here was to recognize that the optical pulses recorded on an oscilloscope corresponded to a radio pulsar in the Crab Nebula. This is actually a significant transfonnation that would not be obvious to someone outside this area of astronomy, but was not a significant transfonnation for the astronomers involved. It was not as trivial as a Baconian data-driven discovery, either--they had to check and re-check for artifacts and alternate explanations (Lynch, 1992).

3. Watson and Crick were both flexible and stubborn, sticking to their helical mental model but modifying the shape and arrangement of the structure as they found or were given new data.

4. It is not clear that writing played a major role in this discovery. Watson did jot down important ideas from time to time, though he did not keep a notebook. His breezy account of the discovery should be supplemented by a careful study of any written documents, including drafts of the research note announcing the discovery.

Communication, however, was extremely important. Watson and Crick were not only in constant conversation with each other, they were also in touch with Wilkins, Franklin and, through his son, with Pauling. They drew on the expertise of other scientists and laboratories as well. For example, Watson admitted that one of their greatest advantages was having the crystallographer Jerry Donohue in the office next door; it was Jerry who told Watson that infonnation commonly available in chemical textbooks about guanine and thymine was wrong. This news eliminated the possibility that DNA was built on a 'like pairs with like' model; instead, adenine paired with thymine and guanine with cytosine.

Perhaps it would be better to broaden the generalization about writing to focus on communication, and keep writing as an important category:

5. Communication is part of discovery.

Important fonns of communication include: A. Writing

1. Journal articles 2. Letters 3. Notebooks and rough sketches of ideas on scraps of paper

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B. Oral communication 1. Conference papers 2. Conversations

So, at least one twentieth century case-study has reinforced the relevance of the generalizations and helped us modify them. More and more excellent studies of twentieth century scientists are emerging; I encourage readers to try these generalizations on other cases. For example, Holton describes in elegant detail the way in which Einstein and Bohr transformed problems (Holton, 1973) and Galison takes us into the fine-grained negotiations involved in experimental physics (Galison, 1987).10

The larger question is, can one make generalizations about discovery at all, or is each act of discovery entirely idiosyncratic? The problem with many studies of discovery is that they are framed in the language of the author, making comparisons difficult. Holton, Galison and Gruber use different frameworks and focus on different aspects of discovery. This is creative and may lead to a broader view of the phenomenon, but it makes comparison difficult.

In this chapter, I tried to pick discovery cases which were detailed and comprehensible enough to allow a re::der to question the perspectives taken by those who studied them. The fact that each had inspired some kind of computational simulation gave us a basis for comparison. I cast these discoveries in my own framework, which I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter--in part so the reader will see my assumptions, and feel free to disagree with them.

What about failed discoveries? All of the above generalizations might characterize failures as well as successes. For example, Leverrier, who predicted the existence and position of Neptune, used the same techniques to predict the existence of a planet Vulcan between Mercury and the sun (Schaffer, 1994). Another astronomical case will provide us with a more detailed case of a discovery that wasn't.

1.6 The Canals on Mars

In 1877, Schiaparelli discovered can ali (channels) on the surface of Mars. Earlier observers had hinted at the existence of such features, but Schiaparelli's were sharper and more systematically arranged (Hoyt, 1976). Percival Lowell, a wealthy American astronomer who built his own observatory, turned Schiaparelli's channels into canals, and became their champion in a debate that lasted over a quarter of a century. He came up with a complex system of canals, which he claimed were built by an advanced civilization as the planet turned gradually into a desert. Lowell and Schiaparelli were not the only ones to see

1Opor a good set of very brief studies of scientific and mathematical creativity, see (Gingerich, 1982).

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these canals; indeed, members of the British Astrpnomical Association reported seeing more than a hundred.

If this were a successful discovery, there would have been the usual argument about who deserved priority, Lowell or Schiaparelli. Instead, the blame for a false discovery was laid at Lowell's door.

Three problems eroded support for the canals:

1) Not all astronomers saw them. Lowell argued that he used superior observational techniques, including spending far more hours observing Mars than most other astronomers.

2) Experimental evidence with human partICIpants. Several astronomers attempted to conduct crude experiments to find out whether the canals might be some sort of optical allusion. One of Lowell's own observatory group placed artificial planets at a distance of about a mile, studied them through a telescope and found that "some well known planetary appearances could, in part, be regarded as very doubtfuL" (Hoyt, 1976, p. 160). He was fired for his pains. A British astronomer, E. Walter Maunder, asked school boys to copy pictures of Mars; they drew in canals, even though none were present. A similar experiment with French schoolboys yielded the opposite result, but even so, the British Astronomical Association concluded that those members who had claimed to see canals "really saw something very different from the straight lines they imagined they were looking at" (Hoyt, 1976, p. 160).

3) Improved astronomical equipment: Eventually, better telescopes and photographic equipment found no evidence of the canals--the last reported sighting came in 1924. By this time, Lowell had been dead for eight years.

Do our generalizations show evidence of a failed discovery in the making, in this case?

Generalization #1: Were the canali on Mars a major problem before Lowell?

Arguably not--like many discoverers, Lowell sought to establish the significance of what he had found. For example, he might, like Schiaparelli, simply have said he had seen mysterious lines on the face of Mars. Instead, he developed a theory concerning the presence of the lines that explained why they varied with the seasons and why on at least one occasion, new ones appeared.

Generalization #2: Did Lowell transform the data?

Certainly--in hindsight, it is obvious he created the data, and convinced others that they saw it, too. But he would have argued he was simply describing what was there. In other words, for Lowell, this was a data-driven discovery--the lines came first, and the theory followed. Of all the discoveries we have studied so far,

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Lowell's had the weakest grounding in prior theory. However, Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift began with an observation about the way the shapes of the continents and the continental shelves fit together (LeGrand, 1988). Unlike Lowell, Wegener was able to refer to multiple lines of evidence in favor of his discovery: not only did the shapes of the continents match, but also the flora and fauna on either side, and continental drift could be used to explain patterns of global climate change.

Generalization #3: Did he maintain a balance between stubbornness and flexibility?

No--once he had established his theory and network of canals, he never altered it in the face of criticism. This stubbornness is often a hallmark of successful scientists (Mitroff, 1974). Wegener, for example, never abandoned continental drift, though he altered what the he philosopher Imre Lakatos (Lakatos, 1978) refers to as the corollary assumptions surrounding the hard core of a theory. For example, in response to criticisms from physicists, Wegener de-emphasized the portions of his hypothesis that attempted to explain how the drift occurred (LeGrand, 1988).

Generalization #4: Did writing playa role in his discovery?

Lowell wrote extensively about the canals, particularly for a general audience, including books, lectures and articles for Scientific American and Nature. He also published regular, detailed reports from his observatory and wrote lengthy letters to his critics, especially those who challenged his priority. Lowell's writing made the canals controversy and Mars itself a center of attention shortly after the turn of the century. It is harder to say what role these writings played in convincing the author himself. More detailed study of Lowell's notebooks and drafts is needed.

The Lowell example suggests that our generalizations do not clearly discriminate between successful and unsuccessful discoverers. Lowell's work was based less on theory and he was a bit more stubborn than most of the other discoverers we have studied. Basically, Lowell's problem was that the canals just weren't there. This kind of appeal to reality as the ultimate arbiter of scientific disputes is anathema to some sociologists of science, whose work we will discuss briefly at the beginning of the next chapter. But in terms of advice for future discoveries, the Lowell case suggests another generalization, one that we hinted at in the Faraday case:

6. Successful discoverers often pursue a network of related enterprises.

This is necessary so that if one potential discovery doesn't pan out, it is not fatal to the whole enterprise (Gruber, 1989). As noted above, Faraday was never able to translate gravity into electricity, but this was not fatal to his larger goal of demonstrating the unity of forces--his failure in one area was balanced by

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significant successes in others. Similarly, Lowell's persistent search for a 'Planet X' beyond Neptune was instrumental in the eventual discovery of Pluto (Hoyt, 1980). He patiently calculated and re-calculated the probable orbit of 'Planet X', and put the Lowell observatory to work searching for it at intervals between 1905-1916, but he died before it could be discovered. Still, the search for Planet X was one of the legacies he left the observatory. Clyde Tombaugh, who was hired by the observatory and given new equipment to search for Planet X, found Pluto at a position close to Lowell's predictions in 1930.

But was the discovery due to Lowell's calculations or to sheer persistence? The controversy raged for years. Pluto appeared to be much smaller than Lowell's Planet X--so small that it was doubtful it could have had calculable effects on the orbit of Uranus. In 1978, the discovery of Pluto's moon Charon confirmed that Pluto was tiny--a few thousandths of the Earth's mass--and therefore it was persistence and not theory that discovered Pluto.

This discovery suggests a seventh, not entirely tongue-in-cheek generalization:

7. Successful discoverers have to be lucky.

One can be persistent, have a mental model which prepares one to make a discovery and the best possible equipment, but still fail because there simply isn't anything to be discovered. Of course, even a failed search can generate lots of important information. Tombaugh continued to search for planets beyond Pluto, and he was able to determine that none existed above the 16th magnitude. This kind of negative information is very important. In the course of this search, he also discovered a wide range of interesting astronomical phenomena, including a new globular cluster and a cloud of some 1800 galaxies (Hoyt, 1980).

Obviously, one cannot teach students to be lucky, but one can remind them to be prepared to take advantage of surprises. The bit of mold that landed in Alexander Fleming's petri dish is the classic example--had he and Florey, Chain and others not diligently pursued this bit of serendipity, penicillin never would have been created (Macfarlane, 1984).

Similarly, Henri Becquerel put uranium salts, a copper cross and a photographic plate in a dark closet, awaiting a sunny day to test his idea that sunlight would make the phosphorescent uranium emit rays. But after several cloudy days, Becquerel developed the plate anyway, and found to his surprise that the image of the cross stood out on the plate. It was the Curies, Ernest Rutherford and others who eventually explained the phenomenon of radioactivity. Marie Curie, in particular, received two Nobel Prizes, one shared with Becquerel and her husband Pierre for the discovery of radioactivity and another on her own for the discovery and isolation of radium. Despite these accomplishments, she was never admitted to the French Academy of Sciences, which was at that time an all­male club. Marie Curie eventually paid with her life for her pioneering work, but her daughter carried on, earning her own Nobel Prize for the discovery of

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artificial radioactivity, which she shared with her husband, Frederic Joliot (Quinn, 1995).

Were Fleming and Becquerellucky? Yes, but as Pasteur noted, "in the field of observation chance favors only the prepared mind" (quoted in Root-Bernstein, 1989, p. 87). They were both primed to take advantage of a surprise generated in the course of their research. We should also refer to prepared minds, in both of these cases--others took the initial discoveries and carried them forward to make penicillin and radium.

So, instead of making 'be lucky' a sixth generalization, let us recognize the importance of taking advantage of luck. This fits under generalizations four and seven: great scientists pursue a network of related enterprises and remain open to surprises that occur in the course of their research program.

1.7 Understanding and Teaching Discovery: What Have We Learned?

Hopefully, this chapter has demolished the idea that process of discovery can be reduced to an algorithm. But hopefully we have also shown that it is not totally mysterious--that when one looks closely at cases of discovery, one can make generalizations about the process that would prove of value to students, managers and all those interested in how human beings have managed to find order in the universe.

Could these generalizations be made more rigorous? Might there be aspects of the discovery process that are more algorithmic? Could we give more specific advice to teachers and managers? In the next chapter, we plunge more deeply into the literature on cognitive psychology of science and, to a lesser extent, sociology of science in an effort to find out.

What about motivation? Earlier, we sketched a picture of the heroic scientist, motivated by a search for the grail--but also by a desire to stake out here or his claim to be the first to find it. Albert Szent-Gyorgi once cynically remarked that, "If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and to into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egoists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature" (Szent-Gyorgi quoted in Holton, 1978, p. 235). Indeed, one could argue that even the hero who returns with the Grail can bring

misery and suffering: witness Einstein's famous E=MC2, which made possible the development of atomic weapons (see Chapter 4 for more details).

Is it possible to seek the Grail of scientific knowledge while at the same time promoting one's own career and also trying to benefit others? We will consider

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these issues in greater depth in Chapters 4 and 5. For now, let us turn to the question of whether scientific methods could be used to gain a better understanding of the process by which scientific discoveries are made.

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CHAPTER 2 UNDERSTANDING DISCOVERY

This chapter will describe the research conducted by cognitive scientists who study scientific thinking and reasoning. Surprisingly few of these studies have been conducted using actual scientists. In this chapter, we will find out why. We will also learn more about terms like 'mental model' and 'heuristic' that were used in Chapter 1. We will also try to show, by way of contrast, how science can be studied from other perspectives, particularly the wide range of view loosely identified as having to do with the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK).

2.1 The Emergence of A Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

History, philosophy and sociology have strong sub-disciplines associated with the study of science. There is no equivalent in psychology--instead, there are scattered practitioners who do psychology research relevant to science, but very few take on a professional identity as psychologists of science. As a consequence, psychology's contributions to the study of science--and invention, as we will see in subsequent chapters--is not as great as sociology and philosophy because these disciplines have carved up the study of science in a way that appears to exclude cognitive psychology. It is worth providing a brief thumbnail sketch of how this state of affairs came to pass--call it a mythical reconstruction, in the best Campbellian sense, because any account like this is a great oversimplification of a much more complicated story.

Philosophy of science before Kuhn assumed the underlying logic of science is what is really important, not the mental processes of individual scientists. The information is out there in the world; all we have to do is see it, and while there may be interesting stories to tell about how perception works, physiologically, and why it and other psychological processes lead to occasional errors, basically, science is a rational progression towards truth. For example, Karl Popper saw little rationality in the way in which scientists arrived at their conjectures about

Understanding Discovery

the universe and its laws, but the way in which their ideas were subjected to testing by the scientific community had to be rational. According to Popper, science advances by discarding false hypotheses and replacing them with ones that are better approximations to the truth , a kind of asymptotic progression where science never arrives at a final, absolute truth but does come gradually closer and closer (Popper, 1959; Popper, 1992). This distinction between discovery and justification allowed philosophers like Popper to bracket psychological processes and ignore them.

The historian of science Thomas Kuhn, in contrast, put the way a scientist represented the universe of possible choices at the center of his philosophy of science (Kuhn, 1962). This emphasis on mental representations is also central to cognitive psychology, which in many ways is the study of how we represent the world.

According to Kuhn, he was working on a dissertation in theoretical physics when he took a course on physics for the non-scientist that included a strong component of history of science.

To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its specIal success.

These conceptions were ones I had previously drawn partly from scientific training itself and partly from a long-standing vocational interest in the philosophy of science. Somehow, whatever their redagogic utility and their abstract plausibility, those notions did not at al fit the enterprise that historical study displayed. Yet there were and are fundamentals to many discussions of science, and their failures of versimillitude therefore seemed thoroughly worth pursuing. The result was a drastic shift in my career plans, a snift from pftysics to history of science and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical problems back to the more philosophical concerns that had initially led me to history (Kuhn, 1962, p. 5).

Kuhn had heard a hero's call to ajoumey that ended-up transforming science studies. The textbook accounts of science he read in graduate school and the rational reconstructions by philosophers of science did not square with historical accounts of how scientific discoveries actually occurred. Kuhn decided that most of the time, scientists do what he called normal science--they work within the framework of a paradigm, which suggests what kinds experiments are most promising and how to interpret the results. Philosophers have criticized Kuhn for the vagueness ofthis concept (Masterman, 1970), but its vagueness is its strength.

Kuhn felt scientists learned their paradigm through exemplars.

It was Kuhn's crucial insight that the fundamental units of scientific knowledge are not theories, nor even theories and associated observations, but solved problems. Problem solutions are the irreducible units of resource in scientific research: they are the models on the basis of

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which further problems are solved. Some of these problem solutions come to be recognized as holding a special promise for future research, and become accepted as authoritative bases for its practice in specific disciplines or specialties in science. These are exemplary achievements or paradigms. In them, theoretical discourse, practice and instrumentation are linked together and grasped in operation: they are understood in use in a way- that they could not be understood by abstract consideration" (Barnes, Bloor, & Henry, 1996, pp.101-2).

To use the language of situated cognition, the kind of scientific knowledge represented by exemplars is embodied in devices and fine-grained experimental procedures which shape the sorts of experiments and observations scientists in a particular field conduct, and how they interpret them.

Those who give Kuhn's ideas a radical interpretation hold that the notion of a paradigm is consonant with the cultural beliefs and ritual practices of primitive tribes (Pinch, 199n Scientists operating within a paradigm don't see it as a hypothesis, subject to test and change; the paradigm corresponds to the way the world is. Before Kepler, the planets moved in perfect circles. Before Lavoisier, burning produced phlogiston. Lavoisier not only created a new theoretical framework; he also provided exemplary experimental procedures. Faraday's portable electromagnetic motor is another exemplar. Eventually, scientists like these generate enough anomalous results to precipitate a paradigm shift., where an anomalous result is something that does not fit within the existing paradigm--like the orbital data for Mars generated by Tycho Brahe.

Kuhn used research in Gestalt psychology to explain what happens when a paradigm shift occurs. Gestalt psychologists thought that in perception, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. If one changed a small element of a scene, it could suddenly change the way the whole scene was perceived. Kuhn cited an experiment in which the psychologists Bruner and Postman showed participants ordinary playing cards at brief exposures. This kind of brief exposure design is often used in perception experiments to test more automatic perceptual processes. But, as the Gestaltists often showed in their experiments, even brief, 'automatic' processes depend on expectations. In this experiment, some of the playing cards were anomalous, e.g., a black four of hearts. Participants took much longer to recognize these cards. Kuhn quoted one comment, "I can't make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn't even look like a card that time. I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or heart. I'm not sure I even know what a spade looks like. My God!" (Kuhn, 1962, pp. 63-4).

To Kuhn, this kind of dramatic shift in representation is at the core of scientific revolutions. Kepler certainly experienced it when he abandoned the universe of perfect circles. Empirical evidence is still central to Kuhn's view. Anomalous results have to pile up before a paradigm shift can occur. But there is still room for psychological explanations of why the anomalies trigger a representational crisis in a Kepler or an Einstein and not others, of how others then become convinced to abandon the old paradigm.

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According to our mythically-oversimplified account, sociologists of science before Kuhn were more concerned with accounting for the kinds of norms that governed scientific conduct, and also for the way in which non-scientific political and ideological interests accounted for the errors that scientists made (Barnes, et aI., 1996). In other words, reality, was a sufficient explanation for why scientists eventually discovered aspects of the structure of the universe. Robert K. Merton, one of the fathers of sociology of science, argued that, "specific discoveries and inventions belong to the internal history of science and are largely independent of factors other than the purely scientific" (Merton, 1970).

Sociology might be used to explain why Kepler took so long to discard the perfect circle dogma and also why not all scientists immediately embraced his view. The Catholic church's resistance to heliocentric models would be such a factor. 1 1 Here we have sociology as a way of explaining why the right answer, scientifically speaking, wasn't immediately obvious to everyone. This takes us back to BACON--if a computer can find Kepler's laws in a few minutes, and a group of college students in a few hours, why did it take civilization so long? Must be sociology.

This kind of sociology is certainly very important, but more recently, sociologists of science have tried to understand how scientific knowledge is created, regarding reality as an insufficient explanation. Kuhn drew an explicit analogy between scientific and political revolutions, thus opening the door to a consideration of how sociology shapes scientific knowledge. A new Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) gradually emerged as a kind of paradigm for studying science, at least among certain sociologists and anthropologists. I use the word 'paradigm' here loosely--SSK is a term which covers many different approaches, and there are sociologists who regard SSK as anathema. But from the standpoint of our almost mythically-oversimplified reconstruction, SSK made the radical assumption that the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge were proper objects of sociological study. The corollary assumption was that scientific knowledge was at least in part constructed through social negotiations.

These ideas have been controversial, to say the least. To some critics, it sounded as if SSK were undermining the idea of scientist as discoverer of truth-­instead, we might substitute scientist as skilled manipulator of social networks, with the end result having no more absolute validity than any other socially­accepted custom. Let us consider this issue in more detail.

11 The Church was, and is, a complex institution in its own right, and not all Catholics opposed heliocentric models (Koestler, 1963). A true sociological analysis would tease out these various competing interests in the Church and take into account similar interests among the various Protestant groups in order to discuss the role of religion in the reception of Kepler's theory. Again, we are making an almost mythical oversimplification in order to illustrate one way of viewing the sociology of science.

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2.2 The Scientific Method: Road to Truth or Superstitious Practice?

When an anthropologist starts to question members of a culture about why they believe what they believe--why, for example, they believe that there are spirits in rivers or trees-- the 'natives' will be baffled, if not annoyed. "Because that's the way the world is", might be a typical (friendly) response. The typical anthropologist would not regard this statement as a sufficient explanation; she would look for more evidence as to why this system of beliefs was adopted.

If our anthropologist were then to enter a scientific laboratory and press a practitioner to explain why she believed in quarks, or genes, the answer might be: "Because they exist." One of the methodological principles of the new sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is symmetry: "the sociological explanation of beliefs in science should be pursued equivalently for both true and false beliefs" (Pinch, 1993, p. 363). In other words, appeals to reality are not sufficient to explain belief systems. True and false is an evaluation all cultures make, relative to their belief systems; an outside observer of a culture should not privilege these accounts.

Consider an example, which we will borrow from the new sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK)12 (Latour, 1986). Supposing we were studying the ritual practices and beliefs of a tribe called the Azande. Take a rain dance, for instance. The Azande shaman, or skilled practitioner of the dance, would be able to explain every success and failure and show that it did, indeed, achieve the desired effect, when done properly.

If we studied this Azande practice from an outside perspective, we could explain every success and every failure in terms alien to the Azande and ultimately show, to our satisfaction, that the dance had no effect on the rain. In contrast, if we adopted an Azande framework to study the Azande system of beliefs, we might come up with some interesting new interpretations that improved ritual practices, but we would be unlikely to decide that whole Azande system was worthless as a general method for improving human relationships with nature.

12SSK basically differs from sociology of science in three ways (Hicks & Potter, 1991): 1) SSK focuses more on scientific knowledge claims than on (say) institutional and organizational structures. 2) SSK investigates how knowledge claims are negotiated within the scientific community, rather than on negotiations between scientists and outsiders. 3) SSK focuses more on the context of specific knowledge claims, rather than on (say) the explanatory structure of scientific theories.

In other words, SSK puts sociology at the heart of science, where knowledge is generated, communicated and negotiated. Because the SSK approach is by its nature suspicious of rules, there are plenty of practitioners who stretch beyond the rough boundaries suggested by the three points above. In particular, SSK researchers are pushing beyond the scientific community to tackle applied science, science education, science studies--and even reflexive analyses of SSK.

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One can use powerful techniques like ethnography to study scientific laboratories--the same sorts of techniques that might be used to study a tribe in the Amazon. One should also take the same attitude studying these natives, keeping a kind of anthropological distance. One should not go into a study of the scientific laboratory or of the Azande village by assuming, at the outset, that the practices one observes do lead to the truth, if done properly. Nor should one assume the converse--that the sets of rituals one observes are simply primitive mumbo-jumbo which cannot possibly lead to a greater understanding of nature and the universe. In the course of study of any culture, one may uncover great truths.

To summarize our argument so far, when one studies scientific practice, one should keep a bit of anthropological distance and not take all the scientists' accounts of their own behavior at face-value. Nor should one ignore those accounts. There are two kinds of anthropological distance one must try to maintain:

1) Practitioner: Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, in a recent stinging attack on much of social studies of science, imply that in order to study science, one has to have professional training equivalent to a scientist: "We are saying, in effect, that a scholar devoted to a project of this kind must be, inter alia, a scientist of professional standing or nearly so" (Gross & Levitt, 1994, p.235). Certainly, deep knowledge of the subject matter is important, but being a scientists can assume adherence to a view of the world in which certain practices lead unquestionably to a kind of truth. Not all scientists hold such views (Wise, 1996), but those that do would have to be able to bracket their beliefs in order to study them critically. Charging such a scientist with studying her practice would be akin to asking the Azande shaman to evaluate her beliefs--it is a rare shaman or scientist that could attain this sort of distance. William Keith imagines the scientist responding to the sociologist or anthropologist: "We thought (science) was about seeking truth, while you think it's about social arrangements" (Keith, 1995, p. 321).

Let us try to make this difficult point clearer by considering Kuhn's views once again. During a period of crisis, or revolution, scientists in an area become aware that they are operating within a paradigm and that other views are possible. Kuhn argued that holders of an existing paradigm could not even understand a new point of view, because the two belief systems were incommensurable. An example is Barbara McClintock's discovery of genetic transposition (Keller, 1983). She was working on corn in the mid-1940s at a time when most geneticists were working on drosophila, and she generated a set of anomalies by looking closely at the way in which mutations occurred. After six years of hard, relatively isolated study, she concluded that whole sections of the chromosome could be transposed to another location, and that this was a process that illustrated the normal functioning of the whole genetic system, not an odd or unusual event.

Her initial attempts to communicate this discovery failed almost totally; other geneticists literally did not know what she was talking about, both because what she described was theoretically at odds with the dominant paradigm, and because

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her methods and the organism she studied were unfamiliar to most. "Central to neo-Darwinian theory was the premise that whatever genetic variation does occur is random, and McClintock reported genetic changes that are under the control of the organism. Such results just did not fit in the standard frame of analysis.

"But it was not only the ideas themselves that were foreign, and hence difficult to grasp for most geneticists; the very kinds of evidence she presented, or rather the patterns it formed were also difficult to follow ... Her knowledge of maize was more intimate and more thorough than that of anyone else in the audience" (Keller, 1983, pp. 144-5). This is the kind of combined theoretical and methodological incommensurability that could occur at times of paradigm shift, according to Kuhn. McClintock's work was eventually recognized in the mid 1970s when similar conclusions emerged from work on bacteria (Keller, 1983), and she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1983. This thirty-year hiatus is an example of how long a period of incommensurability can last, but also how it can eventually be overcome.

Kuhn later reduced the importance of incommensurabilities, but those who take a radical view of Kuhn have continued to emphasize it (Pinch, 1997). If this radical view of Kuhn were right, then it would be very difficult to find a practicing scientist who could study her area of science. Consider a 'normal scientist' in genetics looking at what McClintock was doing in the 1950s. Joshua Lederburg concluded she was "either mad or a genius" after visiting her lab (Keller, 1983, p. 142). To study science, one would need a scientist who could bracket what he 'knew' about the realities in his field.

2) Methodological: Kuhn argues that science does not lead to truths about the universe, but rather makes progress by solving puzzles. "I do not doubt, for example, that Newton's mechanics improves on Aristotle's and that Einstein's improves on Newton's as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein's general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle's that either of them is to Newton's" (Kuhn, 1962, pp.206-7).

An anthropologist or psychologist studying science should be careful not to rely on the puzzle-solving practices of a particular field of science to evaluate that area. We discussed this problem above; it is easily solved by noting that our anthropologist will use methods derived from her specialty, perhaps ethnographic techniques, and a psychologist will use tools appropriate to her discipline (see below). Gross and Levitt's professional scientist who studies science would have to receive special training in social sciences as well.

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2.2.1 Ideological relativism

Kuhn's emphasis on puzzle-solving over ontological truth is also prone to a radical interpretation: that science does not lead to absolute truths. This point of view is often referred to as ideological relativism. It implies that the beliefs of the Azande are just as true as the claims of science--'truth' is a relative notion, and truths vary from culture to culture.B Perhaps we can never escape our cultural assumptions, and science is simply an outgrowth of a particular culture's assumptions that the observer can be separated from the observed. There is no absolute, rational boundary between science and pseudo-science, therefore work in areas like ESP and astrology and even Creationism can fairly be labeled science by their proponents (Collins, 1982).

The four discoverers in the last chapter would have been astonished if an observer had argued that they were only contributing to a culturally-bound world­view, even if they were given credit for helping to solve puzzles. Rightly or wrongly, they believed they were after eternal truths--just as the Azande see their beliefs as truths.

To Richard Feynman, the real distinguishing characteristic of science resembles Popper's falsification--a willingness to criticize one's beliefs. In a commencement address at Cal Tech in 1974, he talked about 'cargo cult science', after an unnamed group of South Sea Islanders who wanted the planes that had come full of cargo during World War II to return. So they built something akin to a runway, put fires along its sides, made a wooden hut and put a man in it with wooden pieces on his ears and bamboo bars sticking out from them like antenna. The planes didn't land, of course. Feynman (1974, http.//www.astro. washington.edU/ingrarn/edu/al 01.sp94.cargocult) argued that the central scientific idea is missing in cargo cult sciences:

It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right aDout it: other causes that could pOSSibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminatea by some other experiment, and how tney worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you

131 am deliberately oversimplifying a complex issue, here. There are many degrees and shades of relativism (Pickering, 1992); and even those who hold that relativism and objectivism are not opposites [Porter, 1992].

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have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

Feynman is sketching a kind of CampbeUian hero who seeks the grail of truth without regard for mortal consequences. Feynman himself played a critical role in the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, which does not contradict Feyman's emphasis on scientific integrity but does demonstrate that a scientist's choice of a problem may be determined by institutions. The point a sociologist might make is that these organizations do not lie outside of science--indeed, the Manhattan Project was created by scientists like Einstein and Szilard. (see Chapter 4)

Furthermore, Feynman's view of the self-critical scientist stands in apparent contrast to Latour's observation that science advances by creating 'black boxes' (Latour, 1987): procedures or devices or equations or facts that are taken for granted by future generations of scientists and may be virtually incomprehensible to outsiders. Black boxes are an effort to close off the kind of constant questioning Feynman is calling for. Latour thinks of science studies as an effort to open these black boxes, particularly for a wider public.

The physicist Alan Sokal (http://www.nyu.edulgsas/dept/physics/faculty/ sokaVindex.html) designed an experiment to test whether science's critics, many of them relativists, were cargo cultists or serious scholars. 14 He submitted an article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Herneneutics of Quantum Gravity" for the special "Science Wars" issue of the postmodernist journal, Social Text (Chapman, June 6, 1996). The article was a deliberate parody of the kind of language used by postmodern scholars, quoting extensively from philosophers like Derrida. Sokal's hypothesis was that, despite the fact that he deliberately made statements about physics that were wrong, the editors would accept it, because it accorded with their preconceptions. In other words, he bet that the editors would exhibit confirmation bias. Studies of the peer-review process suggest that reviewers are often biased towards results that agree with the dominant paradigm in their area (Cicchetti, 1991; Mahoney, 1977).

The editors of the journal accepted his manuscript and published it. When Sokal revealed the hoax, they apologized to their readers, but defended themselves on the grounds that Sokal's deception was itself ethically

14 My analysis of the Sokal affair was greatly facilitated by one of my students, Burton Filstrup, whose paper "Sokal's Experiment" may be found on the Web at http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edu/ classesl200Rl200Rprojs.

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questionable--ajournal editor assumes that an author is being honest (see Robbins and Ross, http://www.nyu.edulpubslsocialtext! sokal.html).

This reminds me of the classic study in which graduate students pretended to be mental patients in order to gain admission to mental hospitals (Rosenhan, 1973). All were admitted and diagnosed, a fact which was used to critique the whole mental health system. But the hospitals defended themselves on the grounds that no sane person would ask to be admitted to a mental hospital! One wonders what the response would have been had a science studies scholar constructed a fake physics article, complete with a set of plausible references and fabricated data that supported the current paradigm in a domain. Chances are, the article would be accepted, if the referees were blind to the author's name and discipline. If so, the fictitious article would simply be dismissed as a fraud and not be seen as undermining the legitimacy of physics.

Deception aside, Sokal' s piece was deliberately constructed to sound like nonsense. If he had submitted it to a refereed journal like Social Studies of Science, it would certainly have been rejected. Therefore, it is wrong to tar science studies with the mistakes made by the editors of Social Text.

Strong relativism of the sort advocated by a minority of science-studies scholars has produced an enraged response from some scientists and mathematicians (Gross & Levitt, 1994) and a more sympathetic critique from others (Labinger, 1995). Gross and Levitt in essence revive C.P. Snow's old two cultures argument (Snow, 1963) and report that the rift between the scientific and humanistic cultures in the academy is widening, with the humanists now claiming to have a unique perspective from which to view science, one that scientists like Sokal find bizarre and incomprehensible. Gross and Levitt argue that a realist perspective is essential to doing science:

Science is, above all else, a reality-driven enterprise. Every active investigator is inescarably aware of this. It creates the pain as well as much of the deli~ht 0 research. Reality is the overseer at one's shoulder, ready to rap one s knuckles or to spring the trap into which one has been led by overconfidence, or by a too-complacent reliance 0 mere surmise. Science succeeds precisely because it nas accepted a bargain in which even the boldest imagination stands hostage to reality (Gross & Levitt, 1994, p. 234).

From this perspective, even the adoption of methodological relativism would make it impossible to understand science, and strong relativism would simply be nonsense. At a recent meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Donna Haraway (Haraway, October 20, 1995) put her finger on the central question--are most of the philosophical differences between scientists like Feynman and Gross and those relativists who study them the result of mutual incomprehensibility or deep-seated issues that cannot be resolved? Are the two sides condemned to talk past one another forever?

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There is room for compromise on the realist/relativist debate. One approach is to take an agnostic view, to bracket the question of whether the entities and relations discovered by scientists really existed before they were brought to light:

... what does indeed come into existence, within, usually, a longer term process, when science 'discovers' a microbe or a subatomic particle, is a specific entity distinguished from other entities (other microbes, other particles) and furnislied with a name, a set of descriptors, and a set of techniques in which it can be produced and handled. In other words, some part of a preexisting material world becomes specified and thereby real as something to be reckoned with, accounted for, and inserted in manifold wars into scientific and everyday life. This does not preclude the possibility that some physical correlate of this entity existed, unidentified, tangled up witli other objects, before scientists turned their attention to this object" (Knorr-Cetina, 1995, p.161).

This agnostic position vis-a-vis realism works well with methodological relativism; it allows the scholar studying science to bracket the whole question of which objects or entities are real and study how scientists convince themselves that they are real.

The physicist Jay Labinger saw methodological relativism as a "perfectly sound scientific practice" if its intent were to isolate the role of social negotiations and other cultural phenomena by bracketing the effects of reality. In this case, of course, one would have to keep in mind "that the subject of study is now an approximate model, and that the excluded factors may well tum out to be at least as important as the ones being examined" (Labinger, 1995, p. 291). Labinger calls for collaboration among scientists and those studying science. This is a promising solution to the problem of expertise: how can one acquire both sufficient knowledge in a science and also in history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology or psychology? Myers' work on writing in biology is an example of such a collaboration (Myers, 1990; Myers, 1995).

An alternate solution to the realist/relativist controversy was suggested by Donald Campbell, who pointed-out that one can be both a realist and a sociologist of scientific knowledge by taking the view that reality plays only a small role in settling scientific debates. 15 Indeed, I would go farther and argue that the role of reality varies among scientific controversies--some may be resolved easily by negotiations among participants, others may include hard, inescapable facts that resist efforts at premature closure. If one drops the ideological posturing, one can conduct empirical studies to determine in what sorts of situations nature resists and facilitates negotiations.

C.P. Snow had little to say about social sciences, which exist between sciences and humanities and could theoretically bridge the two cultures gap. Gross and

15 Don laid out this argument for me in numerous conversations--I am indebted to him for his wisdom and inspiration.

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Levitt have a great deal to say about cultural anthropology and the sociology of scientific knowledge, particularly in their more radical forms, but little to say about disciplines like cognitive psychology of science that do not adopt the strong relativist position.

2.3 Cognitive Psychology of Science

In this section, we will look at what psychologists and cognitive scientists have to contribute to the study of scientific thinking. From the standpoint of traditional philosopher of science, the underlying logic of science is what is really important, not, the mental processes of individual sciences. There may be interesting psychological stories to tell about how discoveries are made, but these are not relevant to how they are justified by the scientific community (Siegel, 1980). There are notable exceptions to this view. For example, philosophers like Steve Fuller and Ron Giere put psychology at the center of science studies in very different ways, the former linked more to Skinner's behaviorism and the latter to cognitive psychology (Fuller, 1989; Giere, 1988).

From the standpoint of at least some sociologists, "thinking is not something that happens inside heads or brains" (Restivo, October, 1995). The way to study scientists is to look at their interactions with each other and the inscriptions that they produce (Latour, 1987).

If science is either largely the product of an underlying logic or of social negotiations, then psychology is marginal--a way, perhaps, of accounting for aspects of discovery and knowledge transmission having to do with perceptual and physiological processes. Psychologists contributed to this marginalization, I think, by their reluctance to study the methods they were using to justify their existence. Most psychologists are very concerned with making their field more scientific. Kuhn thought textbooks revealed the image of science: "the aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic; a concept of science drawn from them is no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text" (Kuhn, 1962, p. 1).

Almost every introductory psychology textbook I have seen opens with a statement about how psychology is a science. For example, the textbook I used when I taught introductory psychology states that "once psychologists have developed a theory, they proceed in much the same general ways, regardless of the exact content of the theory. They subject the theory to empirical tests. They predict in advance what sorts of observable actions should occur when certain variables are changed. By testing to see whether their predictions describe the actual research outcomes, they find out whether their laboriously constructed

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theories are correct" (Darley, Glucksberg, & Kinchla, 1988, p. 8).16 To a philosopher or sociologist, the statements about science would sound naive. Perhaps psychologists do not want to question the methods they are trying so hard to adopt. If so, they are following the pattern of textbooks in the 'harder' sciences.

2.3.1 Can Science Be Used to Study Science?

Cognitive psychologists want to use the methods of science to study science. Therefore, cognitive scientists a faced with a paradox--can science be used to study science? This harks back to the point we made earlier about not relying solely on using Azande methods to study Azande beliefs. If by science we mean a method guaranteed to find orderly relationships in the natural world, and if the object of studying science was to verify that this Method did achieve its goal, then we would be on shaky ground.

But perhaps we are really talking about methods, where the small 'm' denotes the fact that different scientific disciplines have different practices. Making generalizations about discovery by looking closely at what scientists actually do potentially gets us out of the problem of using a Method to verify itself (Barker, 1989). The methods of psychology are not the same as those of physics, or sociology--and within psychology, there are differences in methods among cognitive, social and personality psychologists. For example, all may use experiments from time-to-time, but different specialties design different sorts of experiments. (We will encounter examples of these different types of experiments later in this chapter.)

To make this question more specific, can one use the experimental method to study the experimental method? Yes, if the kinds of experiments reflect the unique practices of a specialty different from the one being studied, and also if the experiments are triangulated with other methods like fine-grained case-studies-­particularly if these methods are borrowed from other disciplines like anthropology and sociology. (Again, we will encounter examples of this triangulation later in this chapter.)

2.3.2 Does Cognitive Psychology Presume Rationalism and Realism?

Most of the partIcIpants in the realist/relativist debate seem to assume cognitive studies will reproduce a kind of Feynman view of the scientist as

16 Not all textbooks are naive; for one that tries to make use of Kuhn's philosophy, see (Sternberg, 1995).

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rational seeker after objective truth. But in fact, one can study the cognitive processes of the Azande as easily as those of scientists.

For example, Edwin Hutchins has done a superb study of the cognitive processes involved in traditional Micronesian navigation (Hutchins, 1983). A small group of expert navigators from the Central Caroline Islands routinely embark on ocean voyages of several days out of sight of land; they belong to a pre-literate culture and use none of the Western technology of navigation, not even a compass. Their navigation begins from the assumption that the boat is stationary and islands gradually move by it; the passage of reference islands is marked by the position of the stars. In most cases, these reference islands are imaginary constructs. The Micronesian navigator has a very different mental model from his modern Western counterparts, but one that is no less amenable to cognitive analysis.

Cognition is usually seen as an individual activity, too, but as Hutchins has shown, modern Western navigation is a team activity that is still amenable to cognitive analysis (Hutchins, 1995). There is no clear demarcation between the cognitive and the social: one merges into the other. But in this book, we will begin from the cognitive end.

From a sociological standpoint, 'beginning from the cogmtlve end' is equivalent to saying we will apply the tools of one discipline or community (cognitive psychology) to studying and understanding the practices of others (sciences). The tools, of course, carry a framework with them, and therefore it is important for those applying the tools to be aware of the assumptions that 'come along for the ride'. Indeed, the tools, methods and assumptions ought to be applied to the studiers as well as those studied.

This is the 'reflexive turn' in the sociology of scientific knowledge--an effort to say the equivalent of "sociologist (or cognitive scientist) study thyself." A further implication is that there is no privileged viewpoint, no solid epistemological ground, from which one can study--the philosopher, the psychologist, the sociologist and the scientists themselves simply speak with different voices. As Latour has cried in mock-horror,

But where can we find the concepts, the words, the tools that will make our explanation independent of the science under study? I must admit that there is no established stock of such concepts, especially not in the so-called human sciences, particularly sociology. Invented at the same period and by the same people as scientism, sociology is powerless to understand the skills from wbich it has so long been separated. Of the sociology of the sciences I can therefore say, "Protect me from my friends, I shall deal with my enemies," for if we set out to explain the sciences, it may well be that the social sciences will suffer first (quoted in Lynch, 1992, p. 230).

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One must be reflexively aware of the black boxes created by those studying science. In an earlier book, I tried to open the black-boxes created by cognitive scientists doing experimental studies of scientific reasoning (Gorman, 1992a). This chapter will review some of that work, but will go substantially beyond it, to consider recent developments that move cognitive science in the direction of focusing more on practice and worrying less about Method. Where possible, I will use adopt the 'meta-alternation' strategy advocated by Collins and Yearley , whose answer to the problem of reflexivity is to advocate alternating between perspectives (Collins & Yearley, 1992) Therefore, I will use aspects of the sociology of scientific knowledge to provide an occasional alternative to the cognitive account.

What we will find is that there is not one cognitive psychology community which applies its tools to science--there are disparate groups, with different definitions of what constitutes the appropriate focus of study. There is an even wider group of practitioners who call themselves cognitive scientists. Cognitive psychology is one of the areas that is usually subsumed under this interdisciplinary label; other practitioners include computer scientists interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning, philosophers of mind sympathetic to computational approaches, neuroscientist interested in functions like memory and cognitive anthropologists like Edwin Hutchins (Gardner, 1985~ Cognitive scientists are often reluctant to study science for the very reason we cited at the beginning of this chapter--many cognitive scientists want to be viewed as following the Scientific Method, and any attempt to apply their tools to studying science makes it sound like they are questioning the basis of their own beliefs.

2.3.3 Computational Simulations of Scientific Discovery

One of the few orthodoxies adhered to by most cognitive scientists is the belief that a hypothesis ought to be expressible in computational form (Baars, 1986; Johnson-Laird, 1988). But this again raises the problem of using a method to validate itself--if all cognitive hypotheses have to be in computational form, then any aspects of scientific practice that could not be described by current computational techniques would be ignored. Similarly, the Azande might insist that all hypotheses about the weather be put in their cultural framework. What would have happened if Faraday had been told all his hypotheses about electricity and magnetism had to be put into equations? Faraday worked in a rigorous, geometric fashion, but he did not reduce his lines of force to equations--that was left to Maxwell.

There is a further complication to the computational work, one that illustrates the way in which cognitive science and cognitive psychology can diverge. Most of the computational simulations have dual goals--to model human problem­solving (cognitive psychology) and also to explore how and whether machines can discover (cognitive science). The traditional goal of Artificial Intelligence

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(AI) has been to understand human intelligence by building machines that mimic human mental processes. In contrast, the goal of expert system design is to create systems that will be as good as, or better than, human experts.

At first blush, it might seem that the two goals are the same. But in many domains, computers assist experts by doing what human beings cannot-­calculating at speeds far in excess of the human nervous system, storing far more information in a literal form than any human brain could, providing sophisticated real-time visualizations, etc. The word 'computer' originally referred to a human being especially trained to do high-speed calculations. So computers are already taking over areas of human expertise, but in most of these, they are not functioning like humans. Consider, for example, the best chess programs, which work by brute force--literally calculating most of the possible combinations, whereas the human opponent relies on heuristics to narrow the search space.

This book is about understanding human discovery, therefore, the AI literature is more relevant than the literature on machine-learning, though the boundary between the two is fuzzy. In particular, many expert systems using brute-force heuristics can become important aids in discovery. Already, most chess players own a computer which they practice with and which they may even be allowed to bring to tournaments. For those who take the view that cognition is often shared across a network of tools and actors, the computer is part of the process we refer to as mind (Gorman, 1997).

The examples in the last chapter illustrate the diversity of computational approaches to discovery: BACON and KEKADA emulated the sorts of heuristics used in scientific discovery, CLARITY allowed the user to explore different discovery paths and Thagard's connectionist system tried to show how scientific controversies could be resolved by explanatory coherence. There are quite a few other approaches as well (Cheng, 1992; Shrager, 1990).

This type of simulation fits the goal of applying the tools of cognitive science to the practice of science. The various computational techniques are tools used by individuals or groups that label themselves cognitive scientists, and in the last chapter, we saw examples of their application to actual cases of discovery.

We also noted that each technique carried an assumptive framework with it. KEKADA makes Kreb look like an exemplar of Herbert Simon's views regarding cognition, CLARITY supports Gooding's framework and Thagard's ECHO supports his philosophical notions.

We also noted that each technique carried an assumptive framework with it. KEKADA makes Kreb look like an exemplar of Herbert Simon's views regarding cognition, CLARITY supports Gooding's framework and Thagard's ECHO supports his philosophical notions. This does not mean these simulations are not

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capable of surprising their creators, just that the range of possible surprises is limited by the structure of the simulations. 17

We are back at the issue of using a method to validate itself. We cannot use KEKADA to validate a heuristic-based approach to an understanding of discovery because the heuristic approach is embedded in KEKADA. For example, KEKADA cannot decisively refute those who argue that heuristics are just post­hoc rationalizations that are used to explain what experts appear to do, but do not reflect the way they actually solve problems (Suchman, 1987). But we could use other methods to complement simulations like KEKADA, like detailed case­studies (Kulkarni, 1988) and experimental simulations (Qin, 1990). We could also create a counterfactual computational simulation of Krebs' process, perhaps based on a connectionist algorithm or on the kind of visual programming used in CLARITY, one that was not heuristic-based. If such a simulation compared well with an actual case-study, it would show that alternatives to heuristic-based models can give at least as good an account of scientific discovery. Unfortunately, multiple computational approaches have not, as far as I know, been applied to a single case--instead, each approach tackles its own problem.

2.3.4 If Machines can Discover, Do we Need a Sociology of Scientific Discovery?

A decisive and sufficient refutation of the 'strong programme' in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) would be the demonstration of a case in which scientific discovery is totally isolated from all social or cultural factors whatever. I want to discuss examples where precisely this circumstance prevails concerning the discovery of fundamental laws of the first importance in science. The work I will describe involves computer programs being developed in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of cognitive science, and specifically within 'artificial intelligence' (AI). The claim I wish to advance is that these programs constitute a 'pure' or socially uncontaminated instance of inductive inference, and are capable of autonomously deriving classical scientific laws from the raw observational data (Slezak, 1989).

Simply put, Slezak's argued that, if programs like BACON can discover, then there is no need to invoke all these interests and negotiations the sociologists use to explain discovery. His claims sparked a vigorous debate in the journal Social Studies of Science (see the November, 1989 issue).

In contrast, Shrager and Langley argue that, "two important aspects of intellectual activity--embedding and embodiment--that have significant on

17For an intelligent discussion of this issue, including numerous examples of different AI architectures, see "A Survey of Cognitive and Agent Architectures," a worldwide Web document prepared by a group at the University of Michigan (http://ai.eecs.umich.edulcogarchO/).

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science ... have not been addressed by exiting computational models. Briefly, science takes place in a world that is occupied by the scientist, by the physical system under study, and by other agents, and this world has indefinite richness of physical structure and constraint. Thus the scientist is an embodied agent embedded in a physical and social world" (Shrager, 1990, p. 224).

The embodiment issue is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the powerful KEKADA simulation, which still could not emulate the tissue-slicing procedures that were critical to Krebs' discovery. Robotic systems and neural nets that do pattern recognition may someday be able to simulate more of the embodied character of scientific procedures.

One important aspect of embodiment is visualization, and here computational simulations are making interesting progress. Cheng and Simon showed that it might have been easier for Huygens and Wren to have discovered the law of conservation of momentum using diagrams rather than deriving it from theory or by data-driven processes similar to those used by BACON (Cheng & Simon, 1992). Cheng then created HUYGENS, a more general computational simulation of discovery by one-dimensional diagrams. He noted that:

HUYGENS provides further computational evidence for the view that switching back and forth between representations is an effective way to enhance creativity. From given numerical data, HUYGENS switches to a space of diagrams in its search for regularities by looking for patterns in the diagrams. When patterns have been found, the regularities are simply transformed back into equations. The change to aiagrammatic representation permits different operators, regularity spotters and heuristics to be employed that are more effective than tnose used in the direct search of a space of algebraic terms (Cheng & Simon, 1995, p. 224).

Cheng admits that we cannot be sure the real Huygens used this method--but it is plausible, historically, and HUYGENS demonstrates that it would have been more efficient than alternatives. Instead of claiming he developed a program that discovers, Cheng argued instead that be had provided computational evidence for the importance of using diagrams in scientific discovery, evidence that could be combined with material from other sources, e.g., fine-grained case-studies of the way diagrams are used in actual discoveries. Cheng's work is still a long way towards being embodied, but it is a step in the right direction.

Another computational approach that has potential for addressing the problem of embodiment is the use of neural networks designed to simulate aspects of the human nervous system. While these networks are particularly valuable for modeling the sorts of sensory processes involved in recognizing and manipulating objects, they may also be able to provide insights into the kinds of connections among neurons that would promote creativity (Martindale, 1995).

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But neither Cheng's diagrams nor neural networks can yet simulate the interplay between instrument, hand and eye--and the way in which the scientist is also an inventor. Indeed, one could argue that the computer is itself part of the process of embodiment--it is one of the tools modified by the scientist that facilitates discovery.

Shrager and Langley also make an important point about the fact that computational simulations fail to capture the way scientists are embedded in social networks. Ironically, all of these computer simulations are themselves embedded in a rich network of human negotiations. It is the humans who seek funding for them, supply them with their data and make the claim that they discover. That is why Slezak is wrong about discovery programs refuting the sociology of scientific knowledge: the programs are themselves embedded in the processes they are supposed to refute! Brannigan argued that Azande computer scientists could "write a program which, given the selective identification of the data observed by Azande experts, would rediscover witchcraft as a cause of illness" (Brannigan, 1989, p. 610} Such a program would teach us a great deal about the heuristics used by the Azande equivalent of witches, but would not establish that witchcraft constituted a 'socially uncontaminated' method of inference.

Computer simulations do not replace a sociology of discovery. They complement fine-grained studies of the discovery process, allowing us to model individual cognitive processes but also potentially aspects of the social negotiations involved. This is reflected in the movement towards case-based simulations of reasoning that reflect the kinds of embedded learning that occur through apprenticeship, and could allow better computational models of human creativity (Schank & Cleary, 1995). We will have more to say about case-based reasoning when we discuss situated cognition at the end of the chapter.

If intelligent machines do emerge in the future, they will form part of the scientists' network, assisting in those areas where humans are weak--high-speed computation, statistical corrections to diagnostic reasoning (Faust, 1984), three­dimensional simulation of processes that are difficult to visualize, etc. Future sociologists and psychologists will need to study how these intelligent programs fit into the discovery process. A good example is Feigenbaum's Dendral expert systems, designed to infer candidate molecular structures from spectral data. Although Dendral was successful at its task, it was not adopted by working scientists; instead, its algorithms were transferred to databases that are currently used widely. As Dendral's creators commented, "As AI researchers we seriously underestimated the problems of technology transfer and the nature of the barriers to diffusion. 'Underestimate' is charitable: we really didn't have the foggiest idea" (Feigenbaum & Buchanan, 1993, p. 238). Further research is needed on how human and computer experts work together to make discoveries.

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2.3.5 In Vitro and In Vivo Studies of Scientific Thinking

Kevin Dunbar (Dunbar, 1995) used a biological analogy to cl~ssify studies of scientific thinking. In vitro studies are experiments on scientific thinking, analogous to biology laboratory experiments. In vivo studies are case-studies of scientists and science students in their working environments, analogous to studies of biological organisms in their natural environments. Dunbar does not provide us a biological analogy for computational simulations, because such simulations can be used by biologists to model what goes on in both in vivo and in vitro studies: one can use laboratory or field data to test or create computational models of biological processes.

There are essentially three types of tasks used by cognitive psychologists in their in vitro studies of scientific thinking:

1) Abstract problems which model aspects of scientific reasoning.

2) Tasks that are designed to simulate actual scientific problems.

3) Actual scientific problems.

Examples of these problems will be found below.

Another distinction used by cognitive psychologists has to do with whether a study uses expert or novice participants, or both. An expert, in this case, would be an actual scientist. The novice category is mostly made up of college students of a variety of backgrounds, some of whom may have taken a few science courses but none of whom are practitioners. Most psychology experiments use undergraduates--often ones taking a psychology course. But note that there may be important differences in expertise within this ambiguous 'novice' category: occasional studies have referred to graduate students in a scientific field as novices when compared to expert scientists, so I lump all students in the novice category.

This special category of 'novice' is worth mentioning. Children have been used as participants in a number of studies of scientific reasoning, on the grounds that the kinds of conceptual changes they go through replicate the sorts of changes that occur in scientific revolutions. We will include a few of these studies in the novice category in the table.

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This way of organizing the cognitive psychology of science is summarized in the following table:

Type of task:

Participants: Abstract Simulated Scientific Scientific Problem Problem

Novices Children Exoerts

Note that an expert scientist could be used as a participant in an in vitro study, and a novice could be used in an in vivo study--say, a field study of how children or college students learn scientific concepts. We will employ this table iteratively, using it to summarize findings in each of the cells in which there has been significant research.

2.3.6 Abstract Tasks

Imagine you are a participant in a psychology experiment. You are told that the three numbers '2,4,6' are an instance of a rule the psychologist has in mind. You are to solve the rule by proposing additional number triples; the psychologist will tell you whether each corresponds to the rule or not.

If you are like most participants, you will begin with numbers like '6,8,10'. When the psychologist says, "That's correct," you will continue the pattern, perhaps proposing '10,12,14'. You might at that point stop and ask if the rule were 'even numbers ascending by twos'.

This particular task, created by Peter Wason (Wason, 1960), has often been used to study scientific reasoning (Gorman, 1992a). At first blush, this seems absurd--what can a three number problem have in common with the kinds of cases of discovery described in the last chapter? One could, however, view each of the number triples proposed by the participant as a kind of experiment, directed at finding an underlying law. 'Even numbers ascending by twos' is a hypothesis discovered by a participant, based both on previous evidence--the triple '2,4,6'-­and on experimental triples proposed by the participant.

Note the resemblance between this task and the kind of data-driven discovery performed by BACON. Both participants in the 2,4,6 task and BACON are trying to find the rule that governs a set of numbers--except that BACON is given data to look at and the participant in the experiment has to generate it. The typical

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partIcIpant is a college student--who may or may not have a scientific or technical background.

Initially, experiments with the 2-4-6 task, as this number triple problem is called, were intended to investigate whether people could use a particular hypothesis-testing strategy favored by the philosopher-of-science Karl Popper (Popper, 1959). Popper emphasized that science progresses best if scientists propose bold, risky hypotheses that can potentially be falsified (Popper, 1963). Popper was not particularly interested in how scientists came up with the hypotheses; he focused more on the way in which the hypotheses were tested.

In other words, Popper supported the classic distinction philosophers make between discovery and justification (Reichenbach, 1938), which simply says that the way in which a hypothesis is discovered should have no effect on how it is evaluated. A scientist could have a dream, like Kekule is supposed to have done, and discover the structure of the benzene molecule. At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of his discovery, Kekule gave the following account if it:

One fine summer evening, I was returning by the last omnibus. I fell into a reverie and 10, the atoms were gambolfing before my eyes! Whenever hitherto these diminutive beings nad appeared to me, they had always been in motion; but up to that time I had never been able to discern the nature of their motion. Now, however, I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair; how a larger one embraced two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller; whilst the whole kept swirling in a giddy dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain, dragging the smaller ones after them, but only at the ends of the chain ... The cry of the conductor: "Clapham Road," awakened me from my dreaming; but I spent part of the nignt in putting on paper at least sketches of these dream forms. This was the origin of structure theory (Schaffer, 1994, p. 23).

Here the voice of the muse comes to the hero who is prepared to listen, and he carries its words back to the world. This famous account is retrospective, and therefore may not be entirely accurate (Ericsson & Simon, 1984). Kekule also provided other accounts of his discovery, including one involving circling snakes that suggested the way the atoms might be linked. Kekule no doubt saw part of the solution in dreams and reveries, but the working out of the rest was time­consuming, difficult and involved frequent negotiations with others; these stories helped establish Kekule's priority and originality. Indeed, Kekule's address resulted, in part, from a deliberate effort by the organizers of the conference to establish him as a scientific hero (Schaffer, 1994). All of this is not to say that Kekule was lying. Human memory for complex events is reconstructive, and tends to reflect what we thing ought to have happened, not what actually happened (Neisser, 1982).

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Popper would not have cared about this story and the negotiations in which it was embedded. What mattered was whether Kekule formulated a falsifiable hypothesis. One could argue with Popper that stories of this sort play a role in determining who gets credit for a discovery, but he still would not be interested. His concern was how theories ought to be justified.

Popper's favorite example of a falsifiable hypothesis was Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which included a specific prediction about the curvature of light in a gravitational field. Eddington set out to test this prediction by measuring to what extent light from selected stars was attracted by the sun's gravitational field during an eclipse. When Einstein was asked what he would do if Eddington's results did not agree with his predictions, he said, "Then I would feel sorry for the dear Lord (Eddington). The theory is right" (Holton, 1973, pp. 234-5). Similarly, when initial experiment results appeared to contradict Special Relativity, Einstein was not alarmed--he pointed out that the rivals to Special Relativity were ad-hoc theories and called for more replication. So, Einstein himself was not a Popperian. Eddington characterized his eclipse results as providing support for Einstein's General Relativity, but there were contradictions and ambiguities in the data (Collins & Pinch, 1993).

How could one determine if falsification would lead to more scientific progress? One could adopt an in vivo approach, looking at instances where falsification was deliberately applied to scientific problems.18 The problem with this kind of study is that any number of other factors could have affected progress, or the lack thereof, in an actual case.

An alternative is to look at whether falsification was an effective strategy on tasks that simulate scientific reasoning. If it were not an effective strategy in vitro, under ideal conditions, that would cast doubt on the usefulness of the strategy in general (Gorman, 1992b). Why? Consider this simple 2-4-6 task. It is exactly the sort of problem on which falsification should be effective--it eliminates all the confounding factors like error in the data and pressures to publish that may interfere with falsification in scientific practice (see Gorman, 1992). Abstract tasks create ideal, simple situations for exploring the heuristic value of the sorts of norms recommended by philosophers. Of course, just because a norm like falsification works in an ideal, abstract situation, there is no guarantee it will work in science. Conversely, if a norm fails to work even under the most ideal conditions, there are good reasons for doubting its effectiveness in a real-world situation.

Wason (Wason, 1960) initially found that partIcIpants did not falsify hypotheses like 'even numbers ascending by twos'--they proposed instances that agreed with that hypotheses, and no triples that should have been wrong if the hypothesis were right. A participant who proposed' 1 ,2,3' would have been told it

18For a brief account of a conference devoted to testing theories about scientific change using historical cases, see (Donovan, 1987).

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was correct. If '1,2,3' is an instance of the rule, the hypothesis 'even numbers ascending by twos' is false. (In fact, Wason's rule was 'ascending numbers'). Wason viewed this as evidence of a 'verification bias' on the part of his participants.

One advantage of in vitro studies is control. In Wason's case, he was able to create a task that controlled for participants' previous experiences--none had ever worked on this problem before--and set-up the problem in a way that required participants to falsify the obvious, initial pattern if they were to discover the actual rule. This set-up factor illustrates the other powerful advantage of in vitro studies; they allow one to manipulate the conditions under which participants try to solve problems.

A group of psychologists at Bowling Green State University took this idea of manipulation a step further. They gave some participants instructions to falsify on the 2,4,6 task, and others instructions to try to verify or confirm their hypotheses (Tweney, 1980). Participants were asked to indicate which of their triples were intended as confirmations or disconfirmations; sure enough, participants given the disconfirmatory instructions did make more attempts to falsify. But their efforts to falsify did not make their performance better than those participants who tried to confirm. Worse, this lack of effect for falsification was a replication of an earlier study at Bowling Green, in which participants shot particles at objects on a computer screen in order to determine what rules govern particle deflection (Mynatt, Doherty, & Tweney, 1977; Mynatt, Doherty, & Tweney, 1978).

This seemed like a surprising result to me. If falsification played an important role in scientific progress, it seemed to me that it ought to improve performance on an in vitro simulation of scientific reasoning. I decided to follow-up on this puzzling finding and tried my own version of such instructions on the 2-4-6 task and a related problem. I unwittingly made an important change in the original design. Whenever a participant made a guess about the rule, experimenters in previous studies had told them whether that guess was right or wrong. That amounted to a scientist's being able to ask God whether her rule was right. No need to falsify if you can find out in some other way.

So, participants in my experiment had to test their own hypotheses, and whenever they asked if they could guess the rule, I told them it was up to them to decide whether and when they knew they had solved the problem. Under these circumstances, instructions to falsify greatly improved subjects' ability to solve the 'ascending numbers' rule.

I appeared to be onto a minor discovery myself--that falsification was effective on at least two problems that simulated scientific reasoning (Gorman, 1992a). My disconfirmatory instructions emphasized trying triples that ought to be wrong if one's hypothesis were right. What I was doing was trying to teach participants a heuristic I thought would lead to falsification. A heuristic is a kind

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of 'rule of thumb' of the sort that experts use. Heuristics, unlike algorithms, do not guarantee results. Experts use them in situations where there is no algorithm.

An analysis by Klayman and Ha (Klayman, 1987) showed why my heuristic should have been successful, and why it wasn't the same as falsification. These two authors referred to strategies like my 'try to get triples wrong as 'negative test heuristics'. When the participant's hypothesis is contained within the target rule, this sort of heuristic is most likely to lead to success.

Figure 5

Numbers ascend by twos

H is the participant's hYl'othesis, T is the target rule. A negative test heuristic will focus the participant on the zone within T but outside of H.

Given that the rule was 'ascending numbers' and the initial triple suggested a hypothesis that was a sub-set of the actual rule, my 'try to get triples wrong' heuristic would be helpful in finding the actual rule--it would point participants to the outer 'T' ring in the above diagram.

However, if the problem space described by the hypothesis were broader than the target rule, a negative test heuristic would not be effective. Suppose one's hypothesis was 'numbers ascend by twos' and the actual rule was 'even numbers ascend by twos'. If one tried negative tests like "1,2,3' and '7,6,13", they would all be wrong, thereby confirming one's hypothesis.

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Figure 6

Understanding Discovery

H: Numbers ascend by twos

Even numbers ascend by twos

In this case, participants need to propose positive instances of H like '3,5,7' in order to find T.

The only way to disconfirm it would be to try a positive test like '3,5,7', which would put one in the part of H that is outside T. My confirmatory instructions urged participants to propose triples they thought would be correct. But in some situations, these instructions would be more likely to lead to falsification, because when the rule is narrower than the hypothesis, some of the triples one thinks should be correct will be incorrect. My confirmatory instructions were really encouraging what Klayman and Ha called a positive test heuristic, which they regard as a good, all-purpose strategy for achieving either confirmation or disconfmnation.

In summary, my experiments did not show that falsification works as a general strategy across a wide range of problems. I had only found evidence to support the idea that a negative test heuristic will falsify a hypothesis that is narrower than a target rule.

I falsified even this analysis in my next experiment. On an even more general rule, 'the three numbers must be different', I found that negative test instructions did not improve performance--participants were clearly trying to obtain negative evidence, but they did not know where to find it. Following Tweney et al. (1980), I changed the task from a search for a single rule which would determine which

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triples were right and wrong to a search for two rules arbitrarily labeled DAX and MED: the DAX rule was "the three numbers must be different" and the MED rule was "two or more numbers must be the same". As in Tweney et al.'s earlier study, this manipulation greatly improved performance, whereas simply giving subjects instructions to falsify did not.

I concluded that falsification depended at least in part on what Johnson-Laird (1983) has called a 'mental model' of the task. Subjects whose mental model was that they were trying to find a single rule with exceptions found little or no negative evidence. For example, participants who proposed the triple '0,0,0' and were told it was incorrect guessed rules like 'any number except zeroes'. In contrast, the DAX-MED instructions suggested a mental model involving a search for two complementary rules. Subjects who proposed the triple '0,0,0' in this situation realized this MED result was a clue to another rule, and pursued it by proposing other combinations in which two or more numbers were the same (for a recent series of experiments that supports this analysis, see (Wharton, Cheng, & Wickens, 1993)). These results suggested that the critical relationship in Klayman and Ha's analysis was between the subject's hypothesis and her representation of the target rule.

Farris and Revlin (1989; 1989a) argued that many subjects who appear to be trying to falsify are actually searching for positive instances of a counterfactual hypothesis. For example, a subject who thinks the rule is 'even numbers' may propose 'odd numbers' as a counterfactual hypothesis, then test that with a triple like '3,5,7' which is a negative test with respect to 'even numbers' but confirmatory with respect to the counterfactual hypothesis 'odd numbers'. A counterfactual heuristic may be a successful way of converting the standard version of the 2-4-6 task to a DAX-MED problem, because a counterfactual hypothesis is roughly equivalent to a hypothesis about the MED rule, and successful DAX-MED subjects pursue positive instances of the MED rule.

This kind of fine-grained analysis of hypothesis-testing highlights the strengths and weaknesses of in vitro studies. The in vitro work allows us to look at heuristics under highly controlled, artificial conditions, manipulating variables like the relationship between a participant's most likely representation of the task and the actual rule. This kind of manipulation and control is impossible in vivo. However, in vivo studies are needed to see if the in vitro results are ecologically valid, i.e., applicable to real-world situations.

2.3.6.1 Experts working on abstract tasks

There are almost no studies involving scientists trying to solve these abstract problems. Mahoney (1977) compared a small sample of scientists working on the traditional version of the 2-4-6 task to a sample of Protestant ministers and found that the former were less willing to abandon their hypotheses than the latter.

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Mahoney initially saw this as evidence of a confirmation bias on the part of scientists, but one could also argue that they were following a positive-test heuristic. If one is to make any conclusions about the abilities of working scientists to solve abstract problems, more research with different rules and procedures are needed. For example, scientists should be run in a condition where they know they cannot ask the experimenter at any time whether their hypotheses are right.

2.3.6.2 Adding the Possibility of Error to Abstract Tasks

One can gradually add realistic features to in vitro studies. One of the features that makes the 2,4,6 and related tasks so unrealistic is that every trial or mini­experiment produces results that are 100% reliable. In contrast, scientists are acutely aware of the possibility of error when they design and evaluate experiments. For example, Einstein's theory of special relativity was apparently falsified by the eminent physicist Kaufmann; Einstein himself remained undisturbed, however, and called for replication. Kaufmann's result was later found to be an error (see Gorman, 1992).

In May of 1795, Joseph J. F. Lalande recorded a new star in two different positions over a three day period, and decided at least one, if not both of the observations were due to errors (Hoyt, 1980). This star was identified as the planet Neptune in 1846, and Lalande's original observations were used in computing its orbits. One scientist's error is another scientist's discovery.

To understand how error can be added to one of the problems that simulate scientific reasoning, let us once again use the 2-4-6 task as an example. In the usual version, every result is 100% reliable and unambiguous. I added the possibility of error by telling participants that anywhere from 0 to 20% of their results might be erroneous, i.e., a triple that was classified as incorrect might be correct and vice-versa. Error would occur at random, as determined by a random number generator on a calculator.

I thought that this possibility of error might make it easier for individuals to engage in confirmation bias. A recent example is the cult Heaven's Gate, which was certain that an alien spaceship accompanied comet Hale-Bopp.

In January of 1997 several cultists, including their leader Applewhite, bought a computerized telescope with a lO-inch mirror. They used it to lOOK at Comet Hale-Bop{" and search for the "companion obJect." They were following a scientific impulse--seeking direct observation of the vehicle that woUld rescue them from our doomed planet.

They saw the comet perfectly. They saw no spaceship.

And then they returned the telescope to the store and asked for their money back (Achenbach, 1997,F4).

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This is a classic use of what Doherty & Tweney (Doherty, 1988) called System-Failure (SF) Error to immunize a hypothesis against falsification. If you don't like the evidence, blame the instrument. There was a spaceship--there had to be. The telescope wasn't working.

The saddest part of the story is that the group killed themselves in the belief that they had to leave their 'vehicles' (bodies) before they could be taken away by the spaceship accompanying the comet. By all accounts, they died with smiles on their faces, certain of the resurrection.

One scientific analogue of this kind of error is an experimental result which appears to confirm a hypothesis but actually disconfirms it and vice-versa. The controversy between Millikan and Ehrenhaft over the charge on the electron serves to illustrate. R.A. Millikan presupposed a unitary charge; in his famous oil-drop experiment, he discarded results that appeared to suggest a fractional charge. But these results, if true, would have supported the theory of his competitor, Felix Ehrenhaft. "If Ehrenhaft had had access to Millikan's notebook, he would have found precisely those runs most valuable for his purposes, which, for Millikan, were failed" (Holton, 1986, p. 12). Having a mental model of the kind of rule one is looking for helps one identify and discard errors.

But suppose one has a Heaven's Gate mental model, totally out of whack with reality? One way to check whether an apparent disconfirmation is an error is to tighten procedures. Another is replication. In the Heaven's Gate case, the group might have tried a larger telescope, and observed over a long period of time. In Millikan's case, he and his technician refined their technique until they could produce the desired effect more reliably; his notebooks record 'beautiful' results more frequently later in his series of experiments, though there are still errors (Holton, 1978, p. 71).

In Millikan's case, replication led to confirmation. It can also lead to falsification. Walter Alvarez recounted the day when he and his father thought they had discovered evidence that a supernova caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The key empirical support for this hypothesis came from the presence of plutonium-244 in the KT boundary which marks the end of the Cretaceous and of the dinosaurs--a period of mass extinction. After an exhausting night of taking samples, two geochemists concluded that there was plutonium-244 in a sample of soil from the KT boundary--an apparent confirmation of the hypothesis. Luis Alvarez was ready to announce the discovery, but Walter tried the result and procedures on the Deputy Director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, who advised them to, "Do it all over again. Repeat every single step from the very beginning, on a fresh sample, to be absolutely sure there really is plutonium-244 in that clay" (Alvarez, 1997, p. 74). They ran the whole set of procedures on a second sample and found no trace of plutonium-244. The heuristic in this domain, where the procedures are so difficult, is to trust the negative result. Replication had turned into falsification.

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I wanted to simulate the effect of error on scientific reasoning in vitro, in order to find out how specific variables affected it. In my first series of experiments, I focused on the possibility of error by setting the error rate at 0. In other words, participants were told that as many of 20% of their results might be errors, but encountered no actual errors. Participants had to figure this out. Most used a heuristic I called 'replication plus extension', proposing triples that were similar to, but not exactly the same as, previous triples in an effort to replicate the current pattern and extend it slightly, e.g., following '2,4,6' by '4,6,8'. This looked much like the positive test heuristic recommended by Klayman and Ha; the difference is the goal--in addition to trying to confirm a hypothesis with positive tests, participants were trying to check for errors. Participants given possible-error instructions had to propose twice as many triple, but managed to discover Wason's rule as often as participants in a control condition.

But in an earlier study using the card game Eleusis, I had discovered that the possibility of error greatly interfered with subjects' abilities to solve a simple rule. One difference between the two tasks is that the cost of replication in Eleusis was much higher. One had to replicate not only a single card, but a sequence of cards. I experimented with giving subjects on the 2-4-6 task a similar rule, presenting it in a format that gave them results of previous trials. To get a feel for the task, try to do what participants did, and write down any guesses that you might have about a rule that could govern all five triples. Would your rule be any different if I told you it was possible one of these five results was an error, i.e., if it is a Y, it should be an N and vice-versa?

Triple Conforms to Rule?

1,2,3 Y 4,5,6 Y 4,5,6 N 5,10,15 Y 10,20,30 N

The key problem is what to do with the fact that 4,5,6 is right once, then wrong. Depending on one's hypothesis, one can label either of them an error. Then I gave participants five more triples. Consider whether these change your first hypothesis.

Triple Conforms to Rule?

10,33,12 Y 13,20,5 Y 14,9,14 Y 12,35,14 N 15,15,6 N

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Let's consider an example. Suppose you hypothesized that the rule was odd and evens alternate within each triple. If you covered the '4,5,6 N' in the fIrst set of triples and the' 12,35, 14 N' in the second, the triples would fIt this hypothesis. This is akin to looking carefully at results of previous experiments in a scientifIc domain, and using the current hypothesis or paradigm to decide which were likely to be errors.

I allowed participants to propose as many as fIve additional triples of their own, which meant they had the opportunity to replicate. In most actual scientifIc situations, one does not have unlimited resources to devote to replication; therefore, I thought this fIve-triple limit was more realistic than unlimited triples.

In fact, there was no actual error. The rule was that numbers had to alternate odd and even across as well as within each triple. This made this task more like the earlier one I had used with cards: to replicate, participants had to repeat not just one triple, but a sequence of triples, and at the same time test their hypotheses. In a possible error condition, participants solved the rule only 15% of the time. In contrast, 50% of participants who were not told about any possibility of error solved the rule.

I tried a couple of in vitro simulations using actual error and the 2,4,6 task. Changing the amount error from zero to 20% greatly interfered with participants ability to discover Wason's original (Gorman, 1989(c)). Some of these 20%-error participants made repeated attempts to replicate and located many of the errors, but because of this, they were not able to adequately test the generality of their hypotheses and ended-up with rules like 'numbers must go up by twos'. Others simply used errors to immunize their hypotheses from disconfIrmation. As one participant said, "I assigned errors to the triples I did because they did not fIt my hypothesis" (Gorman, 1989(c), p.409).

These finding illustrates that, even on very simple artifIcial tasks, replication alone is not suffIcient to isolate and eliminate errors. Collins (Collins, 1985) has discussed how difficult it is to replicate a result. Obviously, scientists rely on other kinds of checks in addition to replication, e.g., refinement of procedures. But these simple experiments demonstrate the way in which hypotheses are often used to identify errors, and the importance of replication. In contrast, my experience suggested that psychology journals were often unwilling to publish replications (Gorman, 1992).

2.3.6.3 Lessons Learned from Abstract Tasks

Hopefully, the description above of my own research using abstract tasks and novice participants will give the reader a sense of the pros and cons of in vitro experiments. The strength of these sorts of experiments is that one can set up a task in a particular way to assess how it will affect performance. For example,

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one can isolate the effect of the mere possibility of error and study them under carefully controlled conditions. The weakness is that one cannot be certain how these results will generalize to more complex situations involving multiple types of error. However, in vitro results can give us issues to focus on in vivo.

Even on these highly abstract tasks, discovery depends both on problem representation and on the strategy one uses to tackle it. I referred to the representations as mental models because of the breadth of this term--it can be used to describe how we solve syllogisms (Johnson-Laird, 1983), how we imagine the workings of a calculator, computer or VCR (Norman, 1993) and, as we saw in the first chapter, what form we think a rule or law might take. Consider Kepler--his initial mental model of a rule for orbits involved perfect circles; he abandoned this rule only when he was forced by negative evidence. Unlike my 2-4-6 subjects, he did not have to generate this negative evidence himself; instead, it was given to him by Brahe.

I refer to the strategies as heuristics because a heuristic is a kind of 'rule of thumb' that works sometimes and doesn't others. If your goal is to test a hypothesis, you can and should employ a number of strategies, depending on how you represent the problem: you might try a positive or a negative heuristic, or a counterfactual heuristic, or some combination.

Mental models are also used to discriminate erroneous data from valid results. There need to be other checks as well, like replication-plus-extension. But scientists need mental models to target probable sources of error. Millikan's mental model suggested that all results which did not indicate a unitary charge for the electron should be carefully scrutinized and replicated.

2.3.7 Tasks That Have the Look and Feel of Scientific Problems

The distinction between abstract tasks and tasks that simulate scientific problems is somewhat fuzzy. Basically, the former refer to tasks that have no content which resembles the sorts of problems encountered in science, whereas the latter contain some content. My modifications to the 2,4,6 task to accommodate error fall into a fuzzy area; the task itself is highly abstract, but by the time one adds a review of literature, limits on replication and the possibility of error, one has a task that bears a closer resemblance to at least some scientific problems. In the next section, I will describe several tasks that have more of the 'look and feel' of actual scientific problems.

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2.3.7.1 Novices

A group at Bowling Green State University (Mynatt, et al., 1977; Mynatt, et al., 1978) developed an artificial universe that required participants to discover the rules governing the motion of particles in a universe of shapes. In the most difficult version of this task, participants spent about ten hours firing particles at different arrangements of shapes. None of them discovered the rule. The participant concentrated on developing a hypothesis and trying to confirm it. In contrast, participants that focused on disconfirmation rejected promising ideas too quickly. Mynatt, Doherty and Tweney concluded that confirmation was an effective heuristic early in the inference process; once a subject or scientist had discovered and verified a pattern, then she could switch to the search for disconfirmatory evidence. This heuristic combination of confirmation and disconfirmation also worked on abstract problems like the 2-4-6 task, especially when the possibility of error was added. But the heuristic value of 'confirm early, disconfirm late' became most apparent on a task that simulated the complexity of actual science.

Kevin Dunbar (1989) created a computerized molecular genetics laboratory in which subjects were posed a problem similar to the one for which Monod and Jacob won the Nobel Prize in 1961. Dunbar did not intend to have subjects simulate the actual discovery path followed by Monod & Jacob; instead, he wanted "to use a task that involves some real scientific concepts and experimentation to address the cognitive components of the scientific discovery process." (Dunbar, 1989, p. 427).

Participants were given elementary training in concepts of molecular genetics, using an interactive environment on a Macintosh computer. Then they were allowed to perform experiments with three controller and three enzyme-producing genes; they could vary the amount of nutrient, remove genes, and measure the enzyme output. The mechanism the subjects had to discover was inhibition, whereas the mechanism they had learned in training was activation.

Dunbar used this task to make the argument that, "rather than inventing an arbitrary task that embodies certain aspects of science it is possible to give subjects a real scientific task to work with" (Dunbar, 1989, p. 427). Hence, we use this problem as an example of a task that simulates an actual scientific problem.

But even so, the similarities between Dunbar's molecular genetics problem and the 2-4-6 task outweigh their differences. Participants on both are given instructions which explain their little universe; these instructions, like the starting triple 2-4-6, bias them towards a hypothesis that is different from the one they are trying to find, and they are able to do a wide variety of mini-experiments to discover the rule--which, although it represents an actual scientific relationship, is as arbitrary to them as the numerical formulas discovered by participants in the

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2-4-6 task. There are none of the potential sources of error that occur in actual genetics experiments and no new techniques to be mastered.

Dunbar relates his findings to the literature on disconfirmation. In this task, all subjects eventually disconfmned their initial hypotheses about the role of the activator gene--no matter what genes were present or absent, there was always an output. What is interesting is what they did next: 6 groups re-interpreted activation to mean a search for the gene that facilitated enzyme production, 7 searched diligently for an activator gene and eventually gave up, and 7 set the goal of explaining their surprising results. Five out of the 7 groups in this category actually found the inhibitor gene. Dunbar's results support the thesis that successful disconfirmation depends on how subjects or scientists represent the task.

Mynatt et al.'s artificial universe and Dunbar's molecular genetics simulation are not the only tasks that simulate scientific reasoning, but they are two of the best and most-cited, and give the flavor of the results one obtains. One other oft­used and cited task is the Big Trak problem, developed by Jeff Shrager (Shrager & Klahr, 1986). Because it involves learning how to run a device, it is not deliberately modeled after a scientific problem, but it is a discovery task.

In the typical version of this task, participants are asked to figure out the function of the RPT key on the back of a programmable vehicle. Let us consider a shortened account of the behavior of one participant, by way of example:

ML began with the hypothesis that RPT N would repeat the entire program N times. So he programmed it to go forward two spaces, then repeat that twice. The result was Big Trak went forward 4 spaces, instead of the predicted 6.

ML had now disconfirmed his initial hypothesis, so he revised it--RPT N repeated only the last step N times. So he programmed Big Trak to go forward 2, left 30, then RPT 1. Big Trak went forward 2 and left 60, confirming ML's hypothesis. Then he ran the same forward 2, left 30 sequence with RPT 2; instead of going left 60 as he expected, Big Trak repeated the forward 2, left 30 sequence twice. Note that ML has conducted a positive test and has gotten a disconfirmatory result. He replicated the whole sequence to make certain. Then he revised his hypothesis: RPT N meant repeat the N steps before the RPT instruction. He then tested it with varying lengths of N, making sure he understood how RPT selected the steps.

Like ML, most participants began with the idea that an instruction like RPT 4 meant 'repeat whatever program had been typed in four times' or 'repeat the last step in the program four times'. Typically, they began with positive tests and quickly obtained disconfirmatory information, though most were not as efficient as ML. In order to discover the rule, subjects had to change their representation of the role of the repeat key: it selected the step to be repeated, so that 'RPT 4' meant 'repeat step 4'. Subjects had to realize that the RPT key might serve as a

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selector, indicating which lines were to be repeated, instead of a counter, indicating the number of times something was to be repeated. The shift from a counter to a selector mental model directed subjects to a different part of the problem space to search for conftrmations and disconftrmations. Similarly, the DAX-MED manipulation transformed participants' mental models of the 2-4-6 task from a search for one rule with exceptions to a search for two mutually­exclusive rules.

Klahr and Dunbar (Klahr, 1988) discussed the way in which participants switched between searching two problem spaces, one of which was a space of possible hypotheses and the other of which was a space of possible experiments. ML ftrst considered a set of hypotheses that depended on the idea that RPT was a counter; he generated a space of possible experiments based on that mental model. When results violated expectations, at one point he switched to searching for a new kind of hypothesis, in which RPT selected the steps to be repeated. Disconftrmation can lead to a change in the type of hypothesis one is pursuing, which in turn directs one to search different parts of the experiment space.

Klahr and Dunbar concluded that their participants showed two different cognitive styles: Theorists and Experimenters. The former, when presented with disconftrmatory results, searched the hypothesis space for alternatives that would ftt the evidence and also make interesting new predictions. ML did this when he thought about why Big Trak repeated the forward 2 left 30 sequence twice in response to RPT 2. The latter responded to disconfirmatory evidence by exploring the experiment space--at some point, most of them ran experiments which made the selector role of RPT salient. Theorists conducted about half as many experiments as Experimenters, and almost all of the former's experiments were guided by a hypothesis, whereas the latter's were often simply exploratory. IN a second study, Klahr and Dunbar found that participants with prior programming experience could discover the function of the RPT key by searching the hypothesis space, then conducting tests in the experiment space.

In a more recent study using a version of their RPT task, Klahr, Fay and Dunbar (1993) established that third and to a lesser extent sixth graders had trouble with evidence that disconftrmed counter hypotheses, in part because they could not switch to a selector hypothesis: "inconsistencies were interpreted not as disconftrmations, but rather as either errors or temporary failures to demonstrate the desired effect." (p. 140). Klahr, Fay and Dunbar interpreted this as a failure to coordinate searches in hypothesis and experiment spaces, a view we will explore in greater depth when we consider the performance of children on actual scientiftc problems.

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2.3.7.2 Conclusions from Tasks That Simulate Scientific Problems

Despite Dunbar's arguments about the importance of modeling tasks after real scientific problems, the conclusions from tasks that have the look and feel of scientific problems look little different from those derived from abstract tasks. What one learns is more about the relationship between mental models, hypotheses and experiments in a variety of domains that resemble aspects of science.

Type of Task:

Participants: Abstract Simulated Scientific Scientific Problem Problem

Novices Effectiveness of heuristics Demonstrate like importance of 1. positive test additional 2. counterfactual heuristics: 3. replication-plus- confirm early, extension disconfirm late; depends on relationship of coordinate search mental model to target rule. in two spaces

Children Are unable to coordinate search in two spaces

Experts Prefer a positive test heuristic

2.3.8 Actual Scientific Problems

Another way to study scientific thinking is to use actual scientific problems. On these problems, it is harder to manipulate features of the task like whether it requires background knowledge or can be done by anyone walking in 'cold', whether the rule is narrower or broader than the participant's most likely initial hypothesis, or indeed whether there is any rule at all, and how the problem space is structured. Such problems do allow us to study differences in the way experts represent tasks in their domain, and what heuristics and algorithms they use.

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2.3.8.1 Novices

Researchers like McCloskey (1983), Clement (1982) and Carey (Carey, 1992; Wiser, 1983) have established parallels between the mental models of modern novices and historical figures in the evolution of science. For example, McCloskey (McCloskey, 1983) found that college students held beliefs about physics that resembled those of Philoponus (6th century) and Buridan (14th century), who thought that a force was required to set a body in motion, and that the force gradually dissipated. Clement (Clement, 1983) found that freshman engineering students were a little more advanced: protocols of their attempts to solve motion problems resembled Galileo's reasoning in De Motu.

Brewer and Chinn (1991) studied how such beliefs change. They gave adult novices brief readings on quantum theory or special relativity and asking them a series of follow-up questions. Both quantum theory and relativity make predictions that conflict with common-sense beliefs about space and time and cause and effect. Some subjects simply rejected the new information, resembling those scientists who cling to the old paradigm. Other subjects showed at least partial assimilation of the new material: they were able to give an answer that corresponded to what they had read, but they "sure didn't believe it." (p. 70)19 Another move was to interpret the answer in terms of existing beliefs, for example, by treating relativistic phenomena as optical illusions.

2.3.8.2 Children as Novices

Jean Piaget argued that the development of scientific thought in the child recapitulated the evolution of science (Bringuier, 1980). Studies that show how the scientific beliefs of children and novices change owe much to Piaget's inspiration.20 This line of work is also influenced by Thomas Kuhn's (Kuhn, 1962) view that long periods of normal science are followed by crises caused by

19This reminds me of an introductory psychology student who asked me before an exam whether I wanted him to answer the questions according to the textbook and what I had said in class or according to his Christian beliefs. 20 My good friend and colleague Ryan Tweney took me to task on an earlier draft of this material for papering over deep epistemological differences among the various contributors to this literature--like philosophers of science, they frequently argue about fundamentals. But my goal here is to create an interpretation of the literature that will help us frame the rest of the book, not try to replicate all of the important epistemological arguments or even cite anywhere near all of this complex literature. I have used incommensurability as an example of these deep issues; clearly, there are strong views about whether the adult's scientific mental models are really incommensurable with the child's. But throughout the section on cognitive psychology of science, I have preferred a classification system based more on methods than on philosophy, because I think the methods embody philosophies in a way that is often more revealing than the researcher's statements. When it comes to synthesis, I have relied heavily on dual space analysis derived from researchers like Herb Simon and Dave Klahr at Camegie­Mellon (Klahr, 1988 ); it seems to me it pulls the literature together with a minimum of epistemological baggage, though I know there are those who would disagree strongly. I hope readers will get a feeling for the issues in cognitive psychology of science from these sections and will go forward and read it on their own. I also recommend a close look at Tweney's own papers on this subject (Tweney, 1989)(Tweney, 1994).

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anomalies in the reigning paradigm. A paradigm corresponds to something like a collective mental model--a good example is the circular orbit model that was almost universally accepted before Kepler. Brahe's anomalous data sparked a crisis, which Kepler resolved by proposing his new model of the solar system.

From a Kuhnian standpoint, the mental models held by practitioners before and after a paradigm shift are incommensurable--those holding the older view cannot even understand the new one. Kuhn's views are by no means accepted by all or even most historians and philosophers, but they are extremely influential. If Piaget and Kuhn are right, children and novices should go through revolutionary shifts in mental models as they learn scientific concepts. For example, Chi (1992) used a Kuhnian framework to review the literature on conceptual changes in children and adults. She argues that radical conceptual change often occurs before anomaly recognition, whereas most of the hypothesis-testing literature tends to take anomaly recognition for granted--except under error conditions, it is clear when a triple is at variance with a hypothesis. Her own analysis suggests that recognition and resolution of anomalies requires a shift to a new system of categories similar to the kind of paradigm shift made famous by Kuhn.

Similarly, Carey (1992) compared the problems children ages 3 to 5 have differentiating weight and density with the problem scientists before Black had differentiating heat and temperature: in both cases, the view before differentiation seems to belong to a different, incommensurable paradigm from the view afterward. Carey is therefore sympathetic to Kuhn's views, but less to those of Piaget, who proposed major changes in the cognitive abilities of children as they passed from one stage of development to another. Carey finds changes in conceptual content in specific domains as the child grows older, not general changes in cognitive ability.

Brewer and Samarapungavan (1991) concluded "that the child can be thought of as a novice scientist, who adopts a rational approach to dealing with the physical world, but lacks the knowledge of the physical world and experimental methodology accumulated by the institution of science" (p. 210). Like Carey, they argue that the apparent differences in thinking between children and adults is due to differences in knowledge, not the ability to employ reasoning strategies. For example, they studied second-graders and showed that those who had a flat­earth mental model could incorporate disconfrrmatory information consistent with a Copernican view by transforming their model into a hollow sphere. They used this new mental model to solve a range of problems about the day/night cycle and motion of individuals and objects across the earth' surface (see Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992).

In contrast, Deanna Kuhn (Kuhn, 1989) argued against the 'child as novice scientist'view. "Both child and scientists gain understanding ofthe world through construction and revision of mental models. Recent research .... suggests that the process in terms of which mental models, or theories, are coordinated with new evidence is significantly different in the child, the lay adult, and the scientist.. . .In

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some very basic respects, children (and many adults) do not behave like scientists" (Kuhn, 1989, p. 687).

D. Kuhn, following Klahr and Dunbar (Klahr, 1988), felt that it was important to distinguish between two problem spaces that have to be coordinated when one is solving scientific problems. One is a space of possible hypotheses, the other is a space of possible experimental or observational results that might bear on the hypotheses: According to D. Kuhn, in the child, experiment and hypothesis spaces are merged into a single mental model, without any clear distinction between the two. In the scientist, theory and evidence are clearly separated. The novice adult falls somewhere between.

In her research, D. Kuhn focused on theory revision in the light of evidence. One of her studies involved hypotheses about the relationship of food and colds. She cites one child who believed that relish caused colds and candy bars did not. This child was presented with instances whose overall pattern showed neither variable made any difference, but instead she picked out individual results that supported her theory, singling out positive tests for relish and negative for candy bars and ignoring the rest.

This process can occur in adults, too, and have enormous significance. The Dow Corning company has been forced into Chapter 11 because of litigation regarding its silicone breast implants. Nikr Kossovsky is often called as an expert witness in these trials. He ran a standard, but very difficult, test for antibodies and found that "scores of 9 of his 249 women with implants were significantly higher than the mean score of the 47 healthy women or of the 39 women with autoimmune disorders. But those 9 women represented less than 4 percent of all the women with implants he tested. What if in reality his ... test was meaningless? Then he might expect 4 percent of all women to score equally high. Because his two comparison groups had comparatively few women, 4 percent of those would be fewer than two from each group. With numbers this small, it is not particularly surprising that he got zero" instances of higher scores from his comparison groups (Taubes, December, 1995, p. 71).

Like children in D. Kuhn's study, Kossovsky singled-out a few positive results without taking into account the overall pattern. These kinds of biases can have multi-million dollar consequences.

Overall, D. Kuhn found that adults were better than children at conducting coordinated searches of hypothesis and evidence spaces on tasks where this sort of financial incentive was absent. Scientists were even better. The key, according to D. Kuhn, is the development of metacognitive skills that permit delineation of theory and evidence, and a coordinated search in two spaces. Metacognition involves being aware of one's own cognitive processes, and modifying them when necessary. In this case, metacognition involves being aware that a mental model is just that--a working model that may have to be modified in the light of evidence.

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Similarly, Klahr, Fay and Dunbar (1993) found that adults performed better than children on tasks that simulate scientific problems because the adults possessed "a set of domain-general skills that go beyond the logic of conftrmation and disconfmnation and deal with the coordination of search in two spaces" (p. 141). A coordinated dual space search facilitates shifts in representation that lead to new mental models.

Carey and Brewer feel that development of scientiftc knowledge has more to do with changes in domain-speciftc knowledge, whereas D. Kuhn and Klahr place more emphasis on heuristics and metacognitive abilities. This debate has important implications for teaching discovery. Does one promote discovery simply by teaching the content of a domain, or does one encourage the development of metacognition and heuristics like dual-space searches? The obvious answer is to do both.

Interestingly, D. Kuhn's research has focused more on situations where the relationships between variables are less than perfect--where one needs to look at the overall pattern of positive and negative results. Vosniadou and Brewer, in contrast, preferred to help children clarify their mental models by pointing out inconsistencies and places that needed elaboration. For example, they showed children who said the Earth was round a picture of a house and asked them questions like, " This house is on the earth, isn't it? How come here the earth is flat, but before you made it round?" (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992,). Children were able to modify their mental models to accommodate this sort of contradiction. One solution some adopted was to visualize the earth as a kind of flattened sphere, a kind of thick pancake.

In other words, Brewer's children don't have to conduct a search in two spaces--they are given results from the evidence space. They are able to use this evidence to modify their hypotheses. Similarly, in Brewer's adult study mentioned above, results from the evidence space were summarized for participants in a way that highlighted the contradiction between their mental model and the result.

The point here is a reflexive one: how you set up the experimental task determines, in part, your results. It is much the same with computational simulations.

D. Kuhn and Brewer could still be surprised by what they found, just as computational simulations can surprise their creators. But there is a difference between studying how children deal with less that perfect covariation between variables (D. Kuhn) and how they deai with what Thagard calls explanatory coherence (Brewer). Both kinds of study are valuable, and well-conducted. In the former, children appear to lack abilities characteristic of adult scientists, and in the latter, they appear to possess them. The obvious compromise is to try to determine the kinds of tasks and situations on which the performance of children

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and novices will resemble those of experts, and the tasks on which they will not. One could, for example, take the same set of children and run them through both co-variation and explanatory tasks and compare their performance to scientists confronted with the same type of problems. Intriguingly, Faust (Faust, 1984) suggests that even experts often do poorly with co-variation problems.

2.3.8.3. Experts and Novices Compared

In the previous section, we compared children and adults. In this one, we will talk about how children and adult novices compare with experts. "For a long time the study of exceptional and expert performance has been considered outside the scope of general psychology because such performance has been attributed to innate characteristics possessed by outstanding individuals. A better explanation is that expert performance reflects extreme adaptations, accomplished through life-long effort, to demands in restricted, well-defined domains (Ericsson & Charness, 1994, p.744). Expert knowledge needs to be more than a 'pile of facts' --it needs to be structured in ways that facilitate problem-solving (Ericsson & Charness, 1994).

Larkin argued that this knowledge is organized in sets of condition-action pairs known as productions, similar to the production rules used by the various forms of BACON, which were activated by patterns in the data (Larkin, McDermott, Simon, & Simon, 1980). She and her colleagues found that when an expert physicist encountered a familiar problem, the initial information typically triggered a set of productions which rapidly produced the correct equations--the expert had automated much of the problem-solving process, and worked forward from the information given. Novice physics students had to struggle backwards from the unknown solution, trying to find the right equations and quantities; they therefore took much longer even when they were able to find the correct result.

Consider the following example. Suppose we have to find the value of the friction coefficient for a block resting on an inclined plane. The initial problem statement gives the weight of the block, the angle of the plane and the force pushing against the block. The expert will work forward from the givens, generating the necessary equations to solve for the friction coefficient. The novice will typically start from the goal, generating the final equation, and trying to find values for the variables in that final equation by generating other equations that use the data given at the beginning of the problem to solve for each. When all variables have values, the novice stops (Anzai, 1991).

Working forward and working backward are examples of general, or 'weak' heuristics that can be applied across a wide range of problem-solving situations. Note that either heuristic can work, but working forward is typically faster and more efficient--the steps in the problem can be laid out systematically. Novices tended to try to apply equations early, whereas experts reason qualitatively until

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they arrive at a representation that suggests what set of equations to use (Larkin, 1983).

This finding suggests that expert/novice differences in heuristics are related to differences in mental models. Chi et al. (Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, 1981) asked experts and novices to group physics problems based on their similarity, where the definition of similarity was determined by the participant. They found that "that experts tended to categorize problems into types that are defined by the major physics principles that will be used in solution, whereas novices tend to categorize them into types as defined by the entities contained in the problem statement" (p. 150). In other words, for experts, categorization is a first step towards solution.

Experts tend to classify problems as having to do with principles like 'conservation of momentum', whereas novice> tend to do a more common-sense reading of the words and diagrams in a problem.21 Expert physicists also generate diagrams that are "principle-oriented abstractions of physical objects" (Anzai, 1991, p. 88) whereas novices tend to rely more on diagrams that look like concrete objects.

In a discussion of the way Galileo transformed the motion of a pendulum into an abstract, representation, Michael R. Matthews gives us a good description of these expert representations:

Planets and falling apples have color, texture, irregular surfaces, heat, solidity and any number of other properties and relations. But when they become the subject matter of mecfiarucs they are merely point masses with specified accelerations; when thus concertualized and cfelimited, they are no longer natural objects, but theoretica objects. In a similar way, when apples are considered by economists they become theoretical objects of a dlfferent sort--commodities with specific exchange values. When botanists consider apples they create yet other theoretical objects. For Galileo a sphere of read on the end of a length of rope swinging in air, when it is considered by his mechanical theory, becomes a pendulum conceived as a point mass at the end of a weightless chord suspended from a frictionless fulcrum moving in a void (Matthews, 1994, p. 12:;).

Galileo solved the pendulum problem by abstracting it in the way suggested by the last line of the quotation, much to the frustration of his former mentor and leading critic, del Monte, who protested that actual pendulums did not behave in the way predicted by Galileo. Galileo countered by pointing out the way in which the actual pendulums failed to attain the ideal, frictionless state he was describing. Like modern novices struggling to attain the predicted result in a science lab, del Monte found that it is hard to make reality conform to the abstract representation.

2lSimiiarly, Dee-Lucas (Dee-Lucas & Larkin, 1988)compared how novices and experts rated the importance of textbook presentations of work, energy, and fluid statics and noted that students relied more on category information like whether the text included definitions, whereas physicists based their ratings almost entirely on the overall quality of the content. Experts are less likely to need the scaffolding provided by definitions in assembling their abstract representations.

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Bucciarelli (Bucciarelli, 1994) includes a detailed analysis of the transformations a student has to be able to make in order to solve a textbook design problem. The student sees a picture of a hydraulic cylinder moving up and down through a slot and is asked to determine the numerical value of several variables at a particular instant in its motion. Like Galileo, the student has to turn a concrete picture into an abstract one, although in the student's case, even the concrete picture is covered with mathematical terms and values (see Figure 7).

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Figure 7

Diagram accompanying a problem concerning a hydraulic cylinder (Bucciarelli, 1994, Fig 6, p. 99)

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The student must transform this picture into an even more abstract representation:

v

.... ..-__ 300 mm-----l .. ~

Figure 8

A more abstract representation of the problem in Figure 7 (Bucciarelli, 1994, Fig 8, p.106).

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The transfonnation reveals the underlying fonn of the exercise. It is a 'vector differential calculus' problem--abstract, universal and unencumbered. There is nothing left of the mechanism save its essence ... no longer any pretense of machinery, hydraulic cylinders, piston rods, slotted anns, or frictionless pins. All of that is irrelevant. The student must learn to perceive the world of mechanisms and machinery as embodying mathematical and physical principle alone, must in effect learn to not see what is there but irrelevant. (Bucciarelli, 1994, p. 107).

Bucciarelli shows the kind of transformations novices must learn to make before they can solve familiar textbook problems. Subjects in these expert­novice comparisons typically work on such textbook-style word problems, not hands-on laboratory tasks. Therefore, findings from the expert-novice literature are especially relevant to educational situations (Reif and Larkin, 1991) but may have less relevance to scientific practice. Green (Green and Gilhooly, 1992) argued that "the standard expert-novice contrastive paradigm by requiring use of problems accessible to novices has led to a relative neglect of how experts tackle difficult problems and how experts detect and recover from errors in the face of task difficulty" (p. 67).

Similarly, Anzai pointed out that, "most of the recent cognitive research on physics has been limited to 'routine' problem-solving by experts and novices. That is, the primary concern has been with the simple problems often seen in high school or college textbooks. Although such routine problems are the real problems with which engineers deal, experts at the frontiers of physics are trying to discover the unknown principles of the physical world and to construct new types of representations that will help explain it in scientific tenns. Only those who succeed in generating novel representations will be long remembered in the history of physics ... " (Anzai, 1991). In other words, textbook problems correspond to what Thomas Kuhn called nonnal science; indeed, he argued that students learned the dominant mental models in their fields from textbooks. Revolutionary science lies beyond the textbooks, and it can take some time before new discoveries are integrated into textbook knowledge for a new generation of students.

Klahr, Fay and Dunbar (1993) point out that the expert-novice studies cited above do not give children or adults the opportunity to design new experiments and fonnulate and evaluate hypotheses, whereas experiments with simulations like the 2-4-6 task do. In a study using a task that pennitted children and adults to generate experiments and hypotheses, Klahr, Fay and Dunbar (1993) found that superior adult perfonnance "appears to come from a set of domain-general skills that go beyond the logic of confinnation and disconfinnation and deal with the coordination of search in two spaces" (p. 141). Klahr and D. Kuhn therefore agree on the importance of metacognition. It is not enough to know a lot of information, not even enough to be able to fonn abstract representations--to discover, one must be able to mount a coordinated search for new hypotheses and evidence that bears on them.

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Type of task:

Participants Abstract Simulated Scientific Problem Scientific Problem

Novices Effectiveness of Demonstrate Use common-sense heuristics like importance of representations and .positive test additional weak heuristics. .counterfactual heuristics: .replication-plus- confirm early, extension disconfirm late; depends on coordinate search relationship of in two spaces mental model to target rule.

Children Unable to Can modify mental coordinate search models to achieve in two spaces explanatory

coherence Experts Prefer a positive Are capable of

test heuristic abstract representations, domain-specific heuristics and metacognitive coordination of dual-space search.

Both Klahr and D. Kuhn relied on abstract tasks and tasks that simulated scientific problems. It is hard to know how one could design an experiment in which experts and novices were put in a real discovery situation and their performance compared. There are two alternatives:

1) It is possible to design tasks based on historical discoveries, and see how novices fare when faced with the problems confronted by a Kepler, Faraday or Darwin. We will explore this possibility in Chapter 5, when we talk about active learning modules based on discoveries and inventions.

2) Participant observation, in which a novice enrolls as a member of a laboratory team and studies its processes as she or he learns them. For example, Bruno Latour enrolled as a technician in Jonas Salk's laboratory and studied it from that perspective (Latour, 1986). Unfortunately, Latour and his colleague, Steve Wool gar, were concerned about adopting the belief system of the 'natives' in this case, and so they deliberately avoided a deep study of the knowledge being

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transmitted, and instead focused on activities. Latour and Woolgar correctly assumed that knowledge was in part the product of social negotiations and activities, but they were not comfortable studying anything but the inscriptions and dialogue that resulted from such negotiations--they did not want to infer representations like mental models. So it is hard to compare their valuable and interesting work, and the work of most other participant-observers, with the cognitive work on expert/novice differences.

2.3.8.4 Different Levels of Expertise in Teams

In Chapter One, we described several cognitive case studies of expert scientists who made significant discoveries. There is one contemporary study from a cognitive perspective of scientific experts working in teams on a scientific problem. Because not all members of the teams studied are at the same level of expertise, it gives us a chance to compare different gradations within the expert classification.

Dunbar (1995; 1997) has conducted a major in vivo study of four molecular biology laboratories, recording laboratory meetings and conducting follow-up interviews. He emphasized the extent to which cognition was shared in these laboratories. He witnessed an actual case of scientific discovery that occurred in a laboratory meeting, where a surprising finding triggered a new model of a disease process.22 Dunbar was not able to single out an individual discoverer; instead, the new model emerged from a group process (Dunbar, 1997).

This discovery illustrates the way in which scientists tend to follow-up on surprising results, even ones that appear to disconfirm the current hypothesis. When confronted with a disconfmnatory result, the scientists typically did one of four things:

a) Ignored it, but only if it came early in the research project and had implications only for a corollary hypothesis, not the core hypothesis in the area (Dunbar, 1997).

b) Changed a corollary assumption of the core hypothesis: "For example, a scientist changed his hypothesis from 'this particular sequence is necessary to initiate binding of the protein' to 'any sequence in this region that has a base-pair mismatch will be bound to by this protein'" (Dunbar, 1995, p. 379). This kind of change preserves the core hypothesis (see Gorman, 1992, for a discussion).

c) Attributed an anomalous result to error: In some cases, the evidence disconfirmed any hypothesis of the type currently held by the scientist. (Dunbar

22 Dunbar had to conceal the identity of the laboratory members and the actual problem they worked on. which is one of the disadvantages of studying contemporary discoverers and inventors.

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failed to provide an example). Individual scientists in this situation made another classic hypothesis-preservation move (again, see Gorman, 1992): they attributed the result to an error.

d) Used the surprise as the basis for coming up with a new hypothesis. The above discovery is an example: a post doc came in excited about a surprising result that did not fit with existing theory, and members of the lab worked together to come up with a new model. On the role of serendipity, Dunbar concluded,

In the data we have collected, the scientist usually is looking for the desired results in the experimental conditions, and to do this the scientist has formulated a rich set of hypotheses and mechanisms that could account for a wide variety of possible findings. When the control conditions produce unusual results, the scientist is already considering a host of potential mechanisms, and thus a surprising finding allows the scientist to focus on the aspects of his or her current conceptual structure that need to be changed or rejected ... The manner in whicb eXl'eriments are constructed minimizes the role of serendipity to the extent that when su~rising results do occur, the scientist already has a constrained set of actIve hypotheses and mechanisms that can be used to interpret the findings (Dunbar, 1995, p. 390).

e) Falsification bias: The most experienced scientists were the ones least likely to display confirmation bias. Indeed, Dunbar claims they displayed a falsification bias, discarding results that appeared to confirm a hypothesis. Dunbar speculated that this falsification bias was a protection against airing hypotheses that might later be proved wrong, a frequent experience for the senior scientists (see the case of cold fusion in 3.1). He also pointed-out that each laboratory tended to pursue some low-risk and some high-risk projects. It would be interesting to know whether falsification bias was more likely to occur with hypotheses from high­risk projects.

In general, the more senior or expert a scientist, the more willing she was to modify or discard a hypotheses--indeed, sometimes too willing. Part of this willingness may come from a deliberate effort to make certain that the group or team considers alternatives. In scientific practice, much of the coordination between hypothesis and evidence goes on in groups, and the most senior members are likely to have the widest experience with divergent views. Dunbar would be well-advised to search for consistent patterns of this sort.

Dunbar also focused on the use of analogies, noting that scientists tended to prefer analogies within the same organism to the kinds of remote analogies to other systems often mentioned in cases of scientific paradigm change. We will come back to this point in the next section, but for now, let us compare Dunbar's studies of shared cognition with Rudwick's (see section 2.4, p. 101).

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2.3.9 20th Century Biologists and 19th Century Geologists Compared

But first, let us consider how Dunbar's conclusions compare to the group cognition case we cited at the end of last chapter, concerning the great Devonian controversy. Both are studies of scientific research teams, but the Devonian case emphasized the interaction between teams, and Dunbar's study focused on what happened within teams. Furthermore, the Devonian 'teams' were really shifting allegiances among individual actors, whereas Dunbar's teams were organized laboratories with senior researchers, post-docs and graduate students.

How do Dunbar's conclusions square with Rudwick's? Murchison showed little evidence of falsification bias. He initially used the possibility of error to dismiss anomalous results, produced by others; if that didn't work, he modified corollary assumptions of his overall system to accommodate the data. The closest he came to falsification bias was when he nearly abandoned the Devonian system after encountering a series of negative surprises in the Rhineland, but Lonsdale fossil work helped rescue his system, and he was eventually able to restore his Devonian system.

In other words, Murchison appeared to operate more like the junior than the senior scientists in Dunbar's study. But remember that Dunbars work was done inside the teams, where it made sense to be critical. Probably Dunbar's scientists supported their hypotheses strongly once they were put into the public domain. Mitroff studied lunar scientists at the time of the Apollo mission and noted that those deemed most outstanding by their colleagues were" "the most creative" for their continual creation of "bold, provocative, stimulating, suggestive, speCUlative hypotheses" and "the most resistant to change" for "their pronounced ability to hang onto their ideas and defend them with all their might to theirs and everyone else's death" "(Mitroff, 1981, p. l71~ Dunbar's work inside the research teams needs to be complemented by an analysis of how the teams ideas are disseminated and defended.

Like Dunbar's experts, Murchison and other participants in the Devonian controversy relied heavily on local analogies--literally local, in the sense that they tried to draw analogies between their own region and other locations. Indeed, one of the central debates in the controversies was whether such analogies were appropriate. Murchison in creating the Silurian, Devonian and Permian systems established the importance of using local analogies to form global representations of strata. The topic of analogy deserves at least brief consideration in a section of its own.

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2.4 Metaphors and Analogies in Scientific Thinking

And I cherish more than anything else the Analogies, my most trustworthy mas.ters. They know all the secrets of Nature, and they ought to be least neglected in Geometry Gohannes Kepler, quoted in (Gentner, 1980, p. 1).

There is no word which is used more loosely, or in more variety of senses, than Analogy Gohn Stuart Mill).

According to David Leary, "all knowledge is ultimately rooted in metaphorical (or analogical) modes of perception and thought" (Leary, 1990, p. 2). If he is right, then science would be no exception. Volumes have been written about analogies and metaphors in science (Edge, 1974; Gentner, 1980; Hesse, 1966), and this section could easily become larger than the rest of the book put together. In order to simplify a complex problem, we will rely heavily on a framework created by Holyoak and Thagard, in part because it relies on mental models:

Many cognitive scientists agree that people and other animals make predIctions by forming mental models, internal structures that represent external reality in at least an approximate way ... Analogy takes us asteR beyond ordinary mental models. A mental model is a representation of some part of the environment. For example, our knowledge of water provides us with a kind of mental model of how it moves. Similarly, our knowledge of sound provides us with a kind of model of how sound is transmitted through the air. Each of these mental models links an internal representation to external reality. But when we consider the analogy between water waves and sound propagation, we are trying to build an isomorphism between two internal models. Implicitly, we are acting as if our model of water waves can be used to modify and improve our model of sound. The final validation of the attempt must be to examine whether by using analogy we can better understand how sound behaves in the external world (Holyoak & Thagard, 1995, p. 33).

Metaphors and analogies move novices', childrens' and experts' mental models into to the unknown. The use of metaphor and analogy is therefore a weak, or general heuristic, dependent on mental models of the source and target domains for its success.

What is the difference between metaphor and analogy? Let us consider an example. Experts frequently use analogies to build bridges from the known to the unknown. Historically, psychologists have used a variety of analogies to understand the mind, likening it to a telephone network and, more recently, to a computer (Leary, 1990). This analogy becomes a metaphor when the word 'like' is dropped: the mind is a computer. This metaphor is powerful, but researchers need to remember it is a metaphor. Interestingly, the study of analogy has provoked a wealth of computational models (Hofstadter, 1995)--powerful and interesting, but all reflexive uses of analogy to study analogical reasoning!

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An even more common metaphor is that brain corresponds to mind. Most psychologists and biologists would not think of this as a metaphor at all--it is Truth. Metaphors are only dangerous when they are confused with Truth. Here's where metacognition plays a major role: practitioners need to realize they are creating metaphors and analogies, which may not totally capture the target. In Chapter 4, we will have more to say about distributed cognition, but the idea is simple: aspects of mind are in the world. For example, the computer I am using to write this contains portions of my memory, in the form of references, related articles, diagrams, and schedules. I could argue that important aspects of my mind are not in my brain.

2.4.1 What Makes a Good Analogy

Holyoak and Thagard (Holyoak & Thagard, 1995) identify three constraints that must be satisfied by a good analogy:

1. Similarity: The source of the analogy and the target must share some common properties. Both minds and computers process and store information; both can be used to solve problems.

2. Structure: Each element of the source domain should correspond to one element of the target domain, and there should be an overall correspondence in structure. Here the mind/computer analogy becomes more slippery. Because the structure of mind is unknown, experts like Herbert Simon and his colleagues look at the structure of the computer, infer that the structure of the mind could be the same, and conduct experiments to explore the parallels. So, for example, a traditional information-processing model inferred that human beings had a working memory that corresponded roughly to the RAM on a computer. Both computers and humans also have long term memory storage, parts of which can be placed in working memory and combined with inputs when solving problems. The bottleneck is working memory, which seemed to have a limited capacity in human beings. Here the structure of the analogy begins to break down--even personal computers can now have huge amounts of RAM.

Newer connectionist and neural net perspectives can also construct models of the mind consistent with the structure of their metaphors, especially since neural nets are based on an explicit analogy with the structure of the human nervous system. Here the analogy requires a further step: mind is the same as brain which is like a neural net. As we will see below, the identity of mind and brain is questionable.

3. Purpose: The creation of analogies is guided by the problem-solver's goals. Analogies are not fixed forever--as new information comes in, they can be modified. If one's goal is to understand the mind, then there is no reason not to engage in what Seifert et al. call 'opportunistic assimilation' (Seifert, Meyer,

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Davidson, Patalano, & Yaniv, 1995). They argue that this process occurs during the incubation phase of discovery, when the problem-solver has reached an impasse; she or he stays on the alert for new information and assimilates it to achieve a solution. When an analogy reaches and impasse, it can leave a problem-solver or even an entire field primed to search for alternate mental models.

Holyoak and Thagard have applied the computer metaphor to their own work, creating a computational simulation called, ARCS, Analog Retrieval by Constraint Satisfaction. Basically, ARCS builds up a set of excitatory and inhibitory links among object and predicate pairs. The authors use as an example the analogy between Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia. Hussein-Hitler is an example of an object pair; invade-occupy is an example of a predicate pair. These two pairs would share an excitatory link, which would have a weight associated with it. Pairs like Czechoslovakia-Kuwait and Iraq-Kuwait would share a negative weight. Given these similarities, ARCS should settle onto an analogical structure which resembles the one used by President Bush, if the initial weights and links are set up in the right way. As with Thagard's ECHO, one could also set up the links from another perspective, say that of one of the critics of Bush's invasion.

ARCS allows one to model almost any analogical structure. It is a reflexive application of the computational metaphor to the study of metaphors. ARCS can mimic the performance of human participants in experiments, allowing us to construct hypotheses to account for their performance. It would be useful to see ARCS applied to a detailed case.

In the next chapter, we will consider Bell's use of the ear as an analogy for a telephone; perhaps a future version of ARCS will be able to take on this or a similar case, although the notion of a mental model may be hard to reduce to computational form. Ippolito & Tweney clarify that mental models are "dynamic representations of dynamic systems rather than static replications of real-world objects. The emphasis on the dynamic is intended to convey a conception of mental models as more akin to organisms than to devices that can be reduced to the enumeration of structures or translated into machine language" (Ippolito & Tweney, 1995, p. 234). There are certainly computational frameworks that can accommodate organic evolutionary structures--genetic algorithms, for example-­but the point is it will take a very sophisticated, dynamic structure to simulate the development of mental models, especially if we include metacognition as an important component.

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2.4.2 Analogical Reasoning in Science

In Section 1.1, we discussed the role of analogies in Kepler's discovery of his three laws. Holyoak: and Thagard include a list of additional analogies that have been used in science (Holyoak: & Thagard, 1995), including:

1. Sound and water waves, proposed by the Greek Chrysippus in the second century B.C. and the Roman Vitruvius in the first century A.D.

2. Light and sound: Huygens proposed this analogy in 1678. Newton's particle theory eclipsed it until experiments by Thomas Young and Augustin Fresnel established that light could behave like a wave. Bohr later argued that the particle and wave views of light should be argued as complementary, and explicitly made an analogy to the yin-yang sign (Holton, 1973).

3. Bacterial mutation and a slot machine: In 1943, Salvador Luria "reasoned that if bacteria become resistant because of gene mutations, then the numbers of resistant bacteria in different bacterial cultures should vary like the expected returns from different kinds of slot machines" (Holyoak: & Thagard, 1995).

4. The atom as a solar system: Gentner (Gentner & Clement, 1988) has used this particular analogy to illustrate her structure-mapping theory:

The basic intuition is that an analogy is a mapping of knowledge from one domain (the base) into another (the target), which conveys that a system of relations that holds among the base objects also holds among the target objects. Thus, an analogy is a way of noticing relational commonalties independently of the objects in which those relations are embedded .... To take a familiar example, in the Rutherford analogy between the solar system and the hydrogen atom, the intended interpretation consists of a set of common relations: that the nucleus is more massive than the electron Gust as the sun is more massive than the planet), that the nucleus attracts the electron, that this plus the mass relation causes the electron to revolve around the nucleus, and so on. Object descriptions are disregarded; there is no attempt to match the nucleus with the sun in color, size or temperature (Gentner & Clement, 1988, p. 313).

This analogy created a new mental model of the atom, one my generation of science students carried in their heads for years. Unfortunately, it is misleading in certain respects. Nils Bohr proposed a new model in 1912 in which electron orbits were not like planetary ones; they were more like rungs of a ladder, with the electrons only at the rungs and not in between. Electrons could switch between rungs by absorbing or giving off a photon.23 He also proposed that the atomic nucleus was more like a drop of water than a body like the sun. "The force that stuck the nucleus together was the nuclear strong force. Counteracting

23The rungs of a ladder analogy was borrowed from Nick Strobel, http://www .astro. washington.edulstrobelllightnotesllightnotes.html# A I. 3

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that strong force was the common electrical repulsion of the positively charged nuclear protons. The delicate balance between the two fundamental forces made the nucleus liquid-like. Energy added from the outside by particle bombardment deformed it; it wobbled like a liquid drop, oscillating complexly just as the braided streams of water Bohr had studied for his dissertation had oscillated" (Rhodes, 1986, p. 228).

Meitner and Frisch were able to use this mental model to explain a paradoxical result obtained by their colleague, Otto Hahn. When uranium was bombarded by neutrons, it appeared to leave a residue of Barium, an element far down the periodic table. As Hahn said in a letter to Meitner, "We understand that (uranium) really can't break up into barium ... So try to think of some other possibility" (Rhodes, 1986, p. 253). Meitner and Frisch used Bohr's water drop analogy. The electrical repulsion of the 92 protons in the Uranium nucleus was almost great enough to counteract the strong force that created the surface tension holding the nucleus together. In effect, the Uranium nucleus was a wobbly drop; when it was hit by a neutron, it could oscillate into an elongated drop that contained two bulbs; electrical repulsion could drive the bulbs so far apart they would split into two separate nuclei of elements well down the periodic table (Rhodes, 1986, pp. 258-9).

Based on his studies of molecular biology laboratories, Dunbar speculates that most of the scientific analogies that cross domains may be used more for explanation than in discovery. Of 99 analogies proposed by the scientists in his study, only two were outside of biology. Kepler's analogy between a ferryman and a planet circling the sun clearly crosses domains and therefore is distant (see 1.1). Kepler claims this analogy had an important role in his thinking. Bohr's water drop is probably distant also, although both atomic nuclei and the behavior of water drops can fall under physics. Again, Meitner and Frisch claim this analogy was important. Dunbar might counter that scientists retrospective accounts of their discoveries are unreliable; in interviews conducted months after the laboratory meetings, Dunbar's scientists did not remember that they had made extensive use of analogies. In contrast to authors like Boden (Boden, 1990)who argue that analogies are used to restructure and transform scientific knowledge, Dunbar found that they were used as scaffolding to make a series of small changes in problem representation. After a new representation was adopted by the group, the scaffolding was thrown away to the point where the scientists could not even remember using it (Dunbar, 1997).

This apparent discrepancy would probably not surprise Thomas Kuhn. Dunbar's laboratories illustrate normal science at its best--small, incremental changes in the structure of knowledge, contained within a paradigm. Distant analogies are probably most useful in times of scientific revolution, when it is necessary to think 'out of the box'. It would be interesting to do a fine-grained study like Dunbar's of a laboratory during a period of revolutionary science and see if there was a switch to more remote analogies.

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How do expert and novice scientists differ in their use of analogies? Clement (1991) asked ten PhDs or advanced doctoral students in physics, mathematics or computer science to solve problems like determining what happens when the width of the coils on a spring are doubled and the suspended weight is held constant. The participants used local analogies to solve these sorts of problems, for example, imagining what would happen if the coils were replaced by a U­shaped spring of the same length. Here once again we see the experts trying to strip away what is irrelevant, to create a simpler problem that falls into a familiar category. They also used heuristics like counterfactual reasoning that were employed by participants working on abstract tasks, but only when pressed to justify their solutions more thoroughly. This move was consistent with Popper's notion that reasoning is most useful during the justification phase of scientific inference.

Clement concluded that novices should be taught the heuristic value of analogical reasoning, which could help them form the kinds of mental models used by experts. For example, Clement showed how novices could gradually learn that static objects can exert forces. Clement used a series of bridging analogies--frrst, a hand pressing on a spring, then a book on a foam pad and then finally a book on a table (Clement, 1991).

We need more expert-novice comparisons under controlled conditions on problems that encourage spontaneous analogy generation. Furthermore, these comparisons, and the resulting educational applications, should focus more on the issue of metacognition. How do we turn novices into reflective practitioners (Bredo, 1994) that can use expert techniques effortlessly on familiar problems, but also adapt, modify or even abandon approaches in their quest for discovery? Earlier in this chapter, we discussed reflexivity: the idea that social scientists should apply their methods to themselves as well as the objects of their study. In order to be reflexive, you have to be reflective--you have to be able to distance yourself from your problem-solving activity and evaluate it, especially when an approach isn't working. As we will see in Chapter 5, this kind of reflection ought to involve ethical considerations.

2.5 Cognitive Psychology of Science in Perspective

1. Discovery depends on establishing that a problem is significant enough to be labeled an important achievement.

The cognitive psychology of science literature has little to say about this; most studies either give participants a task to solve, or use standard problems already accepted as significant by the discipline.

Future cognitive research should study situations where scientists have to make decisions about which research to pursue and also develop laboratory

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simulations that permit participants to choose among a set of scientific tasks. Robert Rosenwein and I have outlined one way to accomplish this sort of research program (Gorman & Rosenwein, 1995). (I will say more about this in Section 5.2).

2. Discovery depends on transforming that problem into a form that suggests a promising path to solution which includes locating and transforming the necessary data.

In terms of locating data, the literature on dual-space search is helpful, suggesting that a careful, coordinated search of both hypothesis and experiment spaces is most likely to uncover evidence that is relevant to the problem at hand. The literature on expert-novice differences gives us hints as to how experts transform textbook-style problems: they try to classify them based on the underlying principles required to solve them, rather than the surface features. The result is the kind of abstraction used by Galileo to solve pendulum problems.

More research needs to be done on what happens when experts move out of their familiar domains. Here work on analogies may be especially helpful. Local analogies appear especially useful in research teams, allowing mental models and techniques that are useful in one domain to be transferred to a closely-related domain. It may be that many more discoveries are made by this kind of local analogy than by remote analogies, though--as we saw in the section on analogies-­there are prominent examples of analogies that seem remote playing an important role in discoveries.

Consider, for example, Darwin's famous insight after reading the sixth edition of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population.--"the polemical account of humanity outstripping its food supply, and the weak and improvident succumbing in the struggle for the available resources" (Desmond & Moore, 1991). Darwin already knew Malthus' theory, but it was the statistics in the sixth edition that convinced him that "A struggle for resources slowed growth, and a horrifying catalogue of death, disease, wars and famine checked the population. Darwin saw that an identical struggle took place throughout nature, and he realized that it could be turned into a truly creative force" (Desmond & Moore, 1991).

Darwin made an analogy between the human struggle exemplified by the poor laws and pauper riots, and the struggle between species, an analogy that certainly seems remote, if not distant. But as Darwin admitted, when he read Malthus, he was already "well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long observation of the habits of animals and plants" (Gruber, 1981). Part of Malthus' argument was that the weak would succumb in the human struggle for increasingly scarce resources. Similarly, Darwin saw that favorable variations might triumph in nature. Darwin's experience and background knowledge allowed him to take an apparently remote analogy and transform it into a local one.

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3. Discovery depends on a combination of flexibility and stubbornness, depending on the cognitive styles and career trajectories of the scientists involved and on how they represent the problem.

The literature on confirmation and disconfirmation suggests that, in general, a scientist ought to begin by trying to confirm any hint of a pattern that might lead to a promising hypotheses, seeking positive results. This positive test heuristic might end up falsifying the pattern, or discovering that there is a great deal of noise in the data. However, the scientist should not deliberately seek disconfirmation until she has found a pattern or hypothesis that merits this kind of rigorous scrutiny.

Of course, scientists do not operate in isolation. One strategy is simply to propose bold hypotheses for which one has amassed some confirmatory evidence, and let others attempt to falsify it. One particularly persuasive cognitive style involves arguing consistently for a novel hypothesis while at least appearing to consider potentially disconfirmatory results (Rosenwein, 1994). Prominent discoverers in psychology like Freud, Skinner and Simon embarked on extensive research programs, took at least some results critical of their perspectives into account, but never abandoned their 'hard core' ideas. It would be interesting to see whether such a cognitive style is equally effective in other sciences.

4. The act of writing is part of the discovery process.

There is a literature on cognition and writing which includes protocols of writers (Flower & Hayes, 1984). Similar protocols ought to be done on scientists as they write. Berkenkotter and Huckin (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995) describe how one biologist wrote and revised an article, and Myers (Myers, 1990) describes how two other biologists wrote and revised grant proposals. These works provide a valuable catalogue of the rhetorical moves and revision strategies followed by the biologists, but do not include the kind of fine-grained analysis represented by a protocol.

For example, Berkenkotter & Hucking followed the process by which their biologist published a research article in a refereed journal. In her own words, the biologist had to learn to tell a 'phony story' about how her research was conducted. In her early drafts, she constructed a narrative based on the internal logic of her own research program. In later drafts, she made it sound like her own research had emerged from issues in the scientific literature in her area. I followed a similar trajectory when I revised one of my experimental research articles (Gorman, 1992a). These accounts of scientists learning the conventions of their genre are very valuable, because, as Holmes documented, discoveries can emerge when a scientist transforms her research results for publication. As part of her quest for publication, the biologist studied by Berkenkotter and Huckin ended­up generating new data which confirmed her general approach--but it might also have generated a surprise that led to a discovery.

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Protocols should also be done on research teams as they compose articles. One heuristics for collaborative writing involves delegation, with a senior scientist establishing a title, focus and organization and farming out specific sections to junior members. At another extreme, the collaboration among members of the team can be so intimate that by the time an article is published, it is impossible to say who was responsible for the overall plan of the piece. It would be interesting to know how Dunbar's teams wrote the articles that announced their results.

5) Successful discoverers often pursue a network of enterprises.

Here, aside from Gruber's seminal work (Gruber, 1989) the cognitive science of science has little to contribute--the kinds of simulations, computational or experimental, that have been done have tended to focus on single problems and problem-solvers. But there is no reason why cognitive psychology could not be applied to following a scientists' network, as Gruber did, looking closely at decisions about what research projects to pursue and the links among the different research enterprises. Such a network can be a great source of the kind of analogies that lead to new discoveries, as we saw in Darwin's reading of Malthus. Darwin's network included detailed studies of barnacles, pigeon breeding, the way in which bees made honeycombs, geological stratification and species variation in the Galapagos. His network helped make the Origin of Species a juggernaut of persuasion.

What is needed in future studies, is the systematic application of some of the research findings discussed in this chapter. Gruber's provocative work on Darwin would profit from the kind of fine-grained protocol analysis that Tweney and Gooding have done on Michael Faraday. One could, for example, make inferences about how Darwin employed confirmatory and disconfirmatory heuristics as he coordinated a search in hypothesis and evidence spaces. Gruber's own framework was Piagetian, which means he focused on assimilation and accommodation, where assimilation involves fitting evidence into existing conceptual structures and accommodation involves altering conceptual structures. A confirmatory heuristic is a way to accomplish assimilation, and a disconfirmatory a way to encourage accommodation.

But to really study the interplay of these heuristics, one needs to follow their use at a finer-grained level than Gruber does. Instead, what he provides are provocative hints. For example, he notes that Darwin had developed a theory of the formation of coral reefs by 1835; this theory contained many of the important features he would use in his theory of evolution two years later, including the idea that population growth is a struggle against natural forces and that different species of coral adapt to different environments. But he did not at this earlier

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date see the parallels that seem 'obvious' in hindsight. Gruber's account of the reasons why Darwin did not see the analogy is incomplete. 24

We need a more detailed study of the interplay between hypothesis and evidence in the coral case to see what kinds of heuristics and mental models Darwin could have transferred to the evolution case. This appears to be another situation where Darwin had to make an analogy that initially seemed remote into something that was obvious, given his background and experience. In this case, the analogy is from one species to all species; he clearly needs to see that the case of coral is not peculiar and can be linked to other cases like the Galapagos finches. One could imagine constructing a computational simulation, perhaps using CLARITY, to explore various possible relationships between hypotheses and evidence in this case. One could extend such a simulation to cover other aspects of Darwin's network of enterprises, and perhaps provide a model for generalization to other scientists' networks.

In defense of Gruber and others who study historical cases, records are not always available to do the equivalent of a protocol analysis and/or a detailed computational simulation. One solution to this problem is to study modern scientific research teams, like the ones followed by Dunbar. The difficulty here is the daunting amount of data that is produced. One solution would be to encourage those who study discovery in vivo and those who simulate it in vitro and on computers to collaborate. Funding agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation could certainly encourage this.

The brief review of the cognitive psychology of science literature conducted in this chapter indicates that it makes an important contribution to several of the generalizations above, particularly numbers 2 and 3. But our review includes at least as many calls for future research as summaries of existing findings. Cognitive psychology of science suffers from the fact that it is a recognized area of interest for only a very small group of researchers. Hence, it is not really a research area, but a diverse group of 'invisible colleges' (Crane, 1972) pursuing their own research programs, often with to little connection to each others' work

24Gruber argues that Darwin got the idea for his branching-tree-of-Iife metaphor from the coral case, but he provides little documentation. He also argues that Darwin did not see the connection between coral and his overarching evolutionary theory because he first needed to abandon the idea that evolution had to account for the origin of life, and he also had to account for extinction. Gruber's book is a marvelous journey through Darwin's mind--a pioneering expedition, pointing-out promising areas for others to explore. Interestingly, Gruber's own network of enterprises metaphor is borrowed reflexively from Darwin's branching tree.

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or the other science studies disciplines. If nothing else, it is hoped that this chapter will encourage more of a synthesis, or at least a dialectic, among the various groups studying scientific thinking.

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CHAPTER 3 CREATING A NEW WORLD

In order to discover, scientists sometimes have to invent. Consider the devices Faraday had to build in order to explore electricity and magnetism. On a larger scale, consider Ernest O. Lawrence's invention of the cyclotron, which made it possible to explore the universe of elementary particles at new levels of precision and depth (Kevles, 1977).25

Edison, the archetypal inventor, said, "in truth, we electricians are discoverers, not inventors" (Baldwin, 1995). If Edison is right, inventors sometimes have to discover. For example, when experiments with a glider in 1901 failed to meet expectations, the Wrights constructed a wind tunnel and disconfirmed the widely-accepted value for the coefficient of lift. In order to invent an airplane, they had to discover new coefficients (Crouch, 1992).

In the last chapter, we spoke of the discoverer as hero. Inventors, especially in America, are often painted in the same mythic colors. In both cases, the focus is on the flash of insight that shows the discoverer the key to nature, or the inventor how to transform the world. Although scientific publications and awards now recognize multiple discoverers, the idea of the solitary inventor lies at the basis of the American patent system, and juries in patent disputes are still impressed by stories of solitary inventors who have a flash of insight (Seabrook, January 11, 1993). "A common perception of the inventor includes terms such as weird, individualistic, wild-eyed, odd, socially inept, and quixotic" (Colangelo, Assouline, Kerr, Huesman, & Johnson, 1993, p. 160). Nikola Tesla is the inventor who comes closest to fitting this portrait, with his Wizard-like ability to produce surprising electrical effects and his eccentric personal habits (Wise, 1994).

25Interestingly, Lawrence's obsession with producing a million-volt cyclotron may have prevented him from being the first to disintegrate a nucleus with a particle beam--Cockcroft and Walton did this at the Cavendish with a machine they built that operated at 125,000 volts (Kevles, 1977, pp.230-2).

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In contrast, the 34 agricultural inventors in Colangelo's study were happy, hard-working people whose only eccentricity was that when a problem captured them, they had to put off everything else and work on it. This kind of obsession also characterized Edison, who both tried to cultivate the notion that he was a Wizard and dispel it with remarks like 'invention is 1 % inspiration and 99% perspiration'. As he said, "No experiments are useless." (Baldwin, 1995, p. 51).

While scientists may have to invent and inventors discover, one could argue that each is pursuing a different goal. The scientist wants to be able to explain a phenomenon, the inventor simply to produce it, reliably. Children may focus on getting positive results on tasks that simulate scientific reasoning because they adopt an engineering goal, rather than a scientific one: they become more concerned with producing an effect than understanding the mechanisms behind it (Schauble, Klopfer, & Raghavan, 1991).

The same kinds of battles over priority that characterize science also characterize invention, but whereas in the former, disputes are mediated by organizations like the Nobel Prize Committee, in the latter, they are settled by the legal system.

To get a better understanding of the similarities and differences between discovery an invention, we will adopt a case-based approach to understanding invention, spending much of the chapter considering the invention of the telephone in fine-grained detail, then seeing if our conclusions generalize to other inventions and to the discoveries we discussed in the first chapter. Recent research on case-based reasoning and situated and distributed cognition suggests that experts learn from examples (Kolodner, 1993). Instead of treating this cognitive research in a separate chapter, as we did with the cognitive psychology of science, we will review relevant portions of this new work as we consider cases. This is a reflexive application of the case-based approach to a discussion of the case-based approach, and carries with it the dangers we referred to at the beginning of the last chapter. Let us keep that in mind as we go forward.

3.1 The Etheric Force and Cold Fusion: When Discovery and Invention Don't Mix

In a press conference on the 23rd of March, 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two scientists working in relative isolation with comparatively simple equipment, announced the discovery of the holy grail of energy researchers: an apparently limitless, pollution free source of power. This was the beginning of the most recent and spectacular controversy over the possible existence of cold fusion, though it was by no means the first (Close, 1991). Initially, it looked like a classic Campbellian hero's tale, a paradigm-busting experiment that signaled a new scientific revolution.

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The reigning paradigm in fusion research involved multi-million dollar technologies like tokamaks, or toroidal magnetic chambers, that achieve temperatures higher than the center of the sun in an effort to fuse hydrogen into helium. The problem is that more energy is used in creating these conditions than results from the fusion. Pons and Fleischmann's experiments at the University of Utah gave hope that fusion could be created and sustained with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment.

Basically, their 'cold fusion tokamak' was an electrolysis cell with a palladium rod down the center, used to separate deuterium from ordinary water. The two researchers knew that palladium has a natural affinity for hydrogen and that the deuterium would therefore migrate into the palladium. They theorized that inside the crystal lattice of the palladium, the hydrogen would be under very high pressure-perhaps enough pressure to produce fusion. Their initial experiments suggested that this palladium cell produced an excess of heat--in one case, enough to cause the cell to explode, fortunately when no one was nearby. Here was a triumph of little science over big science.

Pons and Fleischmann weren't the only researchers to discover cold fusion. Stephen Jones, at rival Brigham Young University, had also conducted experiments that demonstrated cold fusion. Jones found out about Pons and Fleischmann's work when he was asked to referee one of their grant proposals. Initially, both research teams agreed to submit simultaneous papers to Nature. Jones was also about to present his results at a scientific conference, and Pons and Fleischmann felt sure he would be given priority as the discoverer if they did not pre-empt him. Furthermore, they felt that Jones had stolen their idea. Therefore, Pons and Fleischmann decided to announce their discovery at a press conference, rather than in a refereed journal.

These disagreements about priority and credit were intensified by the fact that cold fusion was more than a scientific discovery--it was also an invention that could make the researchers and the universities they worked for wealthy. There were important differences between Jones and Pons and Fleischmann's work that made the former less likely to be an invention than the latter. Jones had detected neutron levels slightly above the background with his cell, suggesting that fusion might be causing the neutron emissions, but at a level too low to be a significant source of power. Indeed, he detected no rise in temperature. Pons and Fleischmann, on the other hand, had detected a significant rise in temperature, but not the concomitant excess of neutrons one would have expected. Nuclear physicists who saw pictures of Pons and Fleischmann standing next to their palladium cell while it was operating said they should have been killed by the radiation. As one scientist noted after seeing a Cable Network News report, lithe man explaining the experiment to the reporters was apparently touching the glass bulb containing the active elements and yet none of his bodily parts fell off" (Close, 1991, p. 163).

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Scientific teams allover the world set out to replicate Pons and Aeischmann's experiments, but critical details of the procedure were hard to come by, partly because the University was submitting patent applications for the process (Huizenga, 1992). Before Congress, Ronald Ballinger of MIT's Plasma Fusion Center testified that, "The level of detail concerning the experimental procedures, conditions and results necessary for verification of the Fleischmann and Pons results have not been forthcoming. At the same time, almost daily articles in the press, often in conflict with the facts, have raised the public expectations, possibly for naught, that our energy problem has been "solved". We have heard the phrase "too cheap to meter" applied to other forms of electric energy production before. And so the scientific community has been left to attempt to reproduce and verify a potentially major scientific breakthrough while getting the experimental details from The Wall Street Journal and other news publications" (Close, 1991, p. 189). James Brophy of the University of Utah lamented that, "The scientists want us to tell everything but the patent attorneys tell us to say absolutely nothing" (Close, 1991, p. 191). Similarly, Aeischmann argued that "we had written a number of patents by that stage and the view of the university was that we should announce this by a press conference. It was really the patents that were driving this" (Close, 1991).

Withholding information prior to obtaining a patent is standard practice for inventors. Secretiveness prior to announcement of a discovery is also acceptable for scientists, but once the word is out in a pubic forum, then the details necessary for replication are supposed to be accessible. Promoting 'vaporware' is an acceptable strategy for inventors/entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison or Bill Gates, who make extravagant promises they expect they will be able to fulfill eventually. Perhaps Pons and Aeischmann were doing the scientific equivalent of vaporware.

Of course, the amount of detail required for replication is often the subject of intense negotiation (Collins, 1985; Collins & Pinch, 1993) and this controversy was no exception. Laboratories allover the world tried to get details; in some cases, they ran experiments based on photographs from newspapers and television reports. At first, results from Georgia Tech, Texas A&M and the University of Washington appeared to support cold fusion, but as these researchers searched for alternate explanations, they found serious problems that led them to retract their initial positive findings and other laboratories at MIT, Caltech and other locations weighed in with negative results. Furthermore, Pons and Fleischmann's reluctance to collaborate with other scientists and share data led to attacks on their integrity. Had Pons and Aeischmann stuck with a scientific goal, rather than an inventor's, their reputations might have fared better-- they could then have supplied the details that the scientific community wanted. However, this kind of openness would have made it harder for them to profit from this revolutionary new energy source, if it panned out. To put it in simple terms, failure to replicate a discovery is bad; failure to replicate an invention simply means that the original inventor and her partners have a competitive edge--the longer it takes others to replicate, the better. Pons and Aeischmann' lawyers even threatened to sue over a

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critical article that appeared in Nature; again, the courts are an appropriate forum for sorting out inventors' disputes, but not scientists'.

Edison made a similar mistake with his first announcement of the 'etheric force' (Gorman, 1989). In 1875, while conducting experiments on mUltiple telegraphy, Edison noticed that when the current to an electromagnet was interrupted, sparks could be drawn off a variety of metal objects in the laboratory. Not only did these sparks emerge at a greater distance than any he had seen before, they appeared to have neither a positive nor a negative charge. He thought he had discovered a new physical force, which he labeled etheric because it seemed to travel through the invisible ether that was supposed to carry light waves. Edison was used to announcing his new inventions to the newspapers, often long in advance of their reduction to practice. He did the same with his new discovery, and a sympathetic New York Herald reporter announced that:

The cumbersome a~pliances transmitting ordinary electricity, such as telegraph poles, insulating knobs, cable-sheathings may be left out...and a great saving of time and labor accomplished. Ocean cables [may be] operated by "etheric force" ... The existing methods or mechanisms may be completely revolutionized Oosephson, 1959, p. 129).

Note that Edison emphasized the potential inventions to the reporter, not the theoretical implications. The scientific community greeted this new force with skepticism, and the future inventor Elihu Thomson played a crucial role in disconfirming Edison's force when he and Edwin Houston showed that it did carry a charge. Edison dropped his pursuit of the etheric force, and left it to Marconi, Tesla and others to explore the phenomenon of radio waves.

Both Pons & Fleischmann and Edison were more concerned about patent priority than scientific credit, so they risked early announcements of discoveries after a few confirmatory tests. Fleischmann's philosophy was "that if you really don't believe something deeply enough before you do an experiment, you will never get it to work" (Taubes, 1993, p. 118). He might also have added that if the researcher does not believe in a phenomenon, she or he will be unable to persuade funding agencies to back it. Moscovici emphasized that a minority view was most likely to prevail when its advocates adopted a consistent behavioral style, arguing persistently for their point of view (Moscovici, 1974). Rosenwein modified this generalization by pointing out that it is a patterned consistency that is most effective; the minority must be responsive to changes in the situation, including new evidence, without abandoning its central point of view (Rosenwein, 1994). This is akin to Lakatos' observation that scientific research programs rarely modify their hard core ideas, but are willing to alter or abandon corollary assumptions (Lakatos, 1978).

Pons and Fleischmann did show a kind of patterned consistency, arguing persistently for the existence of cold fusion, but taking account of new evidence by re-interpreting it to fit their view. For example, they did not run a light-water control until they had been challenged at a number of conferences and when they

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did run it, they found out that both heavy and light water cells produced fusion. They treated this result as a great new discovery. They now had a fonn of fusion that produced virtually no neutrons and worked with regular water as well as with deuterium, but they were ready to rewrite the laws of nuclear physics rather than abandon their hypothesis. In their case, a confinnation heuristic turned into a bias.

A key element of patterned consistency, according to Rosenwein, is 'playing by the rules': remaining within the community of scientists, rather than splitting­off and joining another community. Pons and Fleischmann acted more like inventors. The point in a patent is to be revolutionary, as different as possible from whatever went before (Myers, 1995). Pons and Aeischnmann were certainly revolutionaries, in the classic Kuhnian sense, but they were never able to produce a working model of a cell that consistently generated power and their anomalies were eventually dismissed as errors.

3.2 Reverse Salients and Simultaneous Inventions

The historian Thomas Hughes has talked about reverse salients in the development of complex technological systems. "A salient is a protrusion in a geometric figure, a line of battle, or an expanding weather front. As technological systems expand, reverse salients develop. Reverse salients are components in the system that have fallen behind or are out of phase with the others" (Hughes, 1987).

Reverse salients attract inventors--solving such a problem is a sure way to fame and fortune. Therefore, reverse salients create the opportunity for multiple simultaneous inventions. The invention of the microchip serves as an example. The reverse salient, in this case, was the problem of the 'tyranny of numbers'. In the late 1950s, a new aircraft carrier "had 350,000 electronic components, requiring millions of hand-soldered connections; the labor cost--for wiring those connections and testing each one--was greater than the total cost of the components themselves. Production of the first 'second generation' (i.e. completely transistorized) computer--the control data CD 1604, containing 25,000 transistors, 100,000 diodes, and hundreds of thousands of resistors and capacitors­-lagged hopelessly behind schedule because of the sheer difficulty of connecting the parts" (Reid, 1984).

A solution was arrived at independently by two inventors--Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, both of whom filed patents for a 'monolithic circuit', in which all the components could be made out of silicon.

Kilby and Noyce arrived at this idea via different routes. Kilby had just gone to work for Texas Instruments (TI), and was assigned to work on a project called the 'MicroModule', a product he was sure would not work. When he arrived at his

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new job, everyone else was off on vacation, so he tried to come up with an alternative lest he be forced to work on a bad idea. TI was heavily into silicon, so he studied that material carefully and realized, as he said in his notebook on July 24, 1958, "The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice: resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor" (Reid, 1984, p. 65). Integrating all these components on a silicon wafer would avoid the need for soldering. He built a prototype; when it worked, TI embraced the idea, and Kilby filed a patent application on February 6, 1959.

Kilby was a quiet, introverted type who preferred working alone. Noyce, on the other hand, was as good at inventing companies as new technologies; he was at that point working for Fairchild Semiconductor, a company he had founded with seven colleagues. He would soon be involved in the creation of Intel. Noyce was one of the engineers who created the archetype of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. In 1958, Fairchild was making silicon transistors on a single wafer "and then we cut them apart into tiny pieces and had to hire thousands of women with tweezers to pick them up and try to wire them together again ... The answer, of course, was don't cut them apart in the first place--but nobody realized that then" (Reid, 1984).

Noyce was in the process of patenting another idea--putting a silicon oxide layer on top of a chip to protect it from contamination--when the patent lawyer kept pushing him to imagine other applications. Noyce realized one could print circuit components right on the oxide layer; first he thought of using copper wire, then silicon. Eventually, six months after Kilby, he had the monolithic circuit and filed a patent on July 30, 1959.

Even though Noyce's application was second, he was the first to get the patent. It is not unusual for one application to be processed faster than another, so Kilby's lawyers filed for an interference proceeding, in which a special Board of Patent Interference tries to determine who invented first. Kilby's notebook entry was six months prior to Noyce's, so he was granted the patent. Then Fairchild's lawyers developed a new tactic--they attacked an unfortunate picture in Kilby's patent application which showed wires sticking out of the chip--not at all what an integrated circuit really looked like. After ten years of dispute, and several reversals, Noyce won the patent battle.

By this time, it was irrelevant--the two companies had settled years earlier, granting each other licenses for integrated circuit production and sharing royalty fees from other companies. Furthermore, Kilby and Noyce happily shared credit as co-inventors.

Most inventors are not so willing to share credit. Indeed, one of the greatest motives behind patent disputes is getting credit for being the first to invent something--the money that comes along with the credit is often secondary in the

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minds of the inventors, though not in the minds of their backers and companies who rely on licensing their patents.

The dispute over the invention of the radio is a case in point. There were many contenders, but two inventors emerged with stronger claims than the others. Lee de Forest invented and patented a wireless telegraph receiver he called the audion in 1906. He didn't understand how it worked, but work it did. It was Edwin Howard Armstrong who figured that out in 1912, and greatly amplified the sound by feeding the oscillating current back and forth many thousands of times. Armstrong also saw that this receiver could be turned into a transmitter. Unfortunately, Armstrong lacked the $150 necessary to apply for a patent right away and did not do so until 1914, at which point his application was put into interference with one by de Forest. Armstrong was the initial winner, but he refused an opportunity to settle with de Forest, thereby ending further appeals because Armstrong wanted to be known as the sole inventor of the circuit that made radio possible. Eventually, the Armstrong victories were reversed, on the grounds that a notebook sketch by de Forest's assistant made on August 6, 1912, showed a circuit that could have achieved the feedback effect--even though it was clear from the entry that the experiment had failed (Lewis, 1991). Armstrong ended-up battling the mighty Radio Corporation of America over patent infringement. He veered close to bankruptcy, and killed himself on January 31, 1954--the forty-year anniversary of the day he and David Sarnff, the future president of RCA, had spent a happy night using Armstrong's powerful receiver to copy telegraph messages from all over the world. It was Armstrong's widow, Marion, who successfully pursued a long series of court cases that resulted in his posthumously being recognized as the inventor of PM.

3.2.1 Who Invented the Telephone?

No businessman would have invented the telephone. It's got to be a maverick--some guy who's been working with the deaf and gets the crazy idea that you could actually send the human voice over a wire ... A businessman would have been out taking a market survey, and since it was a nonexistent product, he would have proven conclusively that the market for a telephone was zero (Reid, 1984, p. 70).

If Gray had filed an application for a patent and Bell for a caveat, we should in all probabihty have today the GraY' Telephone Company in place of the Bell Telephone Company (Taylor, Unpublished Manuscript, IV, p. 6).

Alexander Graham Bell was eventually upheld as the inventor of the telephone, but only after years of litigation with rivals, including Elisha Gray, Daniel Drawbaugh and many others. The controversy with Gray was especially bitter, because on the day Bell submitted a patent application for a device that could, among other things, transmit speech, Gray submitted a caveat for a device that would serve the same function. (A caveat was a statement of intention to

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perfect and eventually patent an invention--it was filed with the patent office and could be used to establish an inventor's priority). Indeed, Gray practically accused Bell of stealing his idea: "And, notwithstanding there were suspicious circumstances early in the history of the telephone, it was not until eight or ten years--at least, a long time after the telephone was in use--that I became convinced, chiefly through Bell's own testimony in various suits, that I had showed him how to construct the telephone with which he obtained his first results" (Taylor, Unpublished Manuscript, IX, p. 6).

Basically, there are three possibilities:

1) Gray was the original inventor of what we now call the telephone; Bell simply borrowed his ideas.

2) Gray and Bell arrived independently at the idea for what we now call the telephone, in which case Gray deserves equal billing as inventor.

3) It is only hindsight that makes it appear as though Gray and Bell were inventing the same thing. The case of radio is instructive, here. The courts eventually concluded that de Forest had invented the same regenerative circuit as Armstrong, even though de Forest didn't understand how it operated and his only experiment with it failed. Simply put, de Forest and Armstrong's devices were embodiments of different mental models--they were not viewed in the same way by the inventors, and only hindsight has made them appear to be the same.

3.2.2 Multiple Telegraphy as Reverse Salient in the 1870s

In the mid 1870s, one of the reverse salients lay in the area of multiple telegraphy. The telegraph had transformed the world. Messages could now be sent over great distances, much faster than any human messenger could have carried them and almost regardless of weather conditions. The importance of the telegraph was illustrated in the American civil war; Lincoln spent much of his time at the telegraph office, communicating with his generals and assessing reports from the field. Both sides tapped and cut each others telegraph lines.

The telegraph transformed commerce as well as war. Stock quotes could be sent from New York to Chicago with great rapidity. The result was that many of America's large cities were festooned with uninsulated wires from telegraphs, utilities and burglar alarms, which could become crisscrossed and tangled, creating dangerous shorts which interrupted communications. The wires were expensive to install and maintain. This created a reverse salient. If a way could be found to send multiple messages over a single wire, it would eliminate the salient. This was the problem that attracted Gray, Bell, Edison and a host of other inventors.

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3.3 A Cognitive Framework for Understanding the Invention Process

But while several inventors may be working on the same reverse salient, there is no guarantee that they view the problem in the same way--or even identify the salient as the same problem. In order to understand the way each inventor views a problem such as the transmission of multiple messages, we will use the framework outlined in previous chapters. To refresh the reader's memory, we will use Edison's kinetoscope as an example.

(1) Mental models:

In developing his kinetoscope, or motion picture camera, Edison's goal was to do "for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion, and in such a form as to be both cheap, practical and convenient [by] photographing continuously a series of pictures occurring at intervals ... in a continuous spiral on a cylinder or plate in the same manner as sound is recorded on a phonograph" (Josephson, 1959). Indeed, he intended to put his kinetoscope cylinder on the same shaft with a phonograph cylinder, in order to coordinate sound and pictures.

Now in what sense is this rough idea of Edison's a mental model? He could run alternatives for this system in his 'mind's eye', imagining how it might work. To select among alternatives and tum imagination into reality, Edison needed to rely on:

(2) Mechanical Representations:

Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat, argued that "the mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc. like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as the exhibition of his thoughts; in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea to the world" (Gorman, 1992, p. 47). Ifwe substitute inventor for mechanic, and include the possibility that an inventor can transform the standard 'levers, screws, and wedges' into devices suited to her class of problems, then Fulton's quote contains the idea of a mechanical representation­-a familiar component that an inventor can use repeatedly to create new designs. As Reese Jenkins noted, "Any creative technologist possesses a mental set of stock solutions from which he draws in addressing problems" (Jenkins, 1984, p. 153).

The drum cylinder Edison used in both the phonograph and the kinetoscope serves as an example: it became for Edison a standard solution to the problem of creating a smooth, continuous rotation. To interrupt this rotation to allow pictures to be shown in his kinetoscope, he used another mechanical representation: a double-acting pawl he had developed for use in stock tickers (Carlson, 1990).

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The difference between a mental model and a mechanical representation is that the former is incomplete and represents a possible path to a solution, whereas the latter is embodied in a completed device that represents a solution to part of a problem. Why refer to this sort of a device as a representation? Because not all aspects of the solution embodied in the device are recoverable simply by studying the device--one also must know how the device is represented by the user (Norman, 1983).

Inventors can plug these mechanical representations into their mental models, thereby using a lower-level representation that is embodied in a device to fill in a higher level model. Several years ago I attended an extraordinary conference on invention organized by Robert Weber and David Perkins (Weber & Perkins, 1992), and I am indebted to them for drawing my attention to the idea of slots.

For Weber and Perkins, the fundamental representation is a frame:

An entity with slots in which particular values, relations, procedures, or even other frames reside; as such, the frame is a framework or skeletal structure with places in which to put things. The slot is a &eneralization of the idea of a variable. The frame then represents an object, event, or concept in which the slots are the defining cnaracteristics; the values of the slots are the instantiations of the variables, attributes, relations or procedures (Weber & Perkins, 1989).

The idea of a frame was developed as a way of translating representations into a computational form. A simple example of a frame is a tax form, which has slots like 'name' and 'number of dependents', each of which can contain different values, e.g., 'Sue Smith' and '2'. A more complex example would be a frame for dog. This frame would inherit some characteristics from the overall frame for mammal, including certain slots and values. For example, we might include a slot for 'means of propagation'. Under mammal, that means would be 'live birth'. As an instance of mammal, dog would inherit that slot and value. Dog would also have some unique slots. We might include a slot for 'type of breed', which would include values like spaniel or retriever; within each type of breed, there might be slots for particular breeds like Springer Spaniel or Golden Retriever. This example illustrates the flexibility of the notion of a frame; it gives us lots of room for creating different slots.

A mental model can be viewed as a kind of frame, but one that is more visual and kinesthetic than other more prepositional types of frames. Dog, for example, is more than an abstract concept; most of us have a visual mental model of a dog, perhaps based on our favorite dog. Depending on our individual mental models, certain breeds may look less 'dog-like' to some of us (Rosch, 1973). (A friend of mine was walking his deerhound one day, and a stranger asked if it was a goat or a llama).

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Frames can be nested within frames. Similarly, mental models can be nested within mental models. An inventor can have a mental model of an overall system, and also a mental model of how a part of a system might work.

Like frames, one could imagine mental models being divided into slots. For example, Edison's mental model for a kinetoscope included a slot for a mechanism by which the pictures would be advanced continuously. Edison filled this slot with the drum cylinder from the phonograph.

Substituting different mechanical representations can lead to a transformation in the overall mental model. Edison's capable assistant William Dickson substituted a different mechanical representation for the drum cylinder; he used a tachyscope, a rapidly rotating wheel on which pictures could be mounted. Dickson managed to project these moving images on a screen and coordinate them with a phonograph so when Edison returned from a trip in March of 1890, he was greeted by a moving image of Dickson, raising his hat and saying, "Good morning, Mr. Edison, glad to see you back, I hope you are satisfied with the kinetophonograph." (Carlson and Gorman, 1990, p. 107).

Instead of embracing this solution, Edison ordered Dickson to abandon it. Dickson's adoption of a new mechanical representation had forced a change in the overall mental model guiding the development of the system. It was no longer a 'phonograph for the eyes', intended--like the early phonographs--for use in an individual viewing booth.

The EdisonlDickson example illustrates one of the ways in which mental models can become evident--when an inventor resists an alternate design. This kind of 'mental inertia' corresponds to the kind of 'confirmation bias' found in the early experimental simulations of scientific reasoning. In the last chapter, we noted that more recent research has focused on the advantages of confirmation. As Tweney & Chitwood point out, "In contrast to the usual focus on confirmation bias as a reflection of the limits of human cognition, the evidence suggests that a confirmation heuristic is one of the highly functional means by which knowledge is made possible" (Tweney & Chitwood, 1995, p. 235).

(3) Heuristics:

David Perkins (Perkins, 1997) uses the metaphor of wilderness to describe the search for a solution to an invention problem. In Perkins' view, the inventor's goal should be to transform a Klondike space, in which the inventor knows there is gold somewhere in the wilderness but is not sure where, into a homing space, in which the inventor knows the goal is near. Heuristics are rules of thumb for making this transformation. Just as the gold prospector might use some rough rules for deciding where to pan, so the inventor can apply heuristics like 'see if nature has solved a similar problem and if so, imitate nature'. The first inventions were modifications of natural objects (Basalla, 1988); current inventions are more likely to be based on an analogy to nature. Velcro, for example, was based on

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such an analogy; George de Mestral used a microscope to study the way in which burrs attached to his clothing, and noted the collection of miniature hooks and eyes. It took about ten years to translate this mental model into a product.

The problem with the wilderness metaphor is that it suggests all the inventor's gold is 'out there', waiting to be discovered. In fact, inventors are in the business of creating new kinds of substances and convincing the rest of us that they are precious (Ward, Finke, & Smith, 1995).

However, if not taken too literally, the metaphor is helpful. There are general heuristics that can be used across a wide range of problems, in order to create homing spaces--like looking for an analogy in nature, and following it. There are also domain-specific heuristics that are useful in homing spaces within well­defined domains. Sociologist of science Harry Collins provides several good examples, including "In crystal growing always start the melt cooling from well above the putative melting point", and "The tolerance of TEA-laser electrodes are sufficiently large to make it unlikely that the exact shape of the electrodes is the cause of failure" (Collins, 1990, p. 108). Hans Krebs learned a set of heuristics like tissue-slicing from his first mentor on laboratory methods, Otto Warburg (Holmes, 1991, p. 295).

These domain-specific heuristics can be transformed by a particular scientist or engineer into individual heuristics. This is particularly likely to happen with inventors and discoverers, whose work frequently takes them beyond the bounds of existing techniques. At one critical point in his researches on ornithine, Hans Krebs had to modify the tissue-slicing heuristic he had learned from Otto Warburg by developing a new heuristic for determining the best medium in which to bathe the slices while they were being tested. Basically, he used a general heuristic-­when in doubt, look at nature's solution to a similar problem--and decided to "imitate as closely as possible the actual physiological situation in which tissues normally exist" by duplicating the composition of plasma as closely as possible (Holmes, 1991). Krebs used a weak or general heuristic to develop his own strong heuristic. Alexander Graham Bell used the same weak heuristic, which he called "follow the analogy of nature," to develop a powerful mental model for creating a device that could transmit speech.

Heuristics, like mental models, often become apparent when a kind of resistance is encountered--a resistance that forces the problem-solver to articulate and defend her approach. For example, an expert who solves a certain class of problems automatically, without thinking, may have to struggle to describe her heuristics when queried by a novice. This fact has led Suchman and others to argue that heuristics, like plans, may be post-hoc rationalizations invented by problem­solvers to explain what they do (Suchman, 1987).

I had a calculus professor in college who, in the days before hand-held calculators and desktop computers, would put a long integral on the board and solve it in seconds. He had worked in industry and had developed a powerful set

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of domain-specific heuristics which he had trouble explaining. I had to get another math professor to work with him and explain his tacit knowledge to me. This example illustrates that heuristics do not always have to be post-hoc rationalizations.

Taken together, heuristics, mental models and mechanical representations allow us to study and compare the cognitive styles of inventors and discoverers, by which I mean the manner in which each individual practitioner finds, transforms and solves problems.

To investigate general heuristics and representations, we need multiple case studies of inventors and discoverers working in different domains. To investigate domain-specific heuristics and the sorts of mental modele; and mechanical representations that are shared by experts, we need to add multiple case-studies within an area of expertise. Inventors and discoverers, however, are continually stretching beyond recognized domains, reconfiguring the landscape of expertise; to investigate this process of problem transformation, we need to add comparisons of different inventors and discoverers working on what in hindsight came to be regarded as the same problem.

Hence, we will spend a good portion of the rest of the chapter on a fine­grained comparison of two men, each of whom claimed to have been inventor of the telephone. In addition to the three categories above, we will need also to talk about themes, goals and plans (Schank & Abelson, 1977). Themes correspond to the very general goals people adopt, e.g., make tons of money or be creative, and also the roles they adopt to achieve them, e.g., entrepreneur or painter. Unlike generals and entrepreneurs, inventors rarely talk about goals and plans--they simply design, and often one must infer their intentions from their design processes.

3.4 Competition over the Harmonic Multiple Telegraph

Initially, both Bell and Elisha Gray focused on harmonic telegraphy: the idea of using multiple tones, singly or in combination, to send multiple messages down the same wire. For Bell, this goal emerged from one of his themes. Bell's family was very involved with teaching the deaf. His father, Alexander Melville, developed a special 'visual speech' alphabet which deaf people could use to read how to make specific sounds. As a boy, Bell would participate in demonstrations in which he was placed out of earshot; his father would ask a member of the audience to make a sound, then he would write it in visible speech; Bell would enter, read what his father had written, and make the sound. So Bell inherited a family theme, or mission, having to do with teaching the deaf and making speech visible to the deaf.

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Gray's themes are harder to reconstruct than Bell's, because Gray left less in the way of written records and the only biography, by Lloyd Taylor, is an unpublished work of uneven quality (Taylor, Unpublished Manuscript). Elisha Gray was born in Barnesville, Ohio in 1835. He managed to build a working model of Morse's telegraph before he was ten, but the death of his father and his mother's precarious health made Elisha the primary breadwinner in the family at the age of 12. He took up carpentry until he could enroll as a student at Oberlin College, where he encountered a mentor in the form of his science teacher, Charles Churchill, who inspired Gray's continued interest in electronics and telegraph, (Hounshell, 1975). Here the themes of hard work and telegraph invention seem to join, though we know very little about this period in Gray's life.

Like Bell, Gray often overworked to the point of illness--he managed to put himself through five years of Oberlin but paid with five years of convalescence (Hounshell, 1975). He gained much of his knowledge through his hands: "While studying natural philosophy, it was my custom to make and carry with me into the class such apparatus as could be readily constructed and would serve to illustrate the lesson. My habit of actually constructing everything which I saw or read of so far as my facilities would allow, was the best possible method of fixing the principles of its operation fmnly in my mind" (Gray, 1977, p. 6).

His electrical researches paid off in 1867, when he developed a new form of telegraph relay. He formed a partnership with Enos Barton in 1869; they founded the Western Electric Company, which became. the major manufacturer of telegraph equipment for Western Union. Bell's father introduced Alec to the scientific community; Gray's hard struggle for survival inclined him more to the world of business.

Each inventor suspected the other of stealing his ideas at various points. Gray submitted a patent application for a multiple harmonic telegraph on February 23, 1875; two days later Bell submitted one for his. 26 These closely timed submissions foreshadow the competition over the telephone, in which Gray filed a caveat on the same day Bell filed a patent. (A caveat was a document that could be filed with the patent office to signal an inventor's intention to submit a patent at a future date, when her invention was closer to realization).

So the famous controversy between Bell and Gray over the speaking telegraph, or what we now call the telephone27, was really one episode in a continuing controversy over mUltiple telegraphy. In the telegraphy controversy, we will focus on the way in which Gray and Bell evolved similar mechanical

26We have been unable to locate either of these applications, though their substance is described in other places: see (Bell, 1908; Gray, 1977).

27The word telephone was originally used to describe a device created by Philip Reis in 1860 to transmit musical tones; see (Gorman, 1990).

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representations for receivers; in the telephone, we will show how they evolved similar transmitters. In both cases, however, there were important differences in how each inventor viewed the function of devices that appear similar on the benchtop. An invention that looks the same in hindsight was not always viewed as the same by the inventors at the time.

3.4.1 Elisha Gray's Multiple Harmonic Telegraph

Gray later claimed he got the first idea for using musical tones to send telegraph messages in 1867, when he was using a vibrating metal reed, or rheotome, in a circuit with an electromagnet and a telegraph key. When he closed the key, he "noticed a singing sound in the electro-magnet, and by working the [telegraph] key as if transmitting a Morse message, the signals were audibly produced on the magnet by long and short sounds, representing the dots and dashes of the Morse alphabet" (Gray, 1977).

Gray makes this sound like an entirely serendipitous experimental result, but by this time, he probably had heard of --and even seen demonstrated--the first telephone, constructed by Philip Reis in Germany in 1854. This device was designed to transmit musical tones. The transmitter consisted of a lever with a point, which rested on a membrane; when one sung a note, the membrane would cause the lever bounce, alternately making and breaking contact with a piece of platinum in the middle of the membrane. This intermittent, on-off current would alternately magnetize and de-magnetize a receiving electromagnet, which would reproduce whatever tone had been sung into the membrane. The Reis apparatus was widely known at the time (1880). Gray later referred to his musical telegraph devices as telephones. Unlike Bell, Gray did not document his sources; therefore, it is hard to be sure where his background knowledge came from.

Gray's next mental model for a harmonic telegraph came from observing his nephew touching a zinc-lined bathtub with one hand while in the other he held a coil connected to a vibrating rheotome, an electromagnetic device which produced a tone. When his nephew's hand glided along the zinc, Gray heard the bathtub emit the same tone as the rheotome. When Gray put himself in his nephew's position, he found he could alter the pitch and volume by changing the speed and pressure with which he rubbed the zinc.

It was Pasteur who said that chance favors the prepared mind. In this case, a child's game provided Gray with a mental model for a musical telegraph. A single telegraph receiver could potentially reproduce multiple tones. He was so excited by the potential of this discovery that he resigned as superintendent of Western Electric to pursue his inventions full time.

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In April of 1874 Gray attempted to patent a musical telegraph, which consisted of a two-tone transmitter, consisting of two single-pole electromagnets, each with a vibrating armature. Each armature made and broke contact with a platinum point which switched the current on and off to the coil. Because each electromagnet had a different electrical resistance, each electromagnet exerted a different magnetic pull on its armature and thus caused each annature to vibrate at a different frequency. Each coil and annature combination was controlled by its own telegraph key, so that each frequency could be sent separately or simultaneously. These electromagnets were connected to an induction coil which functioned like a modem transformer and stepped up the current before it was sent out onto the telegraph line. For the zinc bathtub, Gray substituted a grounded piece of galvanized tin. The patent drawing shows a man--presumably Gray himself--holding the wire from the coil in one hand and touching the tin with the other (see Figure 9 from Gray's patent 166,096). The transmitter sent two different, audible tones which were reproduced on the tin plate receiver as the man rubbed it.

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c

Figure 9

Drawing of Elisha Gray in a circuit from his Animal Tissue Patent 166,096. In this case, Gray himself was the animal tissue. In later patents, he substituted other materials.

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The patent office initially rejected this application, on the grounds that one could not patent a circuit which included a person. So Gray converted the person into a slot into which he could substitute a variety of animal tissues, ranging from oyster shell to leather.28 He was eventually granted a patent in February of 1876.

By then, Gray had moved on. He expanded his two-tone transmitter to a two­octave device that could send twenty-four different pitches (two octaves) over one telegraphic circuit. Each tone was generated by a single tone transmitter tuned to a different pitch. Gray often used several single tone transmitters inside more complex devices capable of sending multiple tones, such as his two octave transmitter and printing telegraph. Because he used the single tone transmitter by inserting it into slots in different inventions, it became one of Gray's mechanical representations.29

Gray also developed several receivers to take the place of the awkward animal tissue combination. His mental model was the telephone receiver developed by Philip Reis. According to Gray, the principle of the Reis receiver was that 'when a coil of wire surrounding a bar of iron or the core of an electromagnet is traversed by an electric current, the said bar will be slightly elongated, and if these currents succeed each other with sufficient rapidit~, a vibratory motion will be given to said bar, and it will give forth a musical tone.' 0

All of Gray's receivers embodied this principle and hence were capable of reproducing several tones simultaneously, but they employed different mechanical representations in the amplification of the vibrating core of the electromagnets. So while the Reis receiver functioned as Gray's receiver mental model, these mechanical representations came from several other sources. For example, he used a variety of resonant cavities to amplify the sound. He got the idea of using a tin drum from a combination of the tin he used in his animal tissue patents and experiments with a violin with a metal plate on the back. His previous experience with using a bathtub as a receiver led him to substitute a wash basin.

He systematically tested every type of receiver with his two-octave transmitter With these instruments Gray gave several impressive demonstrations in New York and Washington in May and June, 1874, after which he returned home to Chicago.

28Elisha Gray, 'Electric Telegraph for Transmitting Musical Tones', U.S. Patent 166,095 (filed Jan. 19, 1875, granted July 27, 1875).

29Elisha Gray, 'Improvement in Transmitters for Electro-Harmonic Telegraphs', U.S. Patent 165,728 (filed June 28, 1875, granted July 20, 1875). See also Bell Telephone v. Dowd, op. cit. (46), Part I, 113.

30Gray, 'Magnet Receiver Application', in Bell Telephone v. Dowd, op. cit. (46), Part 11,583-587.

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Gray claimed that, upon returning to Chicago, he worked on the problem of creating a reliable harmonic telegraph transmitter. His two-octave transmitter could theoretically have been used for such a purpose, but Gray apparently thought it more suited to sending composite tones than isolated individual messages. His solution to the transmitter problem was to use "an ordinary electro-magnet and a reed made of a piece of watch-spring, one end of which is fixed to one pole of the magnet while the other free end projects over the other pole, a short distance from it, so as to form an armature" (Gray, 1977, pp. 21-2). Each of these springs could be tuned to a particular frequency. These springs produced an excellent tone for a short time, "but the slightest change in the adjustment, even a jar of the table, causes it to break into nodes, and give a note a chord or an octave away from its fundamental" (Gray, 1977, p. 23). At this point, I want to tum back to BelL who evolved a device that looked very similar to Gray's reed transmitter, foreshadowing the later conflict between the inventors over the telephone.

3.4.2 Alexander Graham Bell's Path to a Multiple Harmonic Telegraph

When Elisha Gray began his multiple telegraph work, he was already an accomplished electrical inventor. Bell's area of expertise, by contrast, was speech and audition. In 1863, his father, Alexander Melville, had challenged Alec and his older brother Melly to manufacture an artificial mouth and nasal passage, complete with vocal chords. The inspiration was Wheatstone's version of an 18th century device for imitating the human voice. The boys eventually succeeded in making the device say "mama" so realistically that a tenant came down to see what was the matter with the baby (Bruce, 1973, p. 37). Bell learned a great deal about how consonants and vowels are formed from this exercise, and it also taught him the value of using a heuristic he would later call 'follow the analogy of nature'.

Like Elisha Gray, much of Bell's knowledge came through building and tinkering, but Bell was gaining expertise in speech, rather than electricity. In another set of experiments, he discovered that he could hold a vibrating tuning fork in front of his mouth and while moving his tongue through the positions of the vowels, one of the vowel positions would cause the fork to resonate. He experimented with combinations of tuning forks and vowels, making what he thought were important discoveries. But when he sent a letter to Alexander Ellis, the great phonetician, he learned that he had been replicating experiments conducted by Hermann von Helmholtz. He derived some comfort from the fact that he had followed in the footsteps of one of the world's greatest scientists.

Bell's first idea for a multiple telegraph came from a conversation with Ellis about Helmholtz's apparatus for artificially producing vowel tones, by means of combinations of tuning forks and resonant chambers. Ellis had to do some translating from the German for Bell, and as a result, Bell got the false impression

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that the device transmitted vowel sounds, when in fact it created them. If vowels could be transmitted, why not consonants and, eventually, speech?

Here we begin to see one of the distinctions between discoverer and inventor. Helmholtz invented apparatus in order to develop and test hypotheses; he was not concerned about commercial applications. Bell, on the other hand, was looking for a way to achieve financial independence, and transformed Helmholtz's apparatus into a mental model of how speech and tones might be transmitted over a wire.

Bell's initial focus was not on speech but on the reverse salient. Why not take two forks that produced exactly the same tone and turn one into a telegraph transmitter and the other into a receiver? If one could do this with one pair of forks, why not do it with four, eight or even sixteen distinct tones, all carrying information down the same wire?

Like Edison, Bell read everything he could get his hands on that was related to his invention ideas. From J. BailIe's The Wonders of Electricity31 Bell got the idea of substituting a steel plate for a tuning fork. Books like BailIe's served almost as catalogues of possible electro-mechanical variations for inventors; like Gray, Bell found he had to transform existing components into mechanical representations he could work with.32 Figure 10 shows several of the stages in the evolution of Bell's steel reed transceiver. The result was a steel reed device whose pitch could be precisely tuned simply by adjusting the length of it that was allowed to hang over the electromagnet. I call Bell's device a 'transceiver' because Bell intended to use the same as both transmitter and receiver.

31 J. Baille The Wonders o/Electricity (New York: Charles Scribner, 1872), pp. 140-143.

321 have put details of these and other experiments by Bell on the World Wide Web at URL http://jefferson.viIlage.virginia.edu/-meg3C/id/aibelllhomepage.html

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(Nov. of 1873)

'I-bl-- '-_--' I. I,: I _ _ I

II, I I I , " ,- --- L __ ...,.II!--- , , , , , , , '- - -1111- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

(Winter of 1873)

~-----------~---~ -III~ - -- -- - -- - -- ---:

Figure 10

Three stages in the evolution of Bell's reed mechanical representation, starting with tuning forks at the top, then switching to a steel reed in a sounding, and finally an adjustable reed over the poles of an electromagnet. He also employed a design in which the reed vibrated over the single pole of an electromagnet. His work in this area was influenced by sources like Baille's Wonders of Electricity (Baille, 1872).

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Bell had great difficulty putting these reed relays into an effective multiple telegraph circuit, which led him to develop a new theme, or role, for himself in November of 1873, when he wrote, "It became evident to me, that with my own crude workmanship, and with the limited time and means at my disposal, I could not hope to construct any better models. I therefore from this time devoted less time to practical experiment than to the theoretical development of the details of the invention" (Bell, 1876, p. 8).

Gray, in contrast, was a master at constructing complex circuits. But in this account, we will focus on how he developed a mechanical representation that bears a resemblance to Bell's. Figure 11 shows the evolution of Gray's reed mechanical representation. In order to make his reed assemblage better able to transmit single tones, Gray made the spring into a heavier metal reed, filed the end of the reed to tune it, and added a small spring to dampen its vibrations. For a single-tone or analyzing receiver, he first tried a tuning fork attached to one pole of an electromagnet. Then he substituted a spring or lever for the fork. Next, he tried a steel ribbon clamped on both ends: "The length and size of the ribbon depend upon the note we wish to receive upon it. If it is a high note, we make it thinner and shorter; if it is a low note, we make it thicker and longer. If this ribbon is tuned to that it will give a certain note when made to vibrate mechanically, and the note which corresponds to its fundamental is then transmitted through its magnet, it will respond and vibrate in unison with its transmitted note; but if another note be sent which varies at all from its fundamental, it will not respond. If a composite tone is sent, the ribbon will respond when its own note is being sent as part of the composite tone, but as soon as its own tone is left out it will immediately stop. This I am able to select out and indicate when any note is being sent, in fact, to analyze the tones which are passing over the line" (Ashley, October 21, 1876).

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Transmitter Slot Receiver Slot

Gray's Reed Transmitter, May, 1874

~' . ' .' -... . ! ·········~~~t··········

Gray's First Analyzing Receiver,

1874 •

Gray's Improved Reed Transmi~ter

Spring 1-

~ /I ........

Gray's Analyzing Receiver, July, 1875

I I • I I " /I

I~I Figure 11

The evolution of Gray's reed mechanical representations. Note the way in which Gray appears to operate in separate transmltter and receiver slots, ending up with different mechanical representations for each.

Unlike Bell, Gray was not working to get a single preferred mechanical representation. He had specific ways of configuring his reed when it was to serve as a transmitter and as a receiver. This difference in function between Bell's and Gray's apparently similar devices illustrates why I use the term mechanical representation. Bell and Gray saw different possibilities in their reed devices.

Gray wanted to patent a variety of transmitters and receivers that could be used in combination. Therefore, Figure 11 is somewhat misleading··it shows that

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Gray could work incrementally to improve his transmitters and receivers, but does not show all the other variations he was generating at a similar time. Gray's cognitive style could be best described by a matrix: he developed a set of alternate mechanical representations for transmitters and receivers, and tested and patented many of the possible combinations. In Gray's case, substitution of mechanical representations in different slots did not lead to radical changes in his overall mental model of how a multiple harmonic telegraph might work; instead, it gave him more variations to experiment with as he tried to reduce his ideas to practice.

3.5 The Error That Led to the First Telephone

Bell's first mental model for a speaking telegraph came from a variation on this reed mechanical representation, and also from experiments he had conducted with piano strings. In the summer of 1874, he put reeds on either pole of a horseshoe magnet, and experimented with sending the sound of either reed, separately or in combination. Bell's goal was to magnetize the reed itself and therefore avoid distortions that occurred when he used an unmagnetized reed in combination with an electromagnet--exactly the sorts of distortions that Gray was able to avoid through clever use of dampers and electromagnets of different resistances.

Bell's horseshoe magnet experiment was partly successful, enough to lead him to imagine a device he called the 'harp apparatus' with perhaps dozens of reeds on each pole of an electromagnet (see Figure 12). Such a device might function like the strings on a piano and vibrate in response to any tone made near them; these vibrations would then induce a current which could be carried to a receiving harp.

This harp was never built, and it was not fully described even in the sketch shown in Figure 12; instead, it served as a mental model--incomplete and unstable, because Bell had no idea how many reeds it would take to make it work, and he was sure it would not induce enough current to transmit a signal strong enough to be heard.

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Figure 12

Bell's harp apparatus. One would speak against the reeds H, attached to a permanent magnet M; the vibration of the reeds would induce a current in the electromagnet n which would be transmitted to E', causing the reeds H' to reproduce the sound. This device was never built; Bell was not even sure how many reeds would be necessary (from Rhodes, 1929, p. 11).

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In June of 1875, Bell and his new assistant Thomas Watson were working on the problem of multiple telegraphy. Bell had obtained support from Gardiner Hubbard, father of one of his pupils, Mabel. Hubbard wanted to break Western Union's virtual monopoly on what we would now call information services. He proposed a plan that would put such services in the post office, under contract to a corporation that Hubbard himself would found and head. When the Congress did not pass his scheme, Hubbard looked for other ways of ending Western Union's dominance (Carlson, 1994) One way was through the development of new technologies like the multiple harmonic telegraph system proposed by his daughter's teacher.

To complicate matters, Bell was courting Mabel. Therefore, out of deference to Gardiner Hubbard, telephonic researches had to take a back seat to telegraphy. On May 2nd, 1875, Bell wrote to "Papa and Mama: I think that the transmission of the human voice is much more nearly at hand than I had supposed. However this is kept in the background just now--as every effort is made to complete the Autograph arrangement so as to have it used on some line." The autograph was a device that would sent printed or written letters over a wire, and Bell had just obtained an important patent for this kind of technology, barely beating Elisha Gray.

There may also be a cognitive reason why Bell kept the speaking telegraph in the background, at least for a bit. When a scientist or inventor is pursuing a network of related enterprises, she or he may suspend a goal when confronted with an obstacle, and pursue other, related goals until a solution to the first goal emerges. The problem with the harp apparatus was that it required to many reads and the induced current would not be sufficiently strong to transmit speech. So Bell suspended the goal of speaking telegraphy, hoping a solution would emerge.

This is the beauty of a network of related pursuits--in the course of pursuing telegraphy, Bell found the solution to telephony. On June 2, 1875, Bell had set up three multiple telegraph stations, A, Band C, each with three of his tuned reed mechanical representations. He wanted to be able to pluck the first reed in A and have the first reeds in B & C vibrate. When Bell depressed the telegraph key corresponding to first reed at A, the corresponding reed at B vibrated well, but Watson, who was in another room with C, noticed it was stuck. To release it, Watson plucked it; Bell noticed that this caused the corresponding reed at B to vibrate powerfully. Bell then listened to each of the reeds at B in succession, placing his ear right against them, and heard both the pitch and the overtones of the tuned reed.

Seen from the standpoint of multiple telegraphy, this result was an error--one stuck reed caused three reeds at the other station to vibrate, and one could hear the overtones of each reed, whereas what one really wanted was to hear a single, pure

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tone. But given Bell's harp mental model, this error suggested a route to the transmission of speech. "These experiments at once removed the doubt that had been in my mind since the summer of 1874, that magneto-electric currents generated by the vibration of an armature in front of an electro-magnet would be too feeble to produce audible effects that could be practically utilized for the purposes of multiple telegraphy and of speech-transmission" (Bell, 1908, p. 59).

Bell immediately asked Watson to build a working telephone in which a reed relay was attached to a diaphragm or membrane with a speaking cavity over it. As one spoke into the cavity, the membrane would vibrate; these vibrations would be translated into an electrical current by the dampened reed, which would send them to a similar device on the other end. Unfortunately, this device did not produce intelligible speech, though Bell and Watson heard a kind of mumbling that suggested they were on the right track. Bell then wrote an application for a patent that included the transmission of speech; he used his reed relays to illustrate how this was to be done. The patent was submitted on February 14th, 1876.

Edison's famous patent for a carbon filament light also may have benefited from a lot of serendipity. By October of 1879, Edison had succeeded in creating a vacuum to one-millionth of an atmosphere in a bulb, had perfected a generator for the lighting system and was experimenting with platinum filaments (Friedel, 1985). The platinum was not entirely satisfactory. Legend has it that Edison was rolling a piece of compressed lambpack between his fingers one night when it occurred to him to put it in his new high vacuum bulb. Previous work had suggested carbon would simply burn up in a lamp, but in the high vacuum, it showed promise.

By June 2nd, 1875, Bell knew most of what he needed to know to create a telephone, but he believed that a single reed could not transmit with sufficient volume. Similarly, most of the pieces of Edison's incandescent lighting system were in place by October of 1877, but he believed that platinum was superior to carbon as a filament. When both inventors encountered results that suggested they were wrong, they were primed to take advantage of them, and went to patent shortly afterwards. In the case of Edison's team, it took several weeks of careful experimenting before they were ready, but even so, it is unlikely that they had a working lamp when they submitted their patent: "The patent application submitted November 4 did not so much describe what had actually been made at Menlo Park as what Edison and his colleagues knew should be made" (Friedel, 1985, p. 106).

3.6 Grayls Caveat for a Speaking Telegraph

A few hours later on the same day, Elisha Gray submitted his caveat for a speaking telegraph. His mental model for the transmission of speech was based on a device called 'the lover's telegraph', or what we would now call a 'string telephone'. According to Gray, this device "proved to my mind that all the

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conditions necessary for the transmission of an articulate word were contained in any single vibrating point... I saw that if I could reproduce electrically the same motions that were made mechanically at the center of the diaphragm... such electrical vibrations would be reproduced on a common receiver in the same manner that musical tones were" (1880, part II, 124-5).

In his caveat, Gray designed a speaking telegraph that looked like a lover's telegraph with a cylinder of water between transmitter and receiver (see Figure 13). Gray intended to use water as a medium of high resistance. Hanging from the bottom of the speaking tube and diaphragm into which one spoke was a thin wire or rod. When one spoke into the resonant cavity, the diaphragm vibrated, causing the wire hanging from it to get alternately closer to, and farther away from, a contact on the bottom of the water; this motion caused a fluctuation in the current passing to the receiver that mirrored the movement of the diaphragm. The idea of using liquid variable resistance, Gray claimed, was 'old in the art at the time' (1880).

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GROI/NO • Figure 13

Gray's caveat for a speaking telegraph. The man with the moustache speaks into A, causing the needle attached to the membrane below A to vibrate, going alternately deeeer and less deeply into the water at B. At the bottom of B is one end of the circuIt; the other is attaChed to the needle. The water serves as a resistance medium; it conducts electricity, but poorly enough so that the small motion of the needle makes a big difference in the amount of current that flows across the ends of the circuit. The electricity continues to the receiver, which consists of a resonant chamber F and an electromagnet). As the current fluctuates, the strength with which the magnet pulls the bottom of the resonance chamber also fluctuates, causing it to resonate in a manner similar to the human voice (from Prescott, 1884, p. 455).

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Gray used familiar mechanical representations in constructing his speaking telegraph. For example, his receiver consisted of a resonant cavity he had used to receive single tones and a double pole electromagnet he had used in an analyzing recei ver. 33

Because he did not have a working device, Gray filed a caveat or preliminary disclosure instead of a full application, and he was not especially concerned if some details of the apparatus were left somewhat vague. For example, in his caveat, Gray raised the possibility of employing multiple diaphragms just as he had used multiple transmitters in his harmonic telegraphs: "I contemplate, however, the use of a series of diaphragms in a common vocalizing chamber, each diaphragm carrying an independent rod, and responding to a vibration of different rapidity and intensity, in which case contact points mounted on other diaphragms may be employed" (Gray, 1977, p. 79).

In his technical history of the telephone, J.E. Kingsbury cited Gray's preference for multiple chambers to argue that in 1876 Gray was only at the level of understanding that Bell reached with his harp apparatus in 1874, in that each of these diaphragms would function like one of Bell's reeds and it would take a large number of them to reproduce the human voice (Kingsbury, 1915).34 But as we have seen, Gray's mental model was the lover's telegraph, which did not require multiple diaphragms.

Furthermore, in 1875 Gray had developed a mechanical transmitter with which "we obtained a great variety of sounds on the receiver, not unlike the human voice, imitations of vowel sounds, and also imitations of a groan as if in distress ... This experiment with the mechanical transmitter confirmed what my previous experiments had led me to believe: that not only could the receivers that had been named be used as receivers of articulate speech transmitted electrically, but that such speech could be transmitted through a single point. I mean by single point, without the intervention of a series of reeds or points differently tuned, and one that would be a common or universal transmitter, in the same sense that the receivers were universal or common" (1880, p. 124).

33The globe-shaped resonant cavity of the caveat receiver comes from a device that Gray constructed in December, 1874. This device was tuned to respond to a single pitch so that it could be used as a receiver for a specific tone and its cavity was made out of glass. Gray, E. (1977). Experimental Researches in Electro-Harmonic Telegraphy and Telephony: 1867-1878. In G. Shiers (Ed.), The Telephone: An Historical Anthology New York: Arno Press, 54-55.

34 On April 9, 1878, Gray submitted a patent for an "Improvement in the Art of Transmitting Rhythmical Vibrations in an Electric Circuit", eventually granted as No. 205,378. In it, Gray outlined a system that would have functioned like the harp apparatus, using multiple transmitters tuned to different parts of a complex sound and battery cells that could be shunted in or out to reinforce these transmitters.

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So it is not clear why Gray still thought he might have needed multiple diaphragms to transmit speech. Recall Holmes' observation that "in moving from an existing conceptual framework to a new one, scientists often cannot make a single leap from one coherent mental framework to another. They may have to endure, for extended periods of time, deep fissures within their mental worlds" (Holmes, 1989). Similarly, an inventor may simultaneously consider alternate mental models which contradict one another in important respects. Gray's caveat is largely consistent with a mental model for the transmission of speech based on the lover's telegraph, but his remark about multiple transmitters is more consistent with a mental model derived from his musical telegraph experiences, where composite tones were produced by combining single-tone transmitters. Similarly, each of the multiple diaphragms in Gray's speaking telegraph would respond "to a vibration of different rapidity and intensity".

Mental models are provocatively incomplete, often fuzzy in important details. That fuzziness is the key to their creativity--it allows them to contain contradictions that spur the inventor to resolve them.

3.7 Bell's Ear Mental Model

On June 30, 1875, Bell wrote a triumphant letter to Hubbard: "I shall have ready tomorrow afternoon an instrument modeled after the human ear--by means of which 1 hope ... to transmit a vocal sound .. .! am like a man in a fog who is sure of his latitude and longitude. 1 know 1 am close to the land for which 1 am bound and when the fog lifts 1 shall see it right before me." The instrument was a second version of the Gallows telephone, constructed by Watson; it worked little better than the first, but Bell wrote his patent anyway. His reference to 'an instrument modeled after the human ear' can be understood only by looking closely at another line of research in Bell's network of enterprises.

Bell's interest in teaching the deaf kindled his interest in devices used to visualize sound. At the Institute of Technology, he had experimented with the manometric flame capsule, a device that had a speaking tube and membrane on the other side of which was a chamber through which gas was fed to a small flame. As one spoke, the gas was alternately compressed and decompressed by the vibration of the membrane, resulting in higher and lower flames, respectively. Four mirrors were typically rotated as a unit to show the wave shapes: "when we speak to the apparatus, an undulatory band of light makes its appearance in the mirror. The upper edge of the luminous band appears to be carved into beautiful waves of various shapes and sizes, and when we sing different vowel sounds into the mouth-piece of the instrument, retaining the voice on a uniform level, the form or shape of the undulations visible in the mirror changes with every vowel. 1 thought that if I could discover the shape or form of vibration that was characteristic of the elements of English speech, I could depict these upon paper by photographic means for the information of my deaf pupils" (Bell, 1908, pp. 24-5).

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Since Bell could not physically record the manometric flame patterns using photography and since the patterns were difficult to discern, he concentrated on another device, the phonautograph, which he also saw at the Institute of Technology. It consisted of a cone and membrane with a lever attached to the membrane; when one spoke into the cone, the lever vibrated. At the end of the lever was a bristle brush which traced the shape of the sound wave on a piece of glass covered with lampblack; the glass was moved horizontally in a direction perpendicular to the motion of the lever. "I proposed to use these glass plates as negatives, and by photographic means, print off copies of the tracings for the use of my pupils" (Bell, 1908, p. 26).

However, a comparison of phonautograph tracings and manometric flame shapes suggested to Bell that the phonautograph device needed extensive modification so that the tracings would match the flame shapes of the manometric capsule. Considering the phonautograph's geometry--with its thin, light membrane and the relatively heavy wooden lever and style--Bell was struck by the resemblance between the device and the structure of the human ear. The ear analogy suggested the sorts of modifications he might undertake to successfully replicate the flame shapes in the tracings of this device. The modifications aimed to make the analogy between technology and nature more literal. Bell sought to duplicate "the shape of the membrane of the human ear, the shapes of the bones attached to it, the mode of connection between the two, etc." (Bell, 1908, p. 29).

Following a suggestion from Dr. Clarence Blake, a distinguished aurist, Bell built an ear phonautograph in the summer of 1874, roughly the same time as he was conceiving his harp apparatus (see Figure 14). When one spoke into the cone, the eardrum and stapes, malleus and incus (all taken from a preserved human ear) were set into vibration; these vibrations were traced on smoked glass by a bristle brush attached to the end of the incus.

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Figure 14

Bell's ear phonautograph. One speaks into A at top right, which causes the bones of the middle ear (B) to vibrate, tracing the pattern of the wave on the smoked glass (C).

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From the phonautograph, Bell gained a tactile, 'hands-on' understanding of how speech was translated into an undulating wave by the vibrations of the bones of the ear. From his multiple telegraph experiments, Bell gained a similar understanding of how the vibrations of a reed or a combination of reeds could be translated into what he called an undulating electric current that would reproduce the sinusoidal pattern of the sounds.

At the urging of Gardiner Hubbard, Bell had begun keeping a notebook at around the time he applied for his patent. Notebooks are one of the ways in which inventors establish priority for their ideas. On February 18, 1876, Bell drew an ear with two different mechanical representations next to the bones (see Figure 15).35

On the left was an electromagnet, suggesting that the bones would serve a function similar to the steel reed he had so often placed over an electromagnet to transmit and receive complex tones. On the right was an iron cylinder attached to the bones and this vibrated in the center of a magnetized helix with an iron core. Bell had conducted experiments with such an arrangement, verifying that it could produce an undulatory current; he would later develop this mechanical representation into a telephone receiver (Bell, 1908). Beside the sketch, Bell wrote, "Make transmitting instrument after the model of the human ear. Make armature after the shape of the ossacles. Follow out the analogy of nature" (Bell, 1876, p. 13).

35 Gardiner Hubbard, Bell's future father-in-law and principle backer, told him, "Whenever you recall any fact connected with your invention, jot it down on paper, as time will be essential to us, and the more things you actually performed by you at an earlier date, the better for our case." Gardiner G. Hubbard to Alexander Graham Bell, November 19, 1874, Bell Family Papers, Library of Congress, Box 80.

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Figure 15

Bell's ear mental model. 'a' denotes the bones of the middle ear. The text under 'Fig 5' reads '(Helix & core, iron cylinder vibrated in helix), and at the bottom right Mabel Bell notes that she copied the figure on February 21st.

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The ear analogy provided Bell with a mental model that suggested possibilities and problem areas. Consider Bell's ear diagram (see Figure IS, again). It shows two possible arrangements of electromagnets that could be used to translate the vibrations of the ossicles into an electric current, one of which he had already used in building his Gallows telephone (the one on the left in the figure). Bell knew he could not include the ossicles in an actual speaking telegraph. Therefore, this sketch served as a reminder of the mental model he had been working with at least since June 30th, 1875, and possibly before.

Why did Bell need to state his mental model a year after he had designed a device which apparently embodied it? He could have been using his notebook to remind himself of his 'latitude and longitude' at this point. As noted above, this kind of reflection on one's representation and strategies frequently occurs when an expert is stuck or moving into a new domain. One could argue that Bell was simply making a statement for use in possible patent disputes, but the entry is not witnessed, nor did Bell ever use it in court. For Ben his notebook was not just a record designed to establish his priority--it was a thinking tool.

As of February, 1876, Bell had a patent, but not a device which actually transmitted speech. Therefore, for Bell, the patent was not the end-point of a long process; it was the beginning of a new stage of research, of going from a patentable idea to a marketable product. At the beginning of this stage, he needed to reflect on his goals and remind himself of his mental model of how to achieve it.

The statement that he was 'following the analogy of nature' suggests that he was also reflecting on the heuristic he should use to accomplish this goal. Like confirmation and disconfirmation, 'follow the analogy of nature' is a higher-order heuristic used by other inventors as well as Bell. For example, the inventor of nylon, Wallace Hume Carothers, went back to nature and roughly imitated the way in which the silkworm puts together the building blocks for a protein (Friedel, 1994). A more recent example is provided by Misha Mahowald, who has made a career out of following the analogy of nature: she has built both a silicon retina and a silicon neuron, trying to imitate nature's solution as closely as possible (Mahowald & Douglas, 1991; Mahowald & Mead, 1991).

But telling a budding inventor that he or she should 'follow the analogy of nature' gives little guidance about what experiments to perform. This heuristic, like all heuristics, depends heavily on having an appropriate problem representation, in this case a mental model of nature's solution, and also some idea of how to map nature's solution onto the current problem domain. In order for Bell to copy nature, he had to have a detailed understanding of how the bones of the ear translated speech into undulating, sinusoidal waves, and how such waves could be reproduced electromechanically. Bell obtained this understanding from devices like the ear phonautograph.

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The central claim of Bell's patent was that this undulating current was the best method to transmit sound, as opposed to the intermittent, or on-off, current commonly used in telegraphy. The undulatory current preserved the gradual changes in intensity produced by speech or musical tones; the intermittent current reduced these often subtle variations to an on-off code. In the first claim at the end of his patent 174,465, Bell claimed "a system of telegraphy in which the receiver is set in vibration by the employment of undulatory currents of electricity" (Bell, 1908, pp. 459-60); his main example of how to do this was his reed mechanical representation, which could send telegraph signals, musical notes, or even speech. Bell's patent was breathtakingly broad: anyone who used the undulating current to transmit information could potentially be in conflict with Bell's claims.36

3.8 Bell's Patent and Gray's Caveat Compared

Bell's patent and Gray's caveat were declared in interference with each other, a formal proceeding at the patent office in which the examiner has to determine whether, in the light of the interference, a patent should be granted to either party.

In fact, the two documents were very different. Gray's caveat covered a single method for transmitting speech. Bell's patent focused on a form of current that could be used in speech or telegraphy. Gray's patent heuristic was to cover speaking and harmonic telegraphy by patenting as many variations as possible; Bell's heuristic was to try to claim the whole landscape in a single patent.

The interference was resolved in favor of Bell's patent because it had arrived in the Patent Office a few hours earlier than Gray's caveat, though technically Gray still had three months in which to submit a patent and could also have contested Bell's claim in court. Gray's backers felt the speaking telegraph was a 'toy' that might be of occasional use over private lines, but would play no significant role in the transmission of multiple messages over long distances (Taylor, Unpublished Manuscript). Therefore, Gray did not contest Bell's patent until the commercial potential of the telephone became apparent.

After the interference had been voided, Bell learned from the patent examiner that the critical point of contention concerned a clause Bell had inserted at the last minute, in which he claimed the possibility of using variable resistance to create an undulating current. Gray's liquid transmitter depended on variable resistance. This conversation with the patent examiner became the source of endless debate during the years of litigation that followed, with some accusing Bell of outright theft of Gray's idea, in part because he eventually achieved the first transmission of speech with a device that looked similar to Gray's (Taylor, Unpublished Manuscript).

36j: have put Bell's patent on the WorldWide Web at http://jefferson.village. virginia.edu/-meg3C/idlalbell/bpat.2.html

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3.9 Bell's Path to the First Transmission of Speech

Bell received his patent on March 7, 1876. He had not yet successfully transmitted speech. From March 7 to 10, 1876, Bell did a series of experiments which culminated in the first transmission of speech. To show this process, I have employed protocol analysis, a technique used to record and analyze the problem­solving processes of participants in cognitive tasks (Ericsson & Simon, 1984). These participants are asked to speak aloud as they work, saying whatever comes into their minds. This is not the same as introspection--they are not being asked to reflect on the causes of their behavior, only report whatever mental steps they are going through. Their statements are used by the psychologist to create a problem behavior graph which documents their progress towards a solution.

We cannot protocol Bell for obvious reasons, but his notebook gives us a good record of his thoughts--he tries to record the steps in detail, pauses to consider alternatives and remind himself of goals. Tweney and Gooding have pioneered the use of protocol analysis with historical data; they conducted fine-grained studies of Faraday's cognitive processes (Gooding, 1990; Tweney, 1989). Like Bell, Faraday left extensive records--detailed notebooks, correspondence and artifacts. In fact, his notebook was seen as the model for other scientists and inventors.

Tweney and Gooding used Faraday's notebook to create graphical representations of his progress--we saw a brief example of this in Chapter 1. Gooding graphed each result, or hypothesis, and the manipulations that led Faraday to move from one state to another (see Figure 3 from Chapter 1). States were represented by boxes and operators by lines that went horizontally rightward for results that changed Faraday's knowledge state and vertically downward for results that did not. The problem-behavior graphs I created to document Bell's process differ in at least three respects from the conventions established by Gooding and Tweney :

(1) Instead of relying solely on symbols like squares for observations and triangles for shifts in goals, the components and the resulting combinations created by Bell are actually shown inside the symbols, to make it more transparent to a reader and to reveal the mechanical representations used by the inventor. Bell spends much of his time during this sequence of experiments substituting components in slots; these substitutions are illustrated with sketches, marked with plusses and minuses, to indicate whether a component was added or removed.

(2) The line moves to the right in Gooding's graphs if there is a change in Faraday's knowledge state. In the Bell graphs below, the line moves right if Bell thinks the result is positive--he is generally quite explicit about whether he thought a result was positive, in terms of the current state of his research. Where he indicates that a result is somewhat positive, but less so than previous ones, the arrow will move rightward and downward, indicating some progress. This

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emphasis on positive and negative results comes out of Bell's notebook. He will occasionally pause to tell us what hypothesis he is working on, but mostly he wants to record configurations that do and don't produce a strong signal.

There is an alternate way of determining whether a result is positive or not. Barney Finn at the Smithsonian replicated a number of Bell's key experiments, using an oscilloscope to determine how strong a signal resulted (Finn, 1966). Bell did not have an oscilloscope, and relied on his own ear. Naturally, his perceptions were colored by his hopes, but what I intend to reconstruct is this pattern of perceptions and hopes, thereby avoiding the criticism that I might have simply imposed some post-hoc rational scheme on Bell's actual problem-solving process. This emphasis on viewing problem-solving in its actual context is characteristic of new work in what is called situated cognition (Bredo, 1994). We will have more to say about this work later.

(3) A slot diagram is also provided for each chain of experiments, to show the areas Bell was concentrating on and to suggest connections to his overall mental model. At the top of Figure 16 is a slot diagram, based on the circuit with which Bell began this sequences of experiments. The primary purpose of the slot diagram is to indicate the places where Bell made substitutions or changes; in this sense, the slot diagram also serves to define the problem space in which the inventor was working.

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Figure 16

Slot diagram(at top left) and problem-behavior graph showing Bell's first series of experiments on March 8th.

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The slot into which Bell substituted tuning forks, reeds and other annatures is labeled 'ossicles' to remind us that his goal was to find an annature which would 'follow the analogy of nature' and function like the ossicles, translating sound into an undulating electric current. The 'electromagnetic induction' slot indicates the place in his mental model where Bell had to solve the problem of how to translate the vibrations of an armature into an undulating current. Pushing the nature analogy, we might have referred to this as the 'organ of corti' slot; Bell knew roughly how this organ translated the vibrations of the bones into electrical impulses (Feist, 1993). Finally, there is a slot for 'power source', which in this chain of experiments meant a battery-- Bell could vary the number of cells.

On March 8th, Bell began by trying to transmit, clearly and distinctly, a tone using a familiar assemblage of components that had worked in the past: his steel reed mechanical representation as a receiver and a tuning fork, a la Helmholtz, as his transmitter (Gorman, Mehalik, Carlson, & ObIon, 1993). This experiment is really a replication of work done earlier. It was almost as though Bell were trying to establish a baseline, reminding himself of the quality of the results he could achieve with his familiar mechanical representations. He achieved the expected positive result--a clearly audible sound from the receiver.

Bell next tried adding an electromagnet of 'very high resistance'. This result was partially successful: a faint sound was heard from the receiver. This result was in line with expectations--increased resistance should produce a reduced signal. He may have been exploring what would happen if he tried to transmit over long distances, where the resistance of the line is a major factor, or he may simply have wanted to assess how strong the signal was by checking how much resistance it could overcome.

Next, he tried removing the electromagnet altogether, simply vibrating the fork over the wire. There was no sound--no surprise, because without the electromagnet, there was no mechanism for translating mechanical motion into undulating current. Bell in this case was probably checking to make certain he could distinguish the sound of the fork from that of the receiving reed. He had to listen to the reed by pressing his ear against it while vibrating the fork a short distance away. He knew how easy it would be to fool himself.

Next, he put the original electromagnet back in and removed the armature from the receiver, to listen directly to the coil. Here, he was working within the ossicles slot to see exactly what modifications would produce the strongest signal. Again, no sound. In this case, it was less clear that he expected a negative result. Bell had done previous experiments in which he heard sounds from a coil without an armature, but certainly not the kinds of tones he heard when he used a reed. Still, he probably wanted to check and make certain the tones he heard were really produced by the reed.

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When he put an annature of soft iron on the receiver, he obtained a positive result.

Next, he shifted to the power source slot, removing it altogether. Bell had noted that the battery he was using was 'almost run down'--this experiment was probably an effort to make sure it was necessary. Bell was obsessed with simplicity: if he could transmit a clear signal without a battery in the circuit, so much the better. This attempt produced a negative result, as indicated by the arrow pointing to the right.

Robert Bruce, the distinguished Bell biographer, has described the set of experiments in Figure 16 as 'random' (Bruce, 1973). But Figure 16 shows they were anything but random: Bell moved systematically from slot to slot, removing or substituting one component at a time. Bruner called this heuristic 'conservative focusing' to distinguish it from another heuristic, 'focused gambling' (Bruner, 1956). The former involves a careful, systematic search through the problem space, varying only one thing at a time; the latter involves making a leap to a new part of the problem space by altering several variables at once. The two heuristics can be used in combination: an inventor could gamble by trying a radically different configuration of components, get a positive result, then return to a conservative focusing heuristic to see which changes were most important.

Bell's conservative focusing in this case was also a form of replication. He had already done versions of most of these experiments before. Bell had to review his mental model in his notebook before embarking on a new program of research; it seems he also needed to see if he could reproduce results obtained with familiar mechanical representations. He was in effect establishing a base-line for further experimentation.

3.9.1 The Liquid Transmitter At this point on March 8th, Bell made what in hindsight was a significant

change, although it was still consistent with his conservative focusing heuristic. He inserted a dish of water into what had been the electromagnetic induction slot, which leads to a change in the slot diagram (see Figure 17).

This device was never patented, and we have no record of experiments Bell may have conducted with it. But the spark arrester may have served as a mechanical representation, reminding Bell how water could be used as medium of higher resistance in a circuit, one that would conduct induced currents of sufficient strength. The idea of turning this mechanical representation into a telephone transmitter probably came from his conversation with the examiner about the interference with Gray. This kind of opportunistic reasoning often occurs in design: a suggestion about another possible solution path is mated with previous work to produce an alternative approach (Simina & Kolodner, 1995).

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The upper left-hand corner of Figure 17 shows a new slot diagram, in which the electromagnetic induction slot is replaced by a 'resistance medium' slot and the ossic1es slot is replaced by 'contacts'. This new slot diagram is a reminder that the shift to liquids represents a transformation of the problem space, opening up new alternatives to explore. The 'resistance medium' slot indicated that Bell could alter the resistance of the water by adding acid, or substituting other materials for water: in his spark arrester application, he mentioned "carbon, plumbago, animal and vegetable tissues, and other substances offering a high resistance" (Bell, 1908). The 'contacts' slots represented the fact that Bell focused on the relative sizes and depths of the contacts in the water.

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Figure 17

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+

Increas. Distance aetween

Contacts

Bras. Ribbon -Piece of Steel

Contacts

Minimize araa of vibrating contact;

I~_maxlm~~ ~'-: ~ :t:e~ c~~a~t-u :.=, I I ~......-...r: I

Slot diagram and problem-behavior graph after Bell introduces water as a resistance medium

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If this approach were successful, it would apparently eliminate one of Bell's sub-goals: to make an armature after the shape of the ossicles. A contact dipping in water is not shaped like the ossicles! But it would still serve the same function: to translate the undulations of speech into electrical impulses. Bell seems to have blurred the traditional distinction between form and function: for him, form often suggested function. But once he had the function clearly in mind, he was willing to relax the constraints of the original form, in this case the shape of the ossicles, focusing instead on any arrangement which would translate sound waves into undulating electrical currents. Bell began with the experiment shown in the slot diagram in Figure 17; when one tine of the vibrating fork was placed in the water, a 'faint sound' resulted. The diagonal arrow to the next experiment indicates that this was a somewhat positive result. Next, he added a bit of acid to the water. This produced a much louder sound. Increasing the distance between the tuning fork and the conducting wire had no effect, which meant that Bell could ignore distance between contacts at this point. He then added a strip of brass to the conducting wire; this made the sound 'much louder' and completely immersing this wire in the liquid made the sound 'very loud' (Bell, 1876, p. 37). Next, he decided to increase the size of the vibrating contact; to do this, he substituted a bell for the tuning fork. No sound resulted, nor was transmission improved when he substituted a steel wire for the brass one to see if the key was the difference in metals. When he replaced the bell with a piece of steel, the sound was again loud.

Note how Bell in this sequence of experiments employed the conservative focusing heuristic he had used in his earlier experiments on the same day, systematically altering one variable at a time to improve transmission. After acidulating the water, he quickly focused on the contacts slot. His heuristic was similar to what Platt (Platt, 1964) has called a strong inference strategy; he designed experiments that discriminated among hypotheses. He eliminated distance between contacts, which Gray regarded as the key to transmission, and also difference in the metals used in the contacts.

At this point, Bell paused, apparently at the end of his working day, and wrote down a new hypothesis under the heading "Thoughts", which can be paraphrased as follows: the best results could be obtained when the vibrating contact was smallest and the contact on the other end of the circuit was largest. This is shown in Figure 17 by a trapezoidal box, with a sketch in it that is based on the sketch Bell drew in his notebook. The vibrating contact was a small needle; the other contact was a large, flat ribbon which lay underneath the vibrating contact. The sketch included a speaking tube and membrane, borrowed from devices Bell had constructed earlier. The receiver was his familiar steel reed mechanical representation.

On the next day (March 9th), Bell and Watson built a version of this apparatus, using a sounding box instead of a speaking tube, a cork to attach the needle to the membrane, and a brass ribbon as the other contact. These substitutions are shown on the left-hand side of Figure 18. One of Bell's reed receivers was placed in another room. Bell listened while Watson sang, and was

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able to hear the pitch of Watson's voice. When Watson spoke, Bell heard "a confused muttering sound like speech but could not make out the sense. When Mr. Watson counted--I fancied I could perceive the articulations 'one, two, three, four, five'--but this may have been fancy--as I knew beforehand what to expect. However that may be I am certain that the inflection of the voice was represented" (Bell, 1876, p. 39). As far as Bell was concerned, this was a positive result--a similar result had convinced him that the Gallows telephone represented a patentable idea. Hence, the horizontal arrow to the next experiment, conducted on the next day.

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March 9, 1876

Figure 18

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March 10, 1876

:~--I-I ---II -----11---

NMr. Watson--come here--I want to see you.

Experiments by Bell and Watson on March 9th and 10th leading up the first transmission of speech patentable idea. Hence, the horizontal arrow to the next experiment, conducted on the next day.

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On March 10th, the two substituted a platinum pipe for the brass ribbon and a speaking tube for the sounding box. Bell spoke the famous words "Mr. Watson-­Come here--I want to see you" (Bell, 1876, p. 40).

Here is the moment when the hero had reached his goal. It is even enshrined in a myth--that Bell spilled acid on his pants, and that is why he asked Watson to "come here." But this moment of heroic triumph is more apparent in hindsight. Arguably, the June 2nd experiment was more important, because it led to the patent.

Furthermore, Bell and Watson did not break out the champagne. Indeed, they continued to experiment. The two switched places and Watson read to Bell from a book: Bell could make out only a few words, but heard Watson say "Mr. Bell, do you understand what I say?" (Bell, 1876, p. 41). They continued to experiment, trying to figure out the exact circumstances which had produced the positive result, and also how to improve it. Adding cells to the battery produced a violent hissing. Bell realized that the transmitter was in effect operating as a battery, because one contact was brass and the other platinum. A black deposit quickly formed on the platinum contact.

To avoid these problems, Watson and Bell went back to their experiments with tuning forks, in effect replicating earlier work. Bell noted that the more deeply the prong of the fork was immersed in the water, the less the sound.

3.10 Bell and Gray's Liquid Transmitters in Perspective

Here the contrast between Bell's design and Gray's becomes most apparent. The combination of devices Bell first used to transmit speech bears a superficial resemblance to the combination of devices described in Gray's caveat. But Gray's liquid transmitter depended on immersing a needle deeply in a vessel of water. Bell's liquid transmitter, in contrast, worked poorly if the needle or tuning fork went too deeply in water; he wanted to minimize the surface area of the vibrating contact and maximizing the area of the other contact.

From a modern standpoint, these differences might seem minor, but they were critical to the participants. In effect, Bell and Gray's liquid transmitters were different mechanical representations, because despite their superficial similarities, they embodied unique representations. Furthermore, Gray thought the transmission of speech might have required multiple speaking chambers, whereas Bell knew only one would be necessary.

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The differences in the transmitters were mirrored by differences in the two receivers. Bell used his familiar reed mechanical representation, which could reproduce any tone. Gray used one of the receivers he had designed to discriminate and enhance single tones. In other words, Grays receiver design would have been best suited to enhance a particular range of vocal tones, whereas Bell's was intended to reproduce any spoken sound. Again, superficial similarities that seem apparent in hindsight mask differences in the representations embodied in the devices.

3.11 After the First Transmission of Speech

After his caveat, Elisha Gray all but abandoned speaking telegraphy until June, after a major Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia, when he heard the human voice through one of Bell's telephones. Had Bell used a liquid transmitter on this occasion, Gray's surprise might have turned to suspicion. But despite his early success with the liquid transmitter, at the Centennial Bell demonstrated magnetic induction designs that looked more like the ones in his first patent. Improvements on this magneto design formed the basis of his second speaking telegraph patent, in 187737. Why did Bell abandon the approach that led to the first transmission of speech?

Finn tested the Bell apparatus housed at the Smithsonian and concluded that, "Bell apparently abandoned the variable-resistance transmitter in favor of the magneto transmitter for the simple reason that the latter worked better and with greater consistency than the variable-resistance liquid transmitter he had designed, and this decision came after an impressively large number of experiments. My recent experiments confirm the validity of Bell's jUdgment." (Finn, 1966, p. 15)

Finn tested Bell's devices with an oscilloscope; Bell used his ear, and compared current results with what he had written about previous ones in his notebooks. Therefore, a fairer judge of Bell's successes may be his notebook record, which suggests that he continued to obtain positive results with the liquid transmitter long after March 10th, results at least as positive as any he had achieved with magneto designs.

Another possibility was that Bell wanted to keep his liquid experiments a secret, knowing that Gray was working on something similar. This implies some clever guesswork on Bell's part, or a spy at the patent office. All Bell ever admitted knowing was that his patent and Gray's caveat were in conflict over the matter of variable resistance.

371 have put this patent on the Web at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/-meg3c/id/ TCC3J5/bellpat2.html.

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There is a third possibility: that Bell saw the liquid transmitter primarily as a way of testing his mental model for the transmission of speech, not as a practical device. The liquid would need to be kept at just the right level. One can imagine running to 'top off the transmitter' every time the phone rang! Bell probably never seriously considered a practical liquid transmitter.

But how could a liquid transmitter confirm Bell's mental model? Contacts vibrating in water do not correspond in form to the bones of the middle ear. But they did serve the same function: translating the sinusoidal patterns of speech into an undulating current. The form of the ossicles was fading into the background, but its function remained paramount.

It is well to remember Freud's point about human behavior being overdetermined. In truth, some combination of all the above motives might account for Bells decision. It is worth taking a brief look at the experiments Bell conducted between March 10th and May.

Recall that on March 10th, Bell realized his liquid transmitter was functioning as a battery. To avoid this problem, Bell used platinum on both contacts. On March 13th, his future father-in-law and principal backer Gardiner Hubbard dropped by and listened to the transmitter; he "was convinced that articulate sounds were transmitted along the wire--although the articulation was so muffled as to be to him unintelligible unless ... he was informed beforehand of its sense" (Bell, 1876, p. 51). Bell concluded that "the experiments were on the whole satisfactory as demonstrating the fact that the timbre as well as the pitch of vocal sounds had been transmitted telegraphically" (Bell, 1876, p. 52). In other words, this experiment represented another confirmation of his undulating current mental model. Perhaps more importantly, this confirmation continued the process of converting Gardiner Hubbard to Bell's view of the potential benefits of the telephone.38

After several frustrating efforts to improve transmission, on March 15th, Bell paused to reflect: "Instead of practical experiment I have come to the conclusion that I can best advance the subject by making a theoretical investigation of the effects produced upon a voltaic current by the vibration of the conducting wire in a liquid included in the circuit--and deducing thence the best way of increasing

38 Gardiner Hubbard eventually came to view the telephone as a viable technology for intra-city communication, one that would facilitate free and open exchange of information. It was he who made Bell into a millionaire. For an account of Gardiner Hubbard's business strategy, see Carlson, W. Bernard. "Entrepreneurship in the early development of the telephone: How did William Orton and Gardiner Hubbard conceptualize this new technology?" Business and Economic History 23 (2 1994): 161-192.

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the amplitude of the electrical undulations so as to admit of the transmission of vocal utterance over long distances" (Bell, 1876, p. 57).

In other words, Bell decided a search in what Klahr and Dunbar (Klahr, 1988) call the hypothesis space would be more profitable at this stage than further work in the experimental space, especially in light of his limited equipment and electrical skills. He sketched a series of thought experiments concerning the relationship between battery power, line resistance and resistance of the liquid, and sketched the shape of the undulations he thought might result from different combinations of these factors. Eventually an article in a handbook convinced him that even acidulated water would be over a million times more resistant than copper wire and would be far too great for the batteries he was using. The key to a liquid transmitter was to lower water resistance--either by acidulating the water, or bringing the contacts closer together, or both.

Bell carefully experimented with these options, and found if he separated the contacts by a thin film of water, the reed of the receiver often got stuck against the electromagnet. This led him to focus on the distance of the receiving reed from the coil, and on March 27th, to an experiment in which he used his two favorite forms of magneto receiver in a circuit. This represented his first experiment with an all-magneto design since March 8th. He obtained a positive result. Bell soon was back to experimenting with liquid devices, partly because they offered a solution to the problem of autograph telegraphy: sending letters over the wire. Bell's autograph telegraph experiments were part of his network of enterprises.

One particular experiment on April 5th, involving a transmitter in which a carbon contact dipped into mercury, allowed Bell to hear the difference between undulating and intermittent currents repeatedly and clearly, leading him to conclude "that my theory is correct--that musical notes which conflict with one another when transmitted by means of an intermittent (current) will not interfere with one another when the undulatory current is employed." (Bell, 1876b, p. 97-­emphasis his). Another experimenter might have referred to this result as an error: the intermittent current kept interfering with the undulatory because the pencil was too short to be adjusted as precisely as necessary. But Bell had a knack for converting errors into positive results--in this case a positive result that also confirmed his theory.

On May 5th, Bell returned to magneto devices; from this point forward, the liquid transmitter virtually disappears from his notebook. He was preparing for a May 10, 1876, presentation to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the pressure of a deadline forced Bell to confirm that a magneto device could serve as both transmitter and receiver. In the talk, he placed much greater emphasis on his work with magneto devices, despite the fact that his notebooks suggested their performance was not consistently superior to that of liquid variable resistance devices: he could get either type to produce vowels, musical tones and even

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occasional phrases, but neither would permit consistent discrimination of consonants. On May 25th an audience at MIT heard occasional sentences transmitted from a neighboring house over a magneto telephone. "Vowels are faithfully reproduced; consonants are unrecognizable" reported the Boston Transcript (Bruce, 1973, p. 189).

Bell's exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial was hastily added to the program by Gardiner Hubbard, who played such a key role in putting Bell's work forward. One of the reasons I admire Bell is because he was a busy, overworked teacher like me, buried under papers he had to grade. He didn't want to take time from his teaching to go to the Centennial; his fiancee Mabel took him to the station and all but shoved him on the train.

Elisha Gray, in contrast, had an elaborate, carefully choreographed set of demonstrations ready, supported by Western Union. On June 25, the judges, accompanied by Dom Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil, listened to a long lecture by Gray and watched him demonstrate both musical and multiple telegraphy, but not speaking telegraphy.

The clever Hubbard had put Bell in the same hotel with three of the judges, so by the time they saw Gray's exhibit, they had already heard Bell's account of the scientific principles underlying his speaking telegraph. The judges then trudged off to see Bell's exhibit. It included multiple harmonic telegraph equipment, but also Bell's latest speaking telegraph--a magneto design that included a new receiver, which he had created by scavenging parts in Charles Williams' shop. Bell had found an iron cylinder with a rod running up the middle; when wire was wrapped around the rod, the whole apparatus became an electromagnet, with one pole represented by the pole of the cylinder and the other pole by the top ()f the rod. Bell added a lid of sheet iron, which vibrated in response to the undulating current from the transmitter.

Wires from this receiver ran to the corresponding transmitter in another part of the exhibit hall. Bell sang and shouted into this transmitter while Sir William Thomson, one of the judges, listened at the receiving end. He heard the words, "Do you understand what I say?", and shouted, "I must see Mr. Bell!" Thomson ran to find Bell, reported the success, and went back to hear more. Dom Pedro was next, heard part of Hamlet's soliloquy, and also rushed off to congratulate Bell. Even Elisha Gray heard "Aye, there's the rub" faintly when he took his turn at the receiver (Bruce, 1973, p. 197). Bell's use of a familiar passage was a clever way of insuring that listeners could fill in the gaps in the faint and unsteady transmission.

The delighted and surprised reaction of his listeners would be echoed time and time again when Bell, Watson and others took their invention 'on the road' and did live demonstrations. For a professional telegrapher like Gray, this

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invention had always been subsidiary to the telegraph. As he said in a letter to his attorney, A.L. Hayes in October of 1875:

Bell seems to be spendin~ all his energies on [sic] talking telegraph. While this is very interesting sCIentifically it bas no commercia1 value at present, for they can do much more business over a line by methods already in use than by that system. I don't want at present to spend my time and money for that which will bring no return.39

He also publicly conceded all priority in matters related to speaking telegraphy in a letter to Bell on March 5th, 1877, in which he said,

Of course you had no means of knowing what I had done in the matter of transmitting vocal sounds. When, however, you see the specification, you will see that the fundamental principles are contained therein. I do not, however, claim even the credIt of inventing it, as I do not believe a mere description of an idea that has never been reduced to practice, --in the strict sense of that phrase,--should be dignified with the name invention.

In later years Gray regretted this concession, especially given the fact that Bell got a patent without achieving a reduction to practice. But Gray also had to admit that Bell was the first to achieve spoken transmission, and that his electromagnetic induction design was original: "I thought it would be impossible to make a practical working speaking telephone on the principle shown by Professor Bell, to wit: generating electric currents with the power of the voice, as it seemed to me then that the vibrations were so slight in amplitude and the inductor necessarily so light that the currents thus generated would be too feeble for practical purposes" (1880, Part I, 142-3). Eventually, Gray designed and patented several magneto speaking telegraphs of his own, in an effort to circumvent Bell's patent. He also built and tested his liquid transmitter after the Centennial, and applied for patents in which it would be used in combination with various receivers. Again, Gray relied on a patent-combinations heuristic, using familiar mechanical representations like the washbasin-electromagnet design as both transmitter and receiver in combination with other mechanical representations, including the liquid transmitter featured in his caveat (Gorman, et al.,1993).

Bell did not even bother to demonstrate his liquid transmitter at the Centennial, and liquid designs virtually disappear from his notebook. The success of the liquid transmitter may have disconfirmed Bell's idea that the form of the armature ought to be modeled on the ossic1es. On September 27th, Bell wondered if he should "try to use the membrane of the human ear as a transmitter. Attach light piece of iron or steel to maleus--having removed stapes and incus" (Bell, 1876, Vol II, p. 83). In this extraordinary passage, Bell reminds us that the

39Gray Papers, National Museum of American History, Box 2, Folder 1.

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ear still serves as a mental model. Attaching an armature to the maleus is similar to his ear phonautograph, in which a brush was attached to all three bones of the middle ear. By removing the stapes and the incus, Bell has removed the hinge that he thought was essential in his February 21st sketch of the ear mental model. The form of the ossicles was gradually disappearing.

His first production telephones substituted a heavy metal diaphragm for the hinged armature suggested by the ossicles analogy, but otherwise they were identical to devices used in his first patent. His discovery of the benefits of a metal diaphragm involves the way in which he used his notebooks as a tool for reflection. On July 11, 1876, Bell tried attaching a disk of tagger's iron to the membrane of the transmitter, replacing the metal strip he usually used. He found sounds were louder with the disk than with the strip. He experimented with a circuit of 19660 ohms resistance and ten battery cells, and found that "the softer the initial articulation the more distinct was the utterance at the other end of the line" (Bell, 1876, Vol II, p. 28). Bell was at this point working to achieve long­distance transmission, and in this sequence of experiments, he occasionally used water to simulate the high resistance of a long-distance line.

The iron disk disappeared as Bell went into a long sequence of multiple telegraph experiments, followed by experiments using springs on the membrane, which led to his insight on September 27th that the spring need not be modeled after the form of the ossicles. Then on October 2nd, he re-read his notebook and noticed the July 11th experiment with the iron disk. He could not imagine why they hand not tried this again. He and Watson glued a steel disk to the membrane. "The articulation was much more distinct" (Bell, 1876, Vol II, p. 3). On October 7th, the two men carried on an enthusiastic telephone conversation, in which Watson said, "Success has at last [attended] our efforts" (Bell, 1876, Vol III, p. 4). The fact that Bell could not make out the word 'attended' scarcely dampened their enthusiasm. Long conversations followed, and were recorded in the notebook.

In January, 1877, Bell submitted a second patent that emphasized speaking telegraphy. The membrane was now gone altogether; in its place was a heavy plate of iron or steel, whose position with respect to an electromagnet or permanent magnet could be adjusted to produce the best transmission or reception. Bell and Watson's first production telephones were built along these lines, but were quickly superseded by better transmitters using carbon as a medium of variable resistance. Bell and Watson also put together an effective 'road show' in which Bell would place a receiver in front of an audience and Watson would sing to them from a remote location (Bruce, 1973) Just as at the Centennial, these shows had a magical effect on audiences. Never mind that much of the effect depended on the way Watson bellowed into the transmitter. Bell's telephone transmitter was quickly superseded by better devices (Carlson, 1989), but he had recognized the importance of transmitting speech and played a major role in creating a market for this new technology.

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Invention involves more than creating a device; to borrow the sociologist John Law's felicitous phrase, it is an exercise in heterogeneous engineering (Law, 1987). What Law means is that successful inventors build a network of technologies, patents, backers, buyers--even, in Bell's case, scientists. Bell did not build this network all by himself; instead, he recruited allies like Gardiner Hubbard, Sir William Thomson and others who promoted his invention. It was Hubbard who created the Bell Corporation and made his son-in-law a millionaire.

Gray, meanwhile, successfully developed an improved form of duplex and used it over long-distance lines starting in May of 1877. He referred to this duplex as a telephone, in the spirit of Philip Reis' original invention, but what Gray had in mind was a harmonic telegraph. He could send two messages at the same time over a long-distance line in a way that did not interfere with all the local Morse telegraph messages that were being sent over the same wires at the same time (Gray, 1977). This was a major accomplishment. But the entire technological front had been transformed by Bell's invention, and conquering the old reverse salient was now a minor victory.

3.12 Cognition, Invention and Discovery: The Five Generalizations

Let us revisit our generalizations, and see whether they can help us compare the cognitive processes of Bell and Gray and extract meaningful lessons, substituting the term inventor for discoverer.

1. Invention depends on establishing that a problem is significant enough to be labeled an important achievement.

One way for inventors to find significant problems is to focus on reverse salients. Kilby and Noyce, inventors of the microchip, did this with great success (Reid, 1984). Elisha Gray, however, found that BeIrs invention transformed the entire communications industry in a way that made the old reverse salient a minor problem. Bell sought to solve a problem whose significance only he really appreciated.

2. Invention depends on transforming that problem into a form that suggests a promising path to solution which includes locating and transforming the necessary mechanical representations.

Here we have substituted the new term mechanical representation for data. Part of the mind of the inventor is embodied in the special components she crafts. This is often true of discoverers as well.

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Gray certainly transformed the technologies available for multiple telegraphy, creating a whole new set of mechanical representations, and patenting combinations among them. Bell, in contrast, sought to come up with a single, best mechanical representation that would embody his mental model of how speech, or telegraph signals, or music might be transmitted and received.

To put it in other terms, Gray's knowledge was more in his devices and Bell's in his sketches and notebooks. Gray was comfortable building a proliferation of sophisticated devices; Bell preferred thought experiments and theoretical reflections, imagining how systems might work.

When I give talks about Gray and Bell, I am often challenged by historians, who claim this combinatory or matrix style of Gray's is simply the result of the spotty records he left--if he had kept the same sort of detailed records as Bell, his cognitive style would look more similar.

First of all, I think it is significant that he did not keep records as detailed as Bell's. Record-keeping is a reflection of cognitive style. Bell used his notebooks as a thinking tool, as well as a means of creating a powerful heroic narrative of his invention. That reflects his goals and style. As early as 1873, he adopted the theme, or role, of a theoretical inventor.

Gray, in contrast, embodied his thinking in devices. That's why he thought his caveat contained the fundamental principles for transmitting speech--even though he nowhere discussed the undulating current, or any of the other theoretical matters raised by Bell in his patent. For Gray, the principles were embodied in the device, which told the whole story.

While Bell tried to find a single, simple device that would represent his goal, Gray created multiple devices which were better suited to different telegraph applications and which would allow him to patent different approaches to the problem of telegraphy. When asked to recall his invention process, he listed devices and experiments conducted with them. Gray left almost no other records because he didn't need them--his devices were his memory, and practically spoke for themselves.

One could try to adapt the language of the dual-space approach to scientific reasoning. Recall that Klahr and Dunbar found two cognitive styles among participants in one of their Big Trak experiments: theorists, who spent more time searching a hypothesis space, and experimenters, who spent more time in an experiment space (Klahr, 1988). Bell's style resembles that of the theorists; he spent a good deal of time considering alternate hypothesis for designs, conducting

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thought experiments and even reflecting on his overall mental model in his notebook.

Gray bears more resemblance to the experimenters, in his preference for creating devices rather than thinking about what sort of current would best transmit speech or musical tones. But the term experimentalist isn't quite right for Gray. He would be better described as working in a space of mechanical representations, developing multiple variations. Bell, in contrast, sought to develop the simplest possible mechanical representation that would embody his mental model for the transmission of speech.

3.12.1 The Wright Brothers: A Dual-Space Analysis

Klahr and Dunbar's participants were trying to come up with an appropriate mental model for operating a device, not building one. The theoristlexperimenter distinction does not incorporate invention, but Gary Bradshaw (http://hawaii.cogsci.uiuc.edulinventlinvention.html) used a dual-space approach to explain why the Wright Brothers were so far ahead of their competitors. Instead of hypothesis and experiment spaces, he argued that inventors like the Wrights worked in design and function spaces (Bradshaw, 1992). The problem with Wright competitors like Langley and Chanute is that they worked almost exclusively in a design space, varying parameters like the location and number of the wings without carefully considering their function. Typically, these inventors would construct aircraft to test their new design ideas and fly them.

In contrast, the Wright brothers' goal was "to achieve certain functions in an airplane; lateral control, sufficient lift, a reduction in drag, etc." (Bradshaw, 1992, p. 248). In other words, they decomposed the problem into functional slots. The brothers built only three gliders before constructing their successful airplane. After careful analyses of their first two gliders, they built a wind tunnel and tested more than one hundred wing shapes before producing the first flying machine.

They also formed unique mental models and sets of mechanical representations. As Tom Crouch noted, "Wilbur and Orville had a genius for visualizing the abstract--a gift for thinking in terms of concrete graphic images. That was what set them apart" (Crouch, 1992, pp. 84-5). They were experienced bicycle mechanics, and that background helped them understand that an airplane, like a bicycle, would have to roll, and that the pilot would need to be able to control that roll. Other inventors assumed an aircraft would have to be stable after it was launched. The Wrights used birds as a mental model for how to control this roll: birds adjusted the tips of their wings, presenting one tip at a positive angle and another at a negative one. Wilbur simulated this by twisting a piece of cardboard; he saw that a pilot might be able to warp the wings in the

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same way. "The Wrights had taken a set of graphic images--a bicycle speeding around a corner, a bird soaring through the air, a cardboard box twisted in the hands--turned them into thought problems, and reassembled the lessons learned into a mechanical system for controlling a plane on a roll axis" (Crouch, 1992, p. 86). To put it in terms of our framework, the Wright brothers created a slot for wing warping.

In the course of their experiments with the coefficients of lift, the Wright brothers created a variety of mechanical representations, including a set of balances for measuring lift and drag. This meant they could calculate the coefficient of lift without using the standard equations. "They had grasped the possibility of devising a mechanical expression of a complex mathematical equation. They had visualized a way in which the incredibly complex play of forces operating on that machine would be directed so as to produce the precise bit of information required. Seen in this light, the lift balance, and the drag balance, must be recognized as intellectual achievements of staggering proportion" (Crouch, 1992, p. 91).

Like the Wrights, Bell had a functional goal: to find the simplest possible means of translating the undulating curves he had seen on the phonautograph into an undulating current. Gray, in contrast, generated a proliferation of alternate designs with little apparent analysis of their functions. So we might say that Bell spent more time in a function space, and Gray in a design space.

But like Gray, the Wrights also developed a sophisticated set of mechanical representations, including balances for measuring lift and drag. It is not sufficient to say that one should conduct a coordinated search of design and function spaces; one must have a mental model to guide one search and be able to invent or borrow mechanical representations that create the necessary data. Much of an inventor's cognition is embodied in devices. For Bell, a number of these devices, like the harp apparatus, existed only on paper and served as mental models. In contrast, Gray' seems to have preferred a kind of experimental benchtop space, in which he could analyze and imagine by building. Part of an inventor's mind is in the devices he or she creates.

3.12.2 Cognitive Styles: Flexibility, Visualization and Networks of Enterprise

3. Invention depends on a combination of flexibility and stubbornness, depending on the cognitive styles and career trajectories of the inventors involved and on how they represent the problem.

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Gray stuck stubbornly to a mental model based on the idea that musical tones could be used to carry telegraph messages. But Gray showed great flexibility in generating alternative ways of converting this mental model into practical devices, and devices like the mechanical transmitter led him in turn to alter his mental model, in this case to incorporate the possibility of speech. For Gray, speaking telegraphy remained a relatively minor extension of harmonic telegraphy.

Like Gray, Bell began with the idea that multiple telegraphy was the problem to solve. But his unique background led him gradually to elevate speaking telegraphy to the primary goal, although he continued multiple telegraph experiments after the Centennial and emphasized telegraph applications in his patents. Once Bell developed an overall mental model for the transmission of speech, based on the human ear, he stuck stubbornly to it, returning to it after a long series of successful experiments with a liquid transmitter. But these experiments also showed his flexibility--he gradually abandoned the idea that the form of the armature would resemble the ossicles, and kept the function: translating sound into an undulating current. To put it in Lakatos' terms, both inventors had hard core ideas they were unwilling to abandon, but outside of these hard cores they showed flexibility.

In terms of Bruner's conservative focusing and focused gambling heuristics, both Bell and Gray could be said to prefer the former to the latter. Recall that conservative focusing involves changing one thing at a time as one experiments, while focused gambling involves making multiple changes at once. Bell's notebooks show his preference for changing one or at most two aspects of a system when conducting a new test. Gray used conservative focusing in a somewhat different way; he tried each of his transmitters with each of his receivers, then patented the most promising combinations. Gray's caveat for a speaking telegraph looks like more of a focused gamble, but even that looks more conservative on closer inspection. Gray's liquid transmitter was essentially an 'off­the-shelf component he was familiar with from telegraphy, and the receiver was one of his familiar mechanical representations.

Of course, it could be that the more closely one study's the invention process, the more it looks conservative--each insight, each new combination appears to be a small step from previous work. Even Jack Kilby's bold leap to the microchip might be viewed as a conservative change: he kept all the components of the circuit, he just etched them on silicon. But this move represents a fundamental change in the mental model. To put it in Klahr & Dunbar's terms, what appears to be a conservative shift in the experiment space may be triggered by a radical shift in a space of mental models that in turn leads to a new set of possibilities.

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4. The act o/writing is part o/the invention process.

Clearly, this generalization holds true for Bell. His notebook was instrumental in his discovery the heavy metal armature he patented in January of 1877. He also used his letters and notebooks to construct a powerful invention narrative, which he repeated endlessly in litigation.

Similarly, the midwestern agricultural inventors studied by Colangelo (Colangelo, et aI., 1993) all kept notes: "Most wrote on whatever was handy, rather than keeping formal journals, but they 'never misplaced those notes'" (163). What is needed are detailed studies of these notes: what methods the inventors used to keep them, whether and how they played a role in new inventions, whether and how they were used to resolve patent disputes.

Writing apparently played less of a role in Gray's invention process. In patent testimony, he uses assistants like William Goodridge to serve as witnesses for experiments, rather than referring to notebook entries or letters (1880). Gray did write articles for journals like the Telegrapher and provided accounts for newspapers. He was acutely aware of the need to publicize his inventions. To buttress his claim to have invented the speaking telegraph, he wrote an extended account of his experimental researches (Gray, 1977).

We might also add that visualization is an important part of the invention process. Finke did a series of experiments in which he asked participants to combine simple geometric shapes to create what he called preinventive forms (Finke, 1990). For example, one student, given a hemisphere, cylinder and line to work with, put the cylinder on the hemisphere, attached the line to the top of the cylinder as if it were hung from the walls of a room, and called the resulting combination a 'hip exerciser': one could stand on the hemisphere, hold onto the cylinder, and rotate one's hips (Ward, 1995).

Most participants in Finke's experiments were able to come up with at least one preinventive combination that judges scored highly on originality and practicality. This kind of 'preinventive' visualization can play an important role in the creation of new mental models and mechanical representations. Indeed, Finke's experiments demonstrate that function can often follow form.

Finke's participants did not keep notebooks or provide written justifications of their invention ideas, so it is impossible to know whether writing would have facilitated their invention processes. Finke recommends recording preinventive forms in a notebook. According to Finke, what distinguishes really creative people is not just or even primarily their ability to generate creative images, but their willingness to explore them for extended periods of time.

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We might also add that visualization is an important part of the invention process. Finke did a series of experiments in which he asked participants to combine simple geometric shapes to create what he called preinventive forms (Finke, 1990). Most participants were able to come up with at least one preinventive combination that judges scored highly on originality and practicality. Finke's participants did not keep notebooks or provide written justifications of their invention ideas, so it is impossible to know whether writing would have facilitated their invention processes. Finke's studies do demonstrate the creative power of visualization.

Similarly, Edison left extensive records of his invention of the carbon transmitter and used them in court, but they consist almost entirely of sketches. For inventors, words are often less important than sketches, prototypes and even mental modeling. Tesla claimed that he envisioned many of his electrical inventions. "The pieces of apparatus I conceived were to me absolutely real and tangible in every detail, even to the most minute marks and suggestions of wear. I delighted in imagining the motors constantly running ... " (Cheyen, 1981, p. 24). Elmer Sperry, a prolific inventor most famous for his marine gyroscopes, "was strongly visually oriented" (Hughes, 1971).

So in the case of inventors we might add sketching and even mental modeling to our generalization about the importance of writing. Even so, in the end, the inventor must either write a patent, or find someone who can write it. Consider the successful inventor Jerome Lemelson, who has over 500 patents to his credit, but rarely builds prototypes of his ideas, let alone market or manufacture them. He made his fortune by developing complex heuristics for keeping patents alive over long periods of time and filing amendments. He licensed his patents to others and, sued those who wouldn't license (Wysocki, 1997). Lemelson wrote all of his own patents: for him, writing and sketching are perhaps the most important part of invention. "Most of my inventions are only in the form of patents, and many of them are quite detailed. I don't see a need for building models of everything I have invented or spending the time and money on models. I know they're helpful in promoting and licensing inventions, but they're not always necessary" (Brown, 1988, p. 126). Contrast Lemelson with Elisha Gray; the former wrote far more than he built, and the latter built more than he wrote.

Furthermore, like Bell, successful inventors must be able to construct an invention narrative that demonstrates the novelty of their ideas--that contains the 'flash of insight' that patent examiners and jurors look for in determining whether a technological improvement deserves the status of an invention (Seabrook, January 11, 1993). Gray's accounts of his invention process were much sparser than Bell's; and Gray was encouraged to compensate by writing accounts like

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"Experimental Researches in Electro-Harmonic Telegraphy and Telephony: 1867-1878" (Gray, 1977). It would be interesting to look at the role Lemelson's accounts of his invention process played in his success as an inventor.

5. Successful inventors often pursue a network of enterprises.

Gray's network of enterprises was focused on telegraphy at this time, but encompassed music and autograph telegraphy as well as harmonic telegraphy. In addition to transmitters and receivers, he developed and patented important technologies for improving transmission over long distance lines.

Bell's network was more diverse, encompassing inventions that could be used to visualize speech in addition to telephony, harmonic telegraphy and autograph telegraphy. Bell's network was also interdisciplinary. He alone of telegraph inventors was an expert in elocution and audition, especially in teaching the deaf. This background was his secret weapon. His experiments with the ear phonautograph, for example, played an important role in Bell's mental model for a telephone.

Edison also pursued a network of connected inventions, although he would periodically focus a massive effort on one project, like the development of an electric lighting system, or mining ore in New Jersey. His favorite invention was the phonograph, and mechanical representations from this invention can be seen in some of his telephones and in his kinetoscope. His ore mining experiments were failures, but knowledge and mechanical representations from them played a role in his successful cement manufacturing business; the equipment he used to separate iron from rock was turned to pulverizing limestone (Baldwin, 1995).

Some inventors, however, pursue one invention with a single-minded, obsessive character. Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, got his motivation from his experience copying patents by a slow photostat process, and also from the hours copying pages from sources at the library (Dessauer, 1971). He made his kitchen into a laboratory and worked there evenings and weekends, after his job as a patent attorney. Eventually, his wife made him move the laboratory to an apartment owned by her mother-in-law. It was here that Carlson and his assistant Otto Kornei photocopied the inscription "10-22-38 Astoria" on October 22, 1938. The result was crude and smudged and the process hardly suited to manufacturing. But he obtained several patents and for eight years looked for a way to market his idea. Finally, in 1944, he received support from the Batelle Memorial Institute, a privately endowed research and development organization that contracted with companies. It took Carlson and the Batelle two more years to find a company that was interested in working with them. After trying General Electric, IBM, RCA and Kodak, they found a willing partner in the Haloid Corporation. Carlson remained with Haloid for the rest of his life, perfecting this invention. For Carlson, there was no network of inventions; he

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focused on a single technological breakthrough and championed it throughout his career. But his case reminds us of another kind of networking inventors have to do--they have to build a network of assistants, financial backers and manufacturers if they are going to bring a product to market.

3.13 What Invention Says to Cognitive Science

The sciences of cognition have tended to examine a disembodied intelligence, a pure mtelligence isolated from the world. It is time to question this approach, to provide a critigue of pure reason, if you will. Humans operate within the physical world. We use the phy:sical world and one another as sources of information, as reminders, and in general as extensions of our own knowledge and reasoning systems. People operate as a type of distributed intelligence, wnere much of our intelligent behavIOr results from the interaction of mental processes with the objects and constraints of the world and where much behavior takes place through a cooperative process with others (Norman, 1993, p. 146).

Consider one of the problems posed by researchers in artificial intelligence: to build a computer that emulates the mind. Often, mind is identified with brain; however, if one takes a distributed view, cognition includes objects like computers that contain important memories, embodies problem-solving strategies and facilitates interactions among individuals who are part of a problem-solving network. Therefore, the computational tools being used to model the mind themselves conduct activities usually referred to as mental. Instead of conducting 'disembodied discovery', computers form part of a network that distributes cognitive tasks and shares functions.

Take Searles classic 'Chinese room' problem, in which a person plays the role of a 'disembodied' program like BACON. Chinese characters are slipped into the room: the person inside consults a rule book that tells her what characters to select in response, and she puts them out without understanding them. Searle intended this analogy to illustrate that "thinking is more than just a matter of manipulating meaningless symbols; it involves meaningful semantic contents" (Searle, 1984, p. 36). Digital computers are like the Chinese room: they use syntactic rules to manipulate symbols without understanding what they mean. BACON, KEKADA and the other simulations discussed in this book literally did not know what they were doing. According to Searle, 'brains cause minds.' Cognition is not disembodied.

In contrast, Edwin Hutchins argues that the Chinese room is a 'sociocultural cognitive system' (Hutchins, 1995a). By this he meant that the whole system translated Chinese--not just the person in the room. He could have similarly

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argued that BACON was part of a cognitive system that re-discovered laws; other elements of the system included the programmers, who realized what the program's accomplishments meant, and publicized them. Hutchins sociocultural comment does not undermine Searle's critique of programs like BACON, but it does pose problems for the idea that minds cause brains. For Hutchins, cognition is distributed as well as embodied.

Hutchins' conducted a detailed study of navigation on an amphibious helicopter transport and found that the navigation task is distributed across a sociocultural cognitive system that included a Navigator, an Assistant to the Navigator, a Navigation Plotter, a Recorder and two Pelorus Operators who took sightings of landmarks. This team also relied heavily on advanced technologies like an adilade for visual sightings, a gyrocompass, various chronometers, the fathometer, which measures the depth of water under the ship, radar and satellite navigation.40 The duties and coordination of this team were spelled-out in manuals. In practice, however, these duties were often negotiated. For example, the Plotter often had to leave his station to instruct the more junior Pelorus Operators how to obtain familiar fixes as the ship came into port. In one particularly dramatic case, the ship lost power, including the gyrocompass, and the navigation team had to re-negotiate its roles in order to do the additional computations that would have been done by the gyrocompass.

Hutchins has recently extended this sort of analysis to how speeds are remembered in the cockpit of a commercial airliner. He focused especially on how indicators called 'speed bugs' functioned as mechanical representations. These speed bugs indicated the minimum maneuvering speed of the aircraft at several different configurations of wing flaps; the configuration of the speed bugs on the airspeed indicator dial is determined by the weight of the plane. "Setting the speed bugs is a matter of producing a representation in the cockpit environment that will serve as a resource that organizes performances that are to come later" (Hutchins, 1995b, p. 279).

Hutchins' example suggests that many of the functions normally associated with mind are distributed outside the brain. "Memory is normally thought of as a psychological function internal to the individual. However, memory tasks in the cockpit may be accomplished by functional systems which transcend the boundaries of the individual actor. Memory processes may be distributed among human agents, or between human agents and external representational devices" (Hutchins, 1995b, p. 284).

40 Satellite navigation was not that useful because it could be updated only every 90 minutes. With the advent of the Global Positioning System, almost continuous navigation updates can be provided, which will transform the ship's navigation procedures.

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It would be interesting to look at how the speed bug was invented, to see if a mechanical representation that forms part of a sociocultural cognitive system was designed by such a system. In this chapter, we have considered inventions done by individuals or two-person teams. In the next chapter, when we consider ethical issues in discovery and invention, we will also provide examples of how new technologies emerge from complex sociocultural cognitive systems.

I have a backpack I refer to as my 'brain'. I try to keep it with me wherever I go since it contains my schedule, to-do lists, important files, disks and other materials that I might need at a moment's notice. I also ask others to remember things for me. For example, if a student needs a letter of recommendation, I ask her or him to send me an e-mail as the time gets closer, then I print the message and put it in my 'brain'. I have seen other people develop much more organized systems of this sort, in briefcases with flaps and folders and compartments that can be labeled.

Cognition clearly is both embodied in brain, hands and eyes, and also distributed among various technologies and shared across groups. Mind is more than brain.

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Kepler's solution to the misery and confusion around him was to 'sink the anchor of his peaceful studies into the ground of eternity'. Should scientists and engineers be given the luxury of this kind of withdrawal from the world? Invention and discovery have transformed nature. To what extent do the agents who made these changes have to take responsibility for their creations? This question is cogently raised by novels like Frankenstein and Jurassic Park. In both cases, we have creators who are obsessed with inventing a way of bringing what was dead back to life. Dr. Frankenstein was initially obsessed with finding the secret to life; once he found it, instead of publishing it in a refereed journal, he decided to demonstrate his power by creating life. To Hammond, the entrepreneur in Jurassic Park, discoveries were incidental to the goal of cloning dinosaurs. Both were motivated by what Arnold Pacey has called 'technological sweetness' borrowing a phrase from Robert Oppenheimer, who "is famous for his statement that one invention used in the hydrogen bomb was 'technically so sweet that you could not argue' against its adoption" (Pacey, 1989, p. 81). Creating life, cloning dinosaurs--these are stupendous technological feats.

But neither Frankenstein nor Hammond considered the possible impacts of their discoveries and inventions. Frankenstein imagined that "A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me" (Shelley, 1818, p. 101). But when his eight-foot man stirred, Frankenstein ran from him in revulsion, refusing to accept the consequences for his actions. The creation turned into a monster and Frankenstein ended his life pursing its destruction. In contrast, Hammond dreamed about building new dinosaur parks as he was devoured by the clones he had brought back to life.

The moral of Frankenstein and Jurassic Park is that the inventor of a new technology like the telephone or the microchip should imagine the potential impact of her invention and embrace the consequences. Latour studied the

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Aramis, an automatic system of guided transportation that merged mental models41

based on automobiles and metros. Aramis was a project pursued in France for almost twenty years, from 1969 to 1987--it flickered in and out of existence several times before being abandoned Aramis was to be composed of small cars running on tracks. A passenger entered a destination at the station, then was assigned to a car that would couple with other cars to form a train until it got close to the destination, then it would uncouple to ride as close as possible to where the passenger wanted to go. The final design looked much like the first one, despite multiple proposals for changes from a variety of interest groups. Latour concluded that Aramis, like Frankenstein's creation, was killed because it was not loved by its creators: they saw Aramis as a research project, not as a real, working system (Latour, 1996). There was no Chester Carlson (the inventor of photocopying-- see 3.12.1) for Aramis, no obsessed champion who would stop at nothing until the system was running.

A contrasting view is exemplified by the 'guns don't kill people, people kill people' slogan of those who oppose gun control. To put it in more general terms, this is the 'technology is neutral' view: a telephone can be used for life-saving communications and for telemarketing. It is up to society, not the inventor, to determine how it is used.

To shed further light on this question, let us consider the technology alluded to in the Oppenheimer quote about technological sweetness.

4.1 When Matter Becomes Energy

Einstein's discovery that E=MC2 was a significant intellectual achievement, one of the important consequences of his revolutionary theory of special relativity. He derived this equation from the fact that no object could travel faster than light; therefore, as objects approached the speed of light, they had to acquire increasing inertial mass.

This discovery suggested that all matter contained an enormous amount of energy. The cold fusion controversy, discussed in the last chapter, illustrates our continuing efforts to tap this potential energy.

In 1939, Lise Meitner was puzzling over a new experimental result obtained by her former collaborator, Otto Hahn. Meitner was in Sweden, where she had fled from the Nazis; Hahn was still in Germany, and could not publicly acknowledge working with her. But the two continued their collaboration through

41 Latour would never use the term mental model--I take responsibility for its use here. The Aramis mental model was a combination of subway and automobile--but if Latour tolerated the term mental model. he would point out that different actors had different mental models and goals for this system, and there was a constant process of negotiation over what Aramis might be.

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correspondence. Their most recent series of experiments had been an effort to figure out what happened when a neutron hit a Uranium nucleus. Their initial hypothesis was that several transuranic elements had been created. But now Hahn, a chemist, had found evidence that Barium was produced when Uranium absorbed a neutron. This made no sense--Barium was well down the periodic table from Uranium.

Hahn, Meitner and others were in a situation similar to Kepler, when he dropped the assumption of perfect circles. No one at this time had any idea that a nucleus could be split. But Meitner, isolated from her beloved laboratory and most of the scientific community, was able to spend some time on vacation with her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, a physicist working with the great Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. It was during this vacation that Meinter got a letter from Hahn outlining the incredible Barium result. She quickly dismissed the possibility of error--Hahn was too good a chemist--and worked with Otto Robert to figure out how this could have happened. They used a liquid drop metaphor for the atomic nucleus, favored by Bohr who had refined it. Frisch remembered that,

At this point we both sat down on a tree trunk, and started to calculate on scraps of paper. The charge of a uranium nucleus, we found, was indeed large enough to destroy the effect of surface tension almost completely, so the uranium nucleus might indeed be a very wobbly-, unstable drop, ready to divide itself at the slightest provocation (such as the impact of a neutron).

But there was another l'roblem. When the two drops separated thef would be driven apart by their mutual electric repulsion and would acquire a vel)' large energy, about 200 MeV in all; where could that energy come from? Fortunately Lise Meitner remembered how to compute the masses of nuclei from the so-called packing fraction formula, and in that way she worked out that the two nuclei formed by the division of a uranium nucleus would be lighter than the original uranium nucleus by about one-fifth the mass of a proton. Now whenever mass disappears energy is created, accordin~ to Einstein's formula E=mc2, and one-fifth of a proton mass was just egwvalent to 200MeV. So here was the source for the energy; it all fitted! (QUoted in Sime, 1996, p. 237)

This kind of retrospective recollection, written years after the fact, deserves to be treated with a grain of salt. The account is reminiscent of the Buddha, sitting under a Bo tree and achieving enlightenment. Nonetheless, there is a plausibility to the 'back-of-the-envelope' calculations involved; Meitner and Frisch were certainly capable of doing them, once they had the liquid drop mental model.

Frisch termed this process nuclear fission, borrowing the term from a biologist. He conducted a follow-up experiment which confirmed their discovery, and he and

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Meitner published the results. But by then, word was already spreading, as it does in research communities.42

This discovery spurred efforts to harness the energy released by fission. Leo Szilard, an emigre Hungarian physicist, was one of the first to recognize the long­term possibilities. In 1932, he had offered to work with Lise Meitner in nuclear physics because he thought such work might help save mankind. He watched the growing Nazi menace and left Germany a day before the Nazis began searching trains and preventing wholesale emigration. Szilard spent much of the succeeding years trying to find places in America and Britain for scientists driven out by the Nazis. Many of Europe's best physicists, including Szilard, Einstein, Neils Bohr and Enrico Fermi, fled to America to escape from fascism, and many lesser-known ones as well.

When Szilard learned about fission, he realized immediately that the energy released was extremely high, and might be used as a source of power or as a new kind of bomb. He was particularly concerned that the United States possess such a weapon before Nazi Germany. Szilard helped Einstein, an avowed pacifist, draft a letter to President Roosevelt in which he mentioned the possibility of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and warned that nuclear experiments were being carried out in Germany. He urged the President to secure uranium supplies.

Were Einstein and Szilard in this case acting like Frankenstein, launching a technological adventure that would spin beyond their control? Szilard saw the bomb as a necessity only as long as the Nazis might build one. As soon as American troops captured German scientists like Heisenberg that were capable of designing such a weapon, Szilard lobbied for a termination of the program to build an atomic weapon (Wyden, 1984). It was, in his view, no longer necessary. But few other scientists listened to him. It seemed ridiculous to stop when they were so close to success, and after the government had invested so much.

Szilard next circulated a petition urging that no atomic bomb be used on Japan until the Japanese were given the chance to publicly refuse detailed surrender terms. When a majority of the scientists he was working with at Chicago objected on the grounds that more lives would be saved by using the bomb, Szilard responded that this was "a utilitarian argument with which I was very familiar through my previous experiences in Germany" (Wyden, 1984, p. 176).

42 Diana Crane refers to such research communities as invisible colleges (Diana Crane, 1972). Niels Bohr was the inadvertent propagator of this discovery; he learned it from Frisch, who worked with Bohr in Copenhagen. Frisch remembered Bohr exclaiming: "Oh, what idiots we have all been! Oh, but this is wonderful! This is just as it must be! Have you and Lise Meitner written a paper about it?" (Sime, 1996, p. 244) When Otto Robert said they were still working on it, Bohr told them he would not talk about it until the paper was published, but he told a colleague on a trip to America and forgot to warn the colleague not to tell others. As a result, word spread quickly through the American physics community in advance of publication.

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One alternative proposed by at least some scientists was a demonstration, dropping the bomb on an unpopulated area of Japan, or so high that it would kill few people. Oppenheimer was among those who argued that a demonstration would not be convincing enough. To be effective at ending the war, it had to be dropped on a city. 'Little Boy', a bomb based on U235, was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 with an estimated 100,000 casualties--no worse than the devastation wrought by Curtis LeMay's fire-bombing of Tokyo, except that this new weapon included long-term radiation effects which kept pushing the death toll higher--up to 140,000 by the end of 1945 and perhaps as many as 200,000 at the five-year mark. A physician described the horror:

Between the [heavily damaged] Red Cross Hospital and the center of the city I saw nothing tnat wasn't burned to a crisp. Streetcars were standing at Kawaya-cho and Kamiya-cho and inside were dozens of bodies, blackened beyond recognition. I saw fire reservoirs filled to the brim with dead people who looked as though they had been boiled alive. In one reservoir 1 saw a man, horribly Durned, crouching beside another man who was dead. He was drinking blood-stained water out of the reservoir .... In one reservoir there were so many dead people there wasn't enough room for them to fall over. They must have died sitting in the water (Rhodes, 1986, p. 724).

The follow-up bombing of Nagasaki, with the first device made from plutonium, occurred only three days later--the Japanese government was still assimilating the news from the first bombing. The Emperor forced his military leaders to agree to a surrender offer which reached Washington on August 11th, and further use of atomic bombs was suspended.

Unlike Szilard, Einstein was not involved in developing the bomb. Not long before his death, he told Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life-­when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that an atomic bomb be made" (Wyden, 1984, p. 342).

Other protagonists felt morally ambiguous about their role in this invention. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos facility, described his reaction to the first successful test:

We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We Knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, tne Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him; he takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" (Rhodes, 1986, p. 676).

Shortly after the war, Oppenheimer reflected on this moment in mythological terms:

When it went off, in the New Mexico dawn, that first atomic bomb, we thought of Alfred Nobel, and his hope, his vain hope, that dynamite

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would put an end to wars. We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man's new !'owers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it. We knew that it was a new world, but even more we !<new that novelty itself was a very old thing in human life, that all our ways are rooted in it (Rhodes, 1986, p.676).

Right after the war, Oppenheimer gave a speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists in which he clarified his vision of the scientist's role in creating this kind of novelty:

When you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what tne realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest !,ossible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values .. .It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowled~e of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrInsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to nelp in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences (Rhodes, 1986, p.761).

For Oppenheimer, the scientist is a Promethean hero who must bring fire and other great marvels to humanity, regardless of the consequences. Prometheus paid a heavy price for his gift, and so did Oppenheimer: he was eventually stripped of his security clearance and banned from the kind of high-level activities he had become used to during the war and afterwards. This investigation is exactly the sort of thing Americans became used to during the McCarthy years, even though McCarthy himself was not involved. Oppeneheimer never got to see the full evidence against him until he was examined by the prosecution, and his lawyer could not be present during this key portion of the trial. The prosecutor tied Oppy in knots over his relationships with Communist sympathizers early in World War II. But the real motive for the trial was Oppenheimer's ambivalence about pursuing a hydrogen bomb. He wanted to rein his Frankenstein in a bit, if possible--not set out immediately to make a much more powerful monster. Edward Teller, one of the fathers of the Hydrogen bomb, testified that Oppenheimer did not deserve clearance, helping to seal his fate (Goodchild, 1981).

The distinguished physicist I.I. Rabi, in a conversation with Bill Moyers' wrote Oppy's epitaph:

Here was a man who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atOInlC bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. There were scientists among tnem. One reason doing It might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A third, a genuine fear of communism. I don't think he was a security risk. I do tnink he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn't pay enough attention to the outward symbols.

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One might also add that he never took the full hero's journey inward--never came to grips with the fact that he was a discoverer, and inventor, a man of peace and a maker of weapons, a man who believed it was right to take the path of technological sweetness and at the same time experienced grave moral doubts. Later in life; in the summer of 1964, at a conference he had helped organize to think about how to achieve a more peaceful civilization, Oppenheimer remarked "We most of all should try to be experts on the worst among ourselves" (Goodchild, 1981, p.278). This comment suggests he was taking that final step in his inwardjoumey, and urging others to do the same.

Stanislaw Ulam, who shares with Edward Teller credit for inventing the hydrogen bomb, recalled that his Aunt Caro was related to the legendary Rabbi who created the Golem, a creature from Jewish mythology made out of clay and water that grows stronger every day and will follow your orders, protecting you from enemies. Norbert Wiener, upon hearing this story, said to Ulam, "It is still in the family!" (Rhodes, 1995, p.575).

Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, two sociologists of science, use the Golem metaphor to describe science. They warn that the Golem "is clumsy and dangerous. Without control, a golem may destroy its masters with its flailing vigour" (Collins & Pinch, 1993, p.1).

Teller's response to those who doubted that a hydrogen bomb should be built suggest he saw science as a kind of Golem: "If the development [of such a weapon] is possible, it is out of our powers to prevent it" (Rhodes, 1986, p.757). Oppenheimer's scientist is morally obligated to push for new discoveries, regardless of the consequences; Teller's scientist is carried along by an inevitable tsunami of technological momentum.

In contrast, Andrei Sakharov, one of the creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, spent much of the rest of his life trying to end the totalitarian government that benefited from his discovery. The day after the successful test of a Soviet super, Sakharov was asked to offer a toast, and drank to the hope that they would never have to use such a weapon. The Soviet general in charge of the operation made a lewd joke whose substance was, you made it, but we will decide how to use it. Like many of the American scientists, Sakharov had created a tool over which he would no longer have control. But in America, at least scientists like Oppenheimer and Teller remained respected voices regarding atomic policy--until Oppenheimer's fall from grace. Sakharov tried. He wrote letters protesting Soviet atomic tests in the 1950s and 1960s, on the grounds that radioactive contamination was immoral precisely because no one could be held accountable for it, its effects were uncertain and future generations were defenseless against it. In other words, instead of saying that one should wait until the fallout from atomic tests was proven to cause harm, one should exercise a little moral imagination, anticipate the probable effects, and ban tests altogether. He also argued that the tests made thermonuclear war more likely. Sakharov went beyond letters. Because he was a Hero of the Soviet Union, he was able to get access to policy-makers like

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Kruschev and make his protests personally. The leaders assured him they were taking his protests seriously, but the tests went on.

Sakharov remembered how the frustration led him to a kind of moral epiphany:

I had an awful sense of powerlessness. I could not stop something I knew was wrong and unnecessary. After that, I felt myself another man. I broke with my surroundings. It was a basic break. After that, I understood there was no point in arguing (Bailey, 1990, p. 238).

Sakharov made the transition from an insider who protested within the system to a dissident. In August, 1968, he published an essay on "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom" in the New York Times. In it, he argued that,

intellectual freedom is essential to human society--freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for oJ'en-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialaom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economics and culture (Bailey, 1990, p. 247).

Sakharov had money, power and privilege within the Soviet system, but also a 'very tragic feeling' . He willingly gave up many of his privileges, including his special apartment, in protest against a corrupt system which denied individual freedom. He was eventually exiled to Gorky for seven years, then rehabilitated by Gorbachev. Characteristically, when Gorbachev called to announce Sakharov's freedom, the latter pointedly questioned the former about other dissidents, demanding their release. Sakharov was elected to the new Soviet Congress, drafted a new constitution for the Soviet Union, and died while writing one of his many speeches--worn out by hunger strikes, exile and the hard work of promoting freedom.

Like Frankenstein, Sakharov literally gave his life in an effort to chain the monster he had created. But unlike Frankenstein, he did not regret what he had done. He recalled initially resisting invitations to join in the development of nuclear weapons, but was concerned that if only one side possessed nuclear weapons, it might be tempted to use them, while the weaker side might be moved to desperate acts to keep from falling behind. In Sakharov's view, both he and Oppenheimer were justified in creating weapons, in order to maintain the terrible balance that Niels Bohr foresaw.

Sakahrov and his fellow scientists were further spurred by the knowledge that they were surrounded by prison laborers who constructed the buildings and mined the uranium. Paradoxically, Sakharov felt their work had to justify this terrible sacrifice. There was another motive as well--Oppenheimer's technological sweetness:

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I found it very interesting. This was not because of what Fermi calls 'interesting pnysics'j here the interest was evoked by the grandiosity of the problem, tfie possibility to show what you could do. That's the way scientists are (Bauey, 1990, p. 423).

Like Prometheus, Sakharov brought the fire--and like the true Campbellian hero, when confronted with the consequences of his action, he heeded the call for an inward journey, one that transformed him from a Hero of the Soviet Union into a heroic dissident.

4.2 Virtue and Moral Reasoning

The development of the atomic and hydrogen bomb can be seen as a kind of Campbellian hero's journey taken by a large group of scientists and engineers, each of whom made a unique contribution and reflected differently on its meaning. As this story illustrates, in the course of this journey, the hero will be forced to decide whether she or he is a moral agent, capable of making ethical decisions, or just someone carried along by the lure of the quest.

The scientists discussed above were expert practitioners in their fields. To be an ethical practitioner, one must both be a virtuous person and be capable of moral reasoning. I will skirt the long arguments about what constitutes virtue and simply argue that a virtuous scientist or inventor is one who wants to make the world a better place. One can have this virtuous goal, and have no idea how to accomplish it--the same way that one could have the goal of inventing a new technology and have no idea how to proceed. For example, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, felt he was working to create a better world by making war impossibly horrible. He was wrong. Many designers of nuclear weapons used similar reasoning. Let us hope they are right.

Therefore, it is not sufficient to be virtuous--the ethical practitioner must also be capable of moral reasoning. If I am a scientist or an engineer and I want to make the world a better place, I have to be able to think about what that means.

This book is not the place for an extended discussion of moral theory (Werhane, 1994). However, we can consider simplified versions of two moral perspectives as examples. Do I want to adopt a utilitarian perspective, promoting the greatest good for the greatest number? Or do I want to take a respect-for­persons (RP) view, holding paramount the individual's right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' (Harris, Pritchard, & Rabins, 1995)?

These two perspectives can come into conflict. For example, consider the bombing of Hiroshima. Szilard's utilitarian scientists could make a good case that this terrible weapon actually saved lives in the long run using cost-benefit analysis.

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The cost of bombing Hiroshima was negligible in terms of American lives, though terrible in terms of Japanese--it killed about 100,000 people. If one assumes that the alternative was the invasion of Japan, the cost of not bombing Hiroshima might have been half-a-million American lives and perhaps four times as many Japanese. Szilard and a group of scientists proposed another alternative--a demonstration on an area with virtually no population, to warn the Japanese that we had a weapon of immense power and persuade them to surrender. The cost of this alternative was using one of the two bombs in existence, and the benefit was uncertain, in the eyes of scientists like Oppenheimer.

From an RP perspective, one could argue that it is never permissible to launch a weapon that is so indiscriminate it kills tens of thousands of civilians outright and leaves thousands of others to die slowly and horribly from radiation sickness.

The dropping of the bomb illustrates another problem in moral reasoning, often referred to as the slippery slope. In the beginning, Allied bomb raids were directed primarily at military targets, though it was often hard to distinguish between military and civilian. Gradually, the scope of bombing was broadened until Curtis Lemay invented fire-bombing, a devastating tactic that allowed him to bum large parts of Japanese cities, killing thousands. It is a huge step from targeting military installations to dropping an atomic bomb; it is a smaller step from destroying cities with conventional bombs to destroying them with a new weapon. Once the U.S. and its allies decided that Japanese civilians were integral to the war effort and had to be targeted, they started down a slippery slope that made additional decisions easier and more obvious. One participant in the final discussions on dropping the bomb argued that the "number of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater in general magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids"(Rbodes, 1986, p.648).

Lise Meitner, the physicist who co-discovered fission with Otto Frisch, observed this slippery slope first-hand as Germany drifted into Nazism. There were good Germans in the physics community who were not Nazis, like her collaborator Otto Hahn. As the Nazis gradually took more and more control and started to oppress the Jews, he became focused on saving his institute and asked Meitner, a Jew, not to appear at work any more. "He has, in essence, thrown me out" (Sime, 1996, p.185).

Hahn later helped Meitner emigrate to Sweden, sent some of her things along and tried to keep her in touch with the ongoing research; however, in the end, he denigrated her work in favor of his own and scarcely mentioned her critical work in his Nobel acceptance speech. Even worse, in Meitner's view, was the way the German physics community, with the exception of Max Planck and one or two others, refused to accept any responsibility for the Nazi horrors and even developed the fiction that German physicists had not developed an atomic bomb because they were more ethical than the Allied scientists! In a letter to Hahn right after the war, she wrote:

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You all worked for Nazi Germany and you did not even try passive resistance. Granted to absolve your consciences you helped some oppressed person here and there, but millions of innocent people were murdered and there was no protest. I must write this to you, as so much depends uEon your understanding of what you have permitted to take place .. .! ana many others are of the opinion that one path for you would be to deliver an open statement that you are aware that through your passivity you share responsibility for what has happened, and that you have the need to work for whatever can be done to make amends ... .!n the last few days one has heard of the unbelievable gruesome things in the concentration camps; it overwhelms everything one previously: feared. When I heard on ~nglish radio a very detailed report 6y the English and Americans about Belsen and Buchenwald, I began to cry out loud and lay awake all night. And if you had seen those people who were brought here from the camps. One should take a man lilCe Heisenberg [prominent German physicist] and millions like him, and force them to look at these camps and the martyred people. (Sime, 1996, p. 31O)

Another element that enters into moral decisions is whether one should take the position that the end justifies the means, or whether the means is the end (Krishnamurti, 1970). The ring in J.R.R. Tolkien's classic Lord o/the Rings is the archetypal example. The heroes in this story were tempted to take this ring and use it, for it could give the right hero enough power to overthrow the Dark Lord, Sauron--but that hero would him or herself be corrupted by the ring and turned into an evil as great as Sauron. This ring has been used to create and control other rings; this set of rings represents a powerful technology which the heroes have to reject because it is a means that can only produce evil, regardless of the initial ends of those who use it.

The philosopher J. Krishnamurti was offered a kind of equivalent of this ring. He was groomed to be a new 'World Messiah' by the Theosophical Society, with a special Order of the Star at his command. He rejected this opportunity because he knew it was immoral to lead others on a spiritual journey. Each of us has to find his or her own way--there is no algorithm for spiritual growth (Lutyens, 1975).

Consider another example. Abraham Lincoln came to the White House in 1861 on a platform which called for allowing slavery to continue in those states where it was currently legal, but not be allowed to expand to any new territories. When the states of the South seceded and then fired on Fort Sumter, he decided that the preservation of the United States was worth going to war. He was careful to preserve the right to slavery in border states he wanted to keep in the Union; even the Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves in the rebellious states.

Lincoln was therefore willing both to go to war and preserve slavery in order to restore the Union. Furthermore, along the way, he suspended or violated aspects of the bill of rights, including habeas corpus. Clearly, here was a man who felt that the end, preserving the Union, was worth almost any means. Furthermore, he made a utilitarian calculation: in the short term, thousands of Americans might be killed, but in the long term, "government by the people, of the people and for the people" would not "perish from the earth".

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Even Lincoln did not anticipate the horrible butcher's bill that resulted from this war, but although it caused him great anguish, he never flinched. He initiated a draft, supported generals who fought long and bloody campaigns and refused to discuss any peace terms that recognized the Confederacy's right to exist. Furthermore, he spent a great deal of his time with inventors who claimed to have developed new technologies for killing including repeating rifles, machine guns and breech-loading cannons (Bruner, 1956). Without Lincoln's intervention, the North's tardy adoption of mortar flotillas and repeating rifles would have been delayed even more.

While Lincoln had no atomic weapons at his disposal, he embraced the idea of using a new kind of incendiary shell on Charleston, a precursor to the fire­bombings perfected by Curtis LeMay in World War II.

But Lincoln would not stoop to any means. He might have postponed or even canceled the 1864 election, on the grounds that it was a condition of national emergency. However, this means would have destroyed the end of preserving a democratic union. For Lincoln, the 'bottom line' was that democracy depended on a covenant among all parties to settle their disagreements at the ballot box--not by seceding whenever they felt they did not like a decision made by the majority (Wills, 1992).

Even the issue of slavery was subordinate to preserving the democratic union. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed only the slaves in the southern states that were rebelling and he couched emancipation as a military necessity, arguing that the slaves were benefiting the southern cause. He also felt he had no constitutional right to abolish slavery; he still regarded himself as President of all the states, and it was these states and the Congress that had the right to amend the constitution. As Oppenheimer put it: "In order to preserve the Union Lincoln had to subordinate the immediate problem of the eradication of slavery ... " (Rhodes, 1986, p.763).

We can continue to argue whether in Lincoln's case, the end really justified the means--destroying much of the South in order to save the Union, suspending rights like habeas corpus in order to defend democracy. The point is, he adopted an explicit moral stance, defended it articulately, tried to anticipate its consequences and, when the consequences were worse than he or anyone had anticipated, continued to assume responsibility. Lincoln combined virtue--a deep concern with making the world a better place for others, not just or even primarily for himself-­with moral reasoning, mostly from a utilitarian standpoint--what current actions would produce maximum long-term benefits.

Similarly, Einstein acted against his own principles when he drafted the letter to Roosevelt, because he believed the end--countering a possible Nazi bomb-­justified the means--building our own bomb. Einstein later regretted writing the

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letter. Lincoln certainly had qualms, but there is no evidence that, given a chance to do everything over, he would have decided not to prosecute the war.43

4.3 Moral Imagination

In previous chapters, I have tried to show that discovery and invention depend at least partly on mental models. Similarly, ethical behavior depends on what my colleague Patricia Werhane calls moral imagination (Werhane, 1991). She uses the Challenger case as an example.

This shuttle was launched on January 28th, 1986, carrying a crew of seven including the first teacher into space. Seconds into the launch, the rocket booster exploded, killing astronauts Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Gregory Jarvis, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnick and teacher in space Christa McAuliffe.

The night before the ill-fated launch, a group of engineers at Morton Thiokol, including Roger Boisjoly, an expert on 0 rings, objected to launching the Challenger on the grounds that they had no flight data on the behavior of these rings below 53 degrees Fahrenheit, and the estimated temperature at the launch was below freezing.

NASA asked the engineers if they could prove the 0 rings would fail. They could not. All the flights below 61 degrees had shown 0 ring damage, but so had several above this temperature: the correlation was far from perfect. Finally, Robert Lund, the Vice President of Engineering, was asked by his immediate superior to "take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat" (Werhane, 1991, p. 606). He switched hats, the launch was approved, and all seven of the crew perished.

There have been thousands of pages of analysis of this tragedy, from all kinds of ethical, scientific, political and sociological perspectives (see Vaughan, 1996). What I want to do is focus on how a lack of moral imagination might help explain what happened. Lund, the VP who switched hats, switched perspectives as well-­from an engineer concerned with problematic test results to a manager who had a schedule to meet and a customer to satisfy. One could argue that Lund was still a virtuous person--he did not become evil, or immoral. But he engaged in what Davis (1989) calls 'microscopic vision'; he accepted the Marhall Flight Center's definition of the problem, which was that the shuttle was safe until proven otherwise.

43 A fuller analysis of Lincoln's moral position would also have to take into consideration his perception of his duty as President of the United States. There are also many kinds of utilitarianism: I have not attempted to analyze which one Lincoln might be tacitly adopting at a particular time. An adequate discussion of moral theory lies beyond the scope of this book (see Werhane, 1994), but I hope the Lincoln example illustrates the importance of combining virtue with reasoning.

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According to Patricia Werhane, moral imagination involves "at least four things: (1) that one disengage oneself from one's role, one's particular situation, or context; (2) that one becomes aware of the kind of scheme one has adopted and/or that is operating in a particular kind of context; (3) that one creatively envision new possibilities, possibilities for fresh ways to frame experiences and new solutions to present dilemmas; and (4) that one evaluate the old context, the scope or range of the conceptual schemes at work, and new possibilities" (Werhane, 1994).

Lund certainly failed to do (1): he switched from one role to another, but did not 'disengage' from both roles and evaluate his decision from yet another perspective--say, that of one of teacher Christa McAuliffe's students. Would such a student say go ahead and fly if there were any concerns about safety? To put it in terms of ethical theories, Lund adopted a utilitarian cost-benefit view when he put on his manager's hat, and from that standpoint it looked like the risk of damaging Thiokol's relationship with NASA outweighed the uncertainties involved in flying at low temperatures. If he had shifted to an RP perspective, the potential loss of human life would have become the primary consideration.

Point (2) is related: it involves becoming aware that one has adopted a role that works well in certain situations, but may not in the present one. We all assume roles, but we also need to be able to get distance from them, to realize we are also human beings with moral responsibilities, not just actors playing out a script.

In the 1950s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram (Milgram, 1974) decided to test a commonly-held theory about the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Imagine you were a subject in Milgram's experiment. You responded to an ad calling for volunteers. You are met at the lab by a scientist in a white coat and another volunteer--an ordinary, middle-aged man who seems nice enough.

The scientist flips a coin. You are assigned the role of experimenter, and the other fellow is the leamer. He is strapped into a chair next to you. Your job is to hold his hand down on a shock plate and press a key delivering a shock every time he gets an answer wrong. The shocks increase in voltage with every mistake. The shocks are clearly painful--the other fellow shouts "Ow!", then complains of a heart condition and demands to be let go. When you ask the experimenter, he says you must continue, and that he will assume responsibility. Eventually, the other fellow refuses to respond, then loses consciousness.

A variety of experts predicted that only a 'pathological fringe' of one or two percent of ordinary citizens would continue to shock the learner all the way through the 450 volt limit. In fact, Milgram found that 30% administered the highest level of shock when they had to force a victim's hand onto the plate, and obedience was much higher when the victim was in another room. Milgram related this to Eichmann's defense that he was just obeying orders when he murdered thousands of Jews.

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Philip Zimbardo (Zimbardo, 1972) did a similar experiment where he used a coin flip to assign student volunteers to prisoner or guard roles in a fake prison. The students identified so strongly with their roles that Zimbardo had to cut the experiment short. Zimbardo himself became more of a prison administrator than a researcher. When he heard that one of the former prisoners, released because he fell apart under the stress, was organizing a break, Zimbardo worked hard to foil ito-instead of realizing he had a golden opportunity to study rumor transmission.

What surprised Milgram and Zimbardo is that participants in their experiments did not simply realize they were playing a role they had little incentive to maintain, and walk out--or even call the police and demand an end to the whole experiment!

Points (3) and (4) regarding moral imagination are also connected to this issue of roles. In order to be able to envision new possibilities, one has to be aware that one is operating within a context, or view. Before Kepler, planets moved in circles. That was not a view--that was the way the world was. But Kepler turned this fact into a 'conceptual scheme' or mental model--it became only one way of looking at the universe. Other views became possible. Similarly, once you realize that you are acting a role, you can imagine what would happen if you stepped out of it, and behave differently.

In 1970, Ford introduced the Pinto, a compact that had been designed in record time with a 'limits of 2000' constraint: it could exceed neither 2000 pounds in weight or $2000 in cost. Because of the speed of design, a potential problem with the fuel tank was identified only after the design was frozen: the tank ruptured when hit from the rear at a relatively low speed (about 30 mph). It would have cost $11 a vehicle to fix this problem. Ford used the National Highway Traffic Association's figure for the cost to society of each traffic fatality ($200,000) and did a utilitarian, cost-benefit analysis which showed that it would be more expensive to fix the car than to live with the possibility of over a hundred fatalities. In this case, Ford should have exercised moral imagination and considered the same problem from a rights perspective.

Dennis Gioia was a relatively new employee at Ford in charge of the recalling of defective automobiles. When exposed to evidence that a number of Pintos had exploded, including "graphic, detailed photos of the remains of a burned-out Pinto in which several people had died" (Gioia, 1992, p. 382) he did not issue a recall. Looking back on his decision, Gioia concluded that,

My own schematized knowledge influenced me to perceive recall issues in terms of the prevailing decision environment and to unconsciously overlook key features of the Pinto case, mainly because they did not fit an existing script. Although the outcomes of the [Pinto] case carry retrospective1y obvious ethical overtones, the schemas driving my perception and actions precluded consideration of the issues in ethical terms because the scripts did not include ethical dimensions (Gioia, 1992, p.385).

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Schema is a term some cognitive scientists use to refer to the expectations a problem-solver brings to a situation. Kuhn's paradigm is a kind of higher-level schema that tells scientists where to look for interesting research problems, how to investigate them and what results to expect. A mental model is a kind of schema that is especially important for inventors and designers, because their expectations are embodied in imagined objects.

Gioia's schema or set of expectations led him to look for a high frequency of incidents or a clear cause. At this time, there was no clear cause (Giogia was unaware of the test analysis that showed a problem with the fuel tank design) and no pattern of incidents--just occasional flaming crashes. Part of Gioia's schema was the assumption that all small cars are more prone to serious crashes of this sort and that people accept risks when they drive--'safety doesn't sell'. Gioia was also experiencing cognitive overload--he had lots of cases and reports to attend to. So to be noticed, a potential problem had to fit a pattern predicted by his schema.

One outcome of a schema is a script that dictates how one ought to act in certain situations. For example, most of us have scripts for restaurants that include waiting to be seated, getting a menu, ordering, and paying a bill (Schank & Abelson, 1977). After seeing one particularly gruesome wreck, Gioia activated one of his standard scripts and called for a preliminary review of the Pinto case. He agreed with the unanimous decision to leave it on the market. In this case, Gioia knew that the Pinto was a popular, best-selling auto and that other sub­compacts had similar accidents; therefore, it was easy for him to engage in confirmation bias and dismiss evidence that would have violated his schema and activated his recall script. Had he stepped back and realized that he was making assumptions consistent with a certain role, he might have seen able to imagine and evaluate other possible responses to the initial, anecdotal evidence that there were problems with the Pinto.

It is too much to ask Bob Lund or Dennis Gioia or anyone to go through all four steps in moral imagination when an immediate decision is called for. One must already be able to do this kind of moral reasoning, which calls for special training. One of the problems with taking roles too seriously is that they lead to compartmentalization. Bob Lund switched hats from engineer to manager, effectively compartmentalizing a decision that needed to be made from both perspectives.

In Dennis Gioia's case, it might have meant integrating his pre-Ford suspicious-of-corporate-America values with his role at Ford: apparently inconsistent roles which, could they have been integrated, might have helped him see how reports of flaming cars and burning teenagers would have been perceived by most people. In tum, Gioia might have been able to help Ford think of new scripts for responding to warning signals like this.

The point here is not to dump on Mr. Lund, claiming that he is responsible for the Challenger disaster; his actions made sense in terms of NASA culture and

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procedures (Vaughan, 1996). Nor do I mean to criticize Mr. Gioia, who was a conscientious employee trying to identify problems serious enough to warrant a recall. It is rather to suggest how an engineer/manager with a different sort of training might have been able to step out of the cultural context in which she or he was operating and evaluate these problem differently. Gioia calls for integrating ethical decision-making into schema and scripts through the use of "vicarious or personal experiences that interrupt tacit knowledge of 'appropriate' action so that script revision can be initiated. Training scenarios, and especially role playing, that portray expected sequences that are the interrupted to call explicit attention to ethical issues can be tagged by the perceiver as requiring attention" (Gioia, 1992, p. 388).

Gioia training scenarios resemble the cases we will be presenting in the rest of the chapter. Moral imagination should be exercised at the discovery and invention stage, not just when problems occur. Charles Perrow (Perrow, 1984) argues that complex systems like nuclear power plants are 'normal' accidents waiting to happen. He might make a similar argument about the space shuttle (see Vaughan, 1996), or the design of the Pinto. Avoiding Challenger and Pinto incidents requires more than moral imagination at the time of a problem--it requires moral imagination from the beginning, when a new technology is being created.

Niels Bohr exercised this sort of moral imagination when he foresaw the two sides of the atomic bomb. Bohr's coat of arms bore the inscription "Contraria Sunt Complementa" (Holton, 1973). He had argued that there were two, complementary ways of looking at light; depending on how one set up an experiment, it behaved as a wave or as a particle. It could not be reduced further-­physicists would have to accept light's complementary nature.

Similarly, he saw the atom bomb as both threat and opportunity: a monstrous weapon that threatened mass-destruction and an opportunity to make war--and even nation-states--obsolete (Rhodes, 1986}.44 Bohr felt that the development of atomic weapons meant that, "We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war" (Rhodes, 1986, p. 532). Bohr tried to communicate these views in various ways to Roosevelt and Churchill, emphasizing the need for international cooperation in dealing with this threat and opportunity after the war--cooperation that would of necessity involve the Soviets. Churchill would have none of it--he thought of atomic weapons as bigger bombs, not qualitatively different weapons, and he also thought that the U.S.-British monopoly on this new technology could be preserved, at least for a time. Roosevelt was initially more sympathetic to Bohr, but was persuaded by Churchill to adopt the Prime Minister's view that this whole effort of Bohr's was subversive and dangerous.

44Bohr was of course not the only scientist or statesman to see the complementary possibilities of the bomb. Secretary of War Stimson wrote a few months before Hiroshima that the bomb " May [bel Frankenstein or means for World Peace" (Rhodes, 1986, p. 642).

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What Bohr advocated was the kind of open sharing of information that was characteristic of science, but not of relations between nations. Once everyone clearly understood the danger represented by fission and fusion weapons, then there would have to be cooperation.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Muzafer Sherif and a group of colleagues, including his wife Carolyn, set-up a series of summer camps at different locations to study inter-group conflict and how to resolve it. Groups of boys arrived at the camp and were randomly assigned to two cabins, and each cabin was deliberately isolated from contact with the other. Group identities soon emerged, with groups taking names like the Rattlers and the Eagles. These groups were brought together for competitive events like Capture the Flag. Intergroup hostility rapidly emerged, leading to insults and fist-fights. Competition heightened intragroup solidarity.

On a small scale, this sounds like the evolution of international hatreds--but compressed into a period of a week, with escalating violence toward the end. How to bring the groups back together?

The Sherifs first tried a common enemy--a sports event in which both groups would have to pool their best players in order to defeat an outside group. The two groups cooperated long enough to beat the other team, but then intergroup hostilities resumed. The threat of a common enemy produced only temporary cooperation--witness the post-war conflict between the Soviets and their World War II allies.

Then, at another camp, the Sherifs tried the equivalent of desegregation. The groups were brought together for a series of pleasant activities--better meals, movies, fireworks. No cooperation was required--just occupying the same space as equals. Unfortunately, these occasions merely served as opportunities for further insults and fights.

Finally, at still another camp, the Sherifs tried using superordinate goals: "problem situations in which goals compelling and appealing to each group could be attained only through the efforts and resources of both groups" (Sherif, 1976, p. 133). First, the staff simulated a failure in the water supply. The boys had to organize themselves to inspect over a mile of pipe, then fix a problem at the reservoir that demanded teamwork. When they returned, the old hostilities resumed.

Second, the boys went in separate trucks on a camping trip. But the truck assigned to get their lunches broke down. (This simulated failure required great skill on the part of the driver). The boys had to pull it up a hill, and hit on the idea of playing tug of war against the truck. Afterwards, they exchanged mutual congratulations and ate together. These sorts of experiences were repeated until mutual sharing was the rule, rather than the exception.

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Bohr's moral imagination was to see in nuclear weapons a superordinate goal-­a threat so huge it would mandate cooperation. Despite many close calls-­including the Cuban missile crisis--the Soviet and American superpowers avoided another world war and instead conducted a ruinous arms race while battling through surrogates. In the end, the Soviet empire crumbled. Nuclear weapons are now possessed by more countries than ever and remain a significant threat. A nuclear war could still break out between countries like India and Pakistan.

What constrains nations is the complementary of this weapon--it promises overwhelming, indiscriminate slaughter against which there is currently no defense and therefore is useless, if the other side possesses it, too. Perhaps Dr. Frankenstein's biggest mistake was to reject his creation, to run from it in horror, thereby helping to turn it into a monster. Bohr did not shrink from the bomb; he embraced its contradictions, and tried to help others see that it had changed everything.

A recent example of this kind of moral imagination is provided by a former Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command, General George Lee Butler, who announced two days after assuming command that with the end of the cold war, SAC's mission was complete--it was time "to think in terms of less rather than more." General Butler called for the elimination of nuclear weapons--not a unilateral, sudden disarmament, but a careful, negotiated reduction in global nuclear weapons, with the United States taking the lead. Now in retirement, he continues to worry about the same issue as Bohr--will governments remember that nuclear weapons threaten such slaughter that they are in effect useless?

In the words of my friend, Jonathan Schell, we face the dismal prospect that The Cold War was not the apogee of the age of nuclear weapons, to be succeeded by an age of nucrear disarmament. Instead, it may well prove to have simply been a period of initiation, in which not only Americans and Russians, but Inaians and Pakistanis, Israelis and Iraqis, were adapting to the horror of threatening the deaths of millions of people, were reaming the think about the unthinkable. If this is so, will history judge that the Cold War proved only a sort of modem-day Trojan Horse, whereby nuclear weapons were smuggled into the life of the world, made an acceptable part of the way he world works? Surely not, surely we still comprehend that to threaten the deaths of tens of hunareds of millions of people presages an atrocity beyond anything in the record of mankind? Or have we, in a silent and incomprehensible moral revolution, come to regard such threats as ordinary--as normal and proper policy for any self-respecting nation?

This cannot be the moral legacy of the Cold War. And it is our responsibility to ensure that it will not be (Butler, 1997, p. C2).

4.4 Towards a Sustainable Tomorrow

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Moral imagination is not just preventive medicine for inventors and scientists, to be exercised once in a while to see if you are about to create a new Frankenstein. Moral imagination can be used to identify areas in which new discoveries are needed, and to provide a framework for developing new technologies.

The organizing metaphor for these cases is once again Campbell's hero, who is called to a quest, receives help from a mentor and returns with new knowledge or power, but can only use it beneficially after an inner, personal transformation. Frankenstein obtained power, but did not undergo the kind of transformation that would have given him the moral imagination to decide whether and how to use it.

Unlike Frankenstein, the heroes in these cases are motivated by the desire to do well by doing good--to create new technologies that will benefit other people as well as themselves. To be successful, such a quest will also involve a personal and organizational transformation.

Here the individualistic Campbellian metaphor breaks down. In these cases, heroes and heroines must become system builders--they must find allies who can share their values and move towards their goals, allies with complementary skills who can form a network.

John Law (Law, 1987) has written about "the fundamental problem faced by system builders: how to juxtapose and relate heterogeneous elements together such that they stay in place and are not dissociated by other actors in the environment in the course of the inevitable struggles--whether these are social or physical or some mix of the two" (p. 117). He uses the example of Portuguese navigators, who sent frail craft out on a journey of discovery. They had to develop technologies and heuristics for dealing with physical forces; they also had to coordinate financial backers, crews, and compete with traders from other cultures.

Like Law's navigators, the designer-heroes in these cases will be assembling frail networks that are continually threatened. To survive, they will have to recruit others, and convince them to adopt a shared mental model.

4.4.1 Sustainable Technological Growth

According to Paul Ehrlich, "Resource depletion and environmental degradation are the products of three factors: population size; per capita affluence (or consumption); and the environmental impact caused by the technology used to supply each unit of consumption" (Ehrlich, Ehrlich, & Daily, 1995, p. 26). Ehrlich puts this in the form of a simple equation:

I=P*A*T

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I=environmental impact P=population size

A=per capita affluence T=technology

Garrett's classic paper on the Tragedy of the Commons highlights this dilemma (Hardin, 1968); he argued that the practice of allowing sheep to graze on common land in England led to overgrazing by individuals who wanted to take a larger share of the common resource, especially as the popUlation grew. Here the P factor is the main culprit, coupled with the desire for an increase in A. The eventual result is environmental disaster--an overgrazed commons that provides insufficient food for any of the people that share it.

As population increases, other common resources like food, water and air are threatened in the same way. Hardin argued that this tragedy has no technical solution; it can only be solved by recognizing "the necessity of mutual coercion" (Hardin, 1968, http://www.free-eco.orglfreelFPffragedyCommons.html). We will have to abandon the idea of a commons in breeding, and agree to restrictions. Hardin is generally receptive to strategies like China's one-child restriction as means to achieving this end.

Hardin recalled that a member of the Indian delegation to the first U.N. Conference on global population claimed that development was the best contraceptive. Hardin went on to deride this strategy, and pointed-out that the Indian government gave its states wide powers to restrict population.

In contrast, there are those who argue that increasing affluence will reduce the growth in popUlation (Bast, Hill, & Rue, 1994). This kind of growth is especially important given the widespread poverty that exists in much of the world. In order to lead to a reduction in population, growth needs to be accompanied by a change in the status of women (Kennedy, 1993). "With greater opportunities for education (especially female education), reduction of mortality rates (especially of children), and greater participation of women in employment and in political action, fast reductions in birth rates can be expected to result through the decisions and actions of those whose lives depend on them" (Sen, September 22, 1994, p. 62). Sen cites the example of the Kerala province in India, which is one of the poorer provinces, yet has a relatively low birth rate. The key is that Kerala also has a very high rate of female literacy (87%) relative to other provinces (average of 39%) and a low rate of infant mortality. (Sen, 1992, p. 62).

The Kerala example suggests that increasing affluence is not sufficient to lower birth rate. Providing greater opportunities for women may be the best hope of reducing population increases. In traditionally male-dominated societies like India, this also involves giving women a stake in decisions involving property and distribution of communal resources (Agarwal, 1997). Increasing affluence makes

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it more likely that women will have increased opportunities, but it takes enlightened policies to insure that this occurs.

Environmental impact is not a product of popUlation alone--it also depends on consumption: "According to one calculation, the average American baby represents twice the environmental damage of a Swedish child, three times that of an Indian, thirteen times that of a Brazilian, thirty-five times that of an Indian, and 280 (!) times that of a Chadian or Haitian because its level of consumption throughout its life will be so much greater" (Kennedy, 1993, p. 32). If the global standard of living continues to rise, environmental degradation and resource exploitation might continue to rise even if population falls.

In contrast, there are those like Mark Sagoff who argue that "The insistence that affluence is a principal cause of the world's environmental ills hides the extent to which poverty, not wealth, is responsible for land degradation, extinction, deforestation, pollution and other problems" (Sagoff, In Press, p. 3). Affluence (A) and technology (T) can actually be factors in reducing environmental impact (I), partly because they lead to a reduction in population (P). Well, A and T can also contribute to a reduction in another P--poverty--which further contributes to the reduction in population growth:

Third world countries are, for the most part, subsistence economies. The rural fold eke out a living by using products gleaned directly from plants and animals. Much labor is needed even for simple tasks. In adaition, poor rural households do not have access to modem sources of domestic energy or tap water. In semiarid and arid regions the water supply may not even be nearby. Nor is fuelwood at hand when the forests recede. In addition to cultivating crops, caring for livestock, cooking food and producing simple marl<etable products, members of a household may have to spend as much as five to six hours a day fetching water and collecting fodder and wood.

Children, then ,are needed as workers even when their parents are in their prime. Small households are simply not viable; eacn one needs many hands. In parts of India, children between 10 and 15 years have been observed to work as much as one and a half times the number of hours that adult males do. By the age of six, children in rural India tend domestic animals and care for younger siblings, fetch water and collect firewood, dung and fodder. It may well be that the usefulness of each extra hand increases with declining availability of resources, as measured by, say, the distance to sources of fuel and water (Dasgupta, 1994).

This kind of subsistence living involves a tremendous amount of environmental damage. Someone who is starving has little concern for the commons--she or he will take whatever is needed for food and fuel, and move on when resources are depleted. In El Salvador, for example, subsistence farmers who were driven from their homes during the civil war "have to clear more land than before because the soil is poor. In addition, most fuel is unavailable or extremely expensive, leaving wood the cheapest and most available means of cooking. The deforestation

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accelerates soil erosion, which in tum causes rives to fill with sediment, killing water life" (Farah, 1997, p. A17).

Perhaps an American baby causes less of some kinds of environmental damage than one from Chad, or Haiti, or El Salvador, because the American baby does not depend on slash and bum agriculture. Affluence may have a beneficial impact on the environment, if the affluence is widely shared in a society and not concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs.

Enter the third factor, technology, which in Ehrlich's simple equation multiplied the negative effects of population and affluence. In 1971, Barry Commoner argued that,

Economic growth is a popular whipping boy in certain ecological circles ... The rate of exploitation of tne ecosystem, which generates economic growth, cannot increase indefinitely without overdriving the system and pushing it to the point of collapse. However, this theoretical relationship does not mean that any increase in economic activity automatically means more pollution. What happens to the environment depends on how the growth is achieved. Durmg the 19th century the nation's economic growth was in part sustained by rapacious lumbering, which denuded whole hillsides. On the other hand, Hie economic growth that in the 1930s began to lift the United States out of the Depression was enhanced by an ecologically sound measure, the soil conservation program (Commoner, 1971, p. 139).

More recently, Commoner contrasted this ecologically-sound growth view with that of those who argue that the environment can only be saved

if human society gives up further economic growth, and with it the continued attack on the environment. Others would exact a sterner tribute, requiring that the world population--and with it the present scale of econonuc activity and environmental stress--be reduced. At the edge of irrationality there is the view of Earth First! that the treaty should require modern industrial society to "give way to a hunter-gatherer way oflife, which is the only economy compatible with a healthy land" (Commoner, 1990, p. 191-2).

Rachel Carson, in her classic Silent Spring, objected vehemently to the widespread use of chemical insecticides:

As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrase has been hurled against the fabric of life--a fabric on the one hand mIraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life nave been i~nored by, the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to theIr task no 'high­minded orientation", no humility before the vast forces with which tney tamper.

The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of

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applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It IS our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth (Carson, 1962, p.261-2).

But Carson was not against using technology to control insect populations. Instead of chemical tools, she advocated biological ones: bacteria that attacked undesirable insects, natural insect predators and the use of radiation to create sterile males of an undesirable species.

The Commoner and Carson examples suggest that technology can be a solution to environmental problems, allowing sustainable growth, provided we take new technological directions. In other words, T(echnology) could be changed from a variable in Ehrliclis equation that increases pollution to one that decreases it (for some persuasive arguments along these lines, see Bast, et al., 1994). In the rest of this chapter, we will consider technologies that may pave the way toward sustainable 4S growth.

In his provocative novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn (1992) argues that about ten thousand years ago, a new kind of Taker civilization emerged, one based on the idea of dominion over the Earth. The Takers developed agricultural technologies that gave them the ability to produce more food than they needed, thereby expanding the population. The alternative hunter-gatherer and herder cultures Quinn refers to as Leavers, to indicate the way in which they allow nature to limit their population and guide their choice of food and other resources:

the Takers systematically destroy their competitors' food to make room for their own. Nothing like this occurs in the natural community. The rule there is: Take what you need, and leave the rest alone"(Quinn, 1992, p. 127).

For Quinn, any attempt to promote sustainable development without a change in Taker attitudes would be a failure. What is needed is for human beings to change the fundamental myth, or story on which most of the civilized world operates: "the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn't serve his needs directly or indirectly" (Quinn, 1992, p. 249).

45 Murray Oell-Mann notes that the word sustainable is used in all kinds of ways: "For example, if the World Bank finances some old-fashioned massive development project destructive of the environment, that project may well be labeled "sustainable development in the hope of making it more acceptable. This practice reminds me of the Monty Python routine in which a man enters an office to get a license for his fish, Eric. Told that there is no such thing as a fish license, he points out that he had received the same reply when he asked about cat licenses, but that he has one anyway. Producing it, he is told, "That's not a cat license. That's a dog license with the work 'dog' crossed out and the word 'cat' written in with a pencil" rOell-Mann, 1994, pp. 346-7]. Oell-Mann goes on to argue that, "The key concept is the achievement of quality of human life and of the state of the biosphere that is not purchased mainly at the expense of the future. It encompasses survival of a measure of human cultural diversity and also many of the organisms with which we share the planet, as well as the ecological communities that they form" rOell-Mann, 1994, p. 348].

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In terms of moral theory, Quinn believes in creating virtuous people by altering the myth most of us live by--once we have internalized a new myth, we will know how to share resources, not just with other human beings but also with other species. Aldo Leopold advocated a land ethic, which "changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such" (Leopold, 1966, p. 240). But how does one acquire this new myth, or view? It will not be enough to hear it--one will have to take the hero's inward journey oneself, or be uniquely prepared by one's previous life experience.

It is also not enough to substitute one myth for another. One should not hold either a Leaver or Taker position dogmatically. The hunter-gatherer model used by Quinn to exemplify the Leaver perspective could not work for a world populated by billions--in order to return to that state, there would have to be a horrific decline in global population. Moral imagination is a tool for combating dogma, for recognizing that there are different ethical perspectives that can be applied to a problem. The hope is that by exercising moral imagination, practitioners will become reflective, considering alternative views and arriving at decisions that are better than one could develop from only one frame of reference.

The way out of the Taker dilemma is not to return to a more primitive society, but to change one's attitude towards nature. Carolyn Merchant describes Aldo Leopold's land ethic as ecocentric--she feels that his privileges nature over the human, in contrast to egocentric or homocentric views, the former privileging the individual human and the latter the human species as a whole. The Leaver ethic is not ecocentric--it sees humans as part of nature, no less or more important than the whale or the nematode. As Quinn says, "We have as much business being stewards ofthe world as infants have being stewards of the nursery" (Quinn, 1994, p. 144).

Merchant proposes a partnership ethic, in which "the greatest good for the human and nonhuman community is to be found in their mutual, living interdependence" (Merchant, 1997, p. 49). This suggests a way out of the TakerlLeaver dilemma. Humans are not infants in a nursery; we are in kinship with nature, sometimes taking a more dominant role, other times listening and being guided.

William McDonough has developed a set of principles which he and Paul Hawken use to achieve this kind of partnership (Hawken & McDonough, November, 1993). They place particular emphasis on one of the heuristics employed by Bell in his invention of the telephone: follow the analogy of nature. According to Hawken,

Business has three basic issues to face: what it takes, what it makes, and what it wastes, and the three are intimately connected. First, business takes too much from the environment and does so in a harmful way;

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second, the products it makes require excessive amounts of energy, toxins and pollutants; and finally, the method of manufacture and the very products themselves produce extraordinary waste and cause harm to present and future generations of all species, including humans. The solution for all three dilemmas are three fundamentar principles that govern nature. First, waste equals food. In nature, detritus is constantly recycled to nourish other systems with a minimum of energy and inputs. We call ourselves consumers, but the problem is we do not consume. Each person in America produces twice his weight per day in household, hazardous and industrial waste. and an additional half-ton per week when gaseous wastes such as carbon dioxide are included. An ecological model of commerce would imply that all waste (sic) have value to other modes of production so that everything is either reclaimed, reused or recycled. Second, nature runs off of current solar income. The only input into the closed system of the earth is the sun. Last, nature deI'ends on diversity, thrives on differences, and perishes in the imbalance of uniformity. Healthy systems are highly varied and specific to time and place (Hawken, 1993, p. 12).

It was McDonough who articulated these three principles: waste equals food, work from current solar income and respect diversity (Hawken, 1997). Here nature provides a model for the partnership. As Barry Commoner noted, "in nature, there is no such thing as 'waste.' In every natural system, what is excreted by one organism as waste is taken up by another as food"(Commoner, 1971, p. 36). If a way could be found to follow the analogy of nature, making wastes into food, preserving diversity and using no more of the Earth's fuel resources than are replaced by the sun's energy, then one could have sustainable growth that would respect the diversity of species and the rights of future generations to clean air, water and abundant sources of energy. Indeed, McDonough wants to go beyond sustainability to restoration because he wants to leave the Earth better than it is now (McDonough, 1997). Paul Hawken expresses this philosophy in terms of an economic golden rule for the restorative economy: "Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do" (Hawken, 1993, p. 139).

Julian Simon, a frequent critic of environmentalists, has argued that the greatest resources is the human mind, that innovation can overcome environmental challenges (Bast, et aI., 1994). I think McDonough and Hawken would agree with him. We do not have to go on designing things the way we have done in the past; the human mind is capable of inventing restorative technologies. But the first step will be a change in mental models:

In today's industrial economy, standard thinkin~ is cradle-to-grave: companies who make chemicals should work with end-users so the wastes are properly and safely disposed of. This methodology is an improvement over the "no deposit, no return" mentality that preceded it, but it remains in essence, a license for industry to persist in manufacturing toxins. In addition, the final disposal solutions available today are unacceptable--all of them--including deep-well injection, incineration, and fly-ash storage. Today, when many people's bodies in industrial nations are, technically speaking, too toxic to be placed in landfills, it is time to establish a pathway to eliminate the poisons, a chain of actions and

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consequences that energizes business, that stimulates innovation, that preserves employment, and restores the environment. A cyclical, restorative economy thinks cradle-to-cradle, so that every product or by­product is imagined in its subsequent forms even before it is made. Designers must Iactor in the future utility of a product, and the avoidance of waste, from its inception (Hawken, 1993, p. 71).

For Hawken and McDonough, the place to begin is the corporation. Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface, Inc., the world's largest commercial carpet manufacturer, had an epiphany when he read Hawken's Ecology of Commerce. At the time, Interface had slipped from its number one position. Anderson had called in a tum-around expert who made him feel like an outsider in the company he had created. Anderson "was stunned to read about the breadth of toxins accumulating from one generation to the next and the speed at which natural resources were being depleted." Mr. Anderson could see his own company on every page: carpet mills sucking up hydrocarbons and spewing out toxins. He wept, thinking about his grandchildren's future. "It was a spear in my chest," he says. (Petzinger, 1997, p. Bl). Anderson learned from Hawken that "business and industry, the largest, wealthiest, most pervasive institution on earth, must take the lead in saving the earth ... " (Anderson, 1995, p. 6). Anderson decided to transform Interface. He needed a system, and turned to The Natural Step, another organization Hawken was involved with.46

4.5 The Natural Step

The Natural Step was created by Karl-Henrik Robert, a pediatric oncologist who became concerned about the rising rate of cancer in children. He was struck by the fact that parents of these children would do anything to cure the cancer, yet such parents, acting in concert as members of society, could not take the environmental steps that would reduce the risk of such cancer. He decided that action was prevented, in part, by disagreements over matters of detail like what specific level of a potential carcinogen was really harmful. Paul Hawken, who became Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Natural step, argued that scientists were arguing about the withering leaves instead of focusing on a fact they could all agree on: the tree was dying (Hawken, 1995).

Robert wrote a draft paper outlining the fundamental system conditions essential for a sustainable society and shared it with a group of fifty scientists. Twenty-one drafts later, he had a consensus document, based on the laws of thermodynamics, which the Natural Step interprets as follows:

1) Conservation of matter and energy, which means that we never really consume matter or energy, we just change its form.

46 William McDonough and his colleague Michael Braungart are also consulting with Interface on this transformation, particularly with its subsidiary Guilford, Inc. We are following this important story as it develops. We will have more to say about Michael Braungart below.

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2) Entropy, meaning that matter and energy tend towards lower levels of organization. When we appear to consume matter or energy, we are really increasing its entropy.

Given these laws, how can complex systems like life occur? Because of the way in which plants use the sun's energy for photosynthesis. The Natural Step (TNS), like McDonough's principles, is based on an analogy to nature, in which the sun's energy fuels a local reversal of entropy, allowing evolution of complex, highly-organized forms, including human beings and the technologies we create.

From this assumption, TNS derives four fundamental system conditions:

1) Substances from the Earth's crust must not systematically increase in the biosphere. This implies that natural resources like fossil fuels should not be extracted at a rate greater than they can be replaced by the natural cycle of photosynthesis and sunlight. The conclusion here is the same as McDonough's principle, 'work from current solar income', but it has the implication that we are not only using up our energy reserves, we are systematically polluting the biosphere with greenhouse gases.

Note that Robert can side-step the detailed argument about whether a greenhouse effect is really occurring by pointing-out that "the concentration of substance in the ecosphere will increase and eventually reach limits--often unknown--beyond which irreversible changes occur" (Robert, Daly, Hawken, & Holmberg, 1996, p. 5).

2) Substances produced by society must not systematically increase in the biosphere. The implication here is that human-created substances must not be produced at a rate greater than natural systems can absorb--or else we will again risk 'irreversible changes'. McDonough's 'waste equals food' reaches a similar conclusion, but TNS holds out the possibility that there may be other ways to absorb waste besides making them food for organisms.

It seems to me that TNS might not object to wastes that could be locked into some kind of geological formation for thousands of years. This is one of the disposal mechanisms proposed for nuclear wastes and while I am sure TNS would object to nuclear power on other grounds, it is possible that the waste could be stored deep in a geological formation for millennia. The problem is, no one could guarantee that some natural or human disaster would not break it loose again, while it was still active.

3) The physical basis for the productivity and diversity of nature must not be systematically deteriorated. This is the 'don't slash and burn the rain forest' argument: we have to protect the photosynthesis engine that drives the evolution of complex system.

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4) There should be fair and efficient use of resources with respect to human needs. For TNS, efficiency means satisfying the first three conditions. "Basic human needs must be met with the most resource-efficient methods possible, and their satisfaction must take precedence over provision of luxuries" (Robert, Daly, Hawken, & Holmberg, 1996, p. 5). 'Needs over luxuries' is where the fairness issue comes in, and does threaten to entangle TNS in a debate about what is a luxury, and what is a need? But as we noted earlier, poverty is one of the causes of pollution, and the poor are also more likely to experience the effect of contaminated drinking water, air pollution and other environmental hazards-­witness the shanty town surrounding Bhopal.

TNS has begun to have a major impact on corporations like Interface and IKEA. At Interface, which works with both McDonough and TNS, "A new tufting method has cut nylon use 10%. Old fibers are 'combed' rather than melted for recycling. Certain yarns are substituted with hemp and flax, a step toward carpeting that is both 'harvestable' and compostable. Processing water is treated for golf-course irrigation. Massive electric motors are jump-started with gravity­feed systems rather than huge jolts of electricity ... 'Looking at waste really forces you to look at how your systems are designed', says James Hartzfield, a top Interface official" (Petzinger, 1997, p. B 1).

These 'natural steps' are not only good for the environment, they also help the bottom-line, saving Interface $25 million since 1995. Interface is also gaining a reputation as a low-cost, green vendor. For example, Interface's green reputation gained it a opportunity to bid on carpeting Gap's new headquarters; Interface then won the bid based on cost.

IKEA is a major global manufacturer or furniture. The company's name is derived from the initials of its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, who began a mail-order business in Sweden selling, among other things, home furniture. In the post World War II period, Swedish furniture prices went up much faster than other goods. Kamprad saw this as both a social problem and a business opportunity and moved in with a large selection of lower price furnishings. According to Kamprad, "The IKEA vision is to contribute to a better way of life for the majority of people. We do this by offering a wide range of home furnishings of good design and function, at prices so low that the majority of people can afford to buy them" (p. 47) 47.

IKEA grew into a major mail order and retail supplier of furniture and other household products.

German regulators spotted a problem with the formaldehyde content of the fiberboard used by IKEA. Instead of evolving a minimal response to this regulation, IKEA started to work with Dr. Robert to create a standard that would exceed any regulations the company might encounter worldwide, thereby freeing it

47 This quote is from, case 0-0501 "IKEA and the Natural Step", by Andrea Larsen and Joel Reichart, p. 4 available from the Darden School Case Bibliography at the University of Virginia (dardencases@virginia.edu, http://www.dardenlcaselbib).

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from concern with any regulations. IKEA would also fulfill the mandate of its founder to 'contribute to a better way oflife for the majority of people' .

Among the 'Natural Steps' taken by IKEA were:

1) A "Trash is Cash" program, which included the construction of an on-site recycling center at the store in Gotenborg, Sweden and selling materials like wood, cardboard, metal and paper that would have formerly gone into the landfill. The result was an improved bottom line as well as a cleaner world.

2) IKEA worked with Greenpeace to reduce the environmental impact of its catalogue, which used over 40,000 metric tons of paper. IKEA managed to eliminate the use of chlorine bleach in creating its catalogue, prohibited the use of any paper made from old growth forest, and agreed to recycle all of its catalogues and even those of its competitors.

3) Joined the U.S. E.P.A.'s Green Lights' Program, which meant a commitment to reduce kilowattlhours in North American IKEA stores by at least 15%. After four years of research, IKEA came up with a way of retrofitting its stores with fluorescent lighting whose initial cost would be recovered in less than two years by energy savings. These new lights required less energy to operate, lasted longer and generated less heat, thereby producing savings on cooling bills as well.

Interface and IKEA demonstrate that social responsibility and profit can go hand-in-hand. In contrast, Milton Friedman argued that "there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engage in open and free competition without deception or fraud" (Friedman, 1996, p. 126). A corporate executive may do what she likes as an individual, but in her official capacity, she is responsible to the shareholders and employees. If she decides to take an action that will benefit the environment, one that costs extra money and goes above and beyond what is required by law, she is spending shareholders money, possibly reducing employee salaries or raising costs to consumers.

Note that Friedman would have no difficulty with a company that decided to 'go green' as a marketing strategy, as long as the motive was profit. If a green reputation gets Interface a chance to bid on Gap's headquarters, that is simply good business. But the company should be careful to do only what is necessary to market itself as green, and only as long as buyers care.

Let us consider an example: the AES Corporation, a supplier of power to utilities, decided to devote two million dollars, or about one year of profits, to activities that would reduce the environmental impact of its coal-fired power plants, in the absence of any regulations that would force them to take these actions (Southerland, 1995). This move was not made in anticipation of any

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increase in sales, due to their 'green' strategy. Friedman would regard this as an involuntary tax imposed by AES management on its shareholders and customers.

On the other hand, Friedman would not have a problem with the environmental reforms made by Interface and IKEA if their primary goal was improving the company's bottom line. To retrofit lighting in order to save money is fine; to do it because a company wants to be socially responsible is, in Friedman's view, unethical.

Hawken and McDonough's philosophy of corporate responsibility appears to be diametrically opposed to Friedman's. But in fact, Hawken and McDonough suggest ways of changing the rules of the game in ways that would encourage companies like AES to behave responsibly towards the environment without hurting their bottom line. Again, this kind of change follows the analogy of nature. Organisms evolve to take advantage of every ecological niche, including those created by the waste produced by other organisms. Given a multi-million year time frame, presumably organisms would evolve that would use our industrial wastes as food. But we don't have that kind of time, so we will have to evolve market mechanisms that will encourage this kind of cycle.

One way to accomplish this would be to have the government impose 'green taxes', such as a tax on the carbon content of fuels like coal. Then companies like AES could obtain a lower tax rate by using alternate energy sources, or planting trees in rainforest locations, or designing more efficient coal-burning operations.

Such changes in the rules would make environmental responsibility consonant with profit. The problem, as Hawken notes, is that corporate leaders are so involved with the political process that they can prevent such changes. To return to Friedman's argument, corporate leaders don't just respond to the rules of the game--they make them. Therefore, one is back to the central problem: one has to convince a few imaginative business leaders to push ahead toward sustainability-­to prove that it is both possible and desirable. A few virtuous leaders can pave the way to new sets of rules that will make it easier for others to follow.

Another possible change in the rules would be to allow prices to reflect actual environmental costs. The physicist Amory Lovins likes to use the example of Desert Storm. The motivation for this operation was to free Kuwait and protect Saudi Arabia, but we would not have been so interested in these countries if they did not supply much of the world's oil. Therefore, argues, the war constituted in part a way of subsidizing lower oil prices. If the price of oil were raised to partly cover the costs of these sorts of wars, then companies and individuals might be encouraged to insulate homes, make more efficient automobiles, invest in solar energy, etc.--in effect, making us far less dependent on foreign oil and benefiting the environment at the same time (Lovins, Lovins & Zuckerman, 1986).

The first step in moral imagination is recognizing that one has assumptions about reality which constitute a view, or perspective. The idea that we must

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protect tanker routes from the Gulf in order to insure energy supplies is such a view. Lovins is trying to tweak us into engaging in moral imagination by doing what systems engineers call outscoping. If the real problem is energy supplies, why not outs cope to consider other solutions besides oil? What about conservation? alternate fuel sources? insulation?

There were certainly other reasons for protecting the national sovereignty of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia besides insuring a plentiful supply of oil. But it is clear oil was a factor, and we need to consider this kind of military presence as part of the cost of oil--a human cost, not just a financial one.

Amory and L. Hunter Lovins also engage in moral imagination when they confront the problem of designing energy-efficient vehicles. They think the barrier is cultural, not technological: that the automobile industry "is not a composite-molding/electricallsoftware culture but a diemaking/steel­stamping/mechanical culture. Their fealty is to heavy metal, not light synthetics; to mass, not information. They have tens of billions of dollars, and untold psychological investments, committed to stamping steel. They know steel, think steel, and have a presumption in favor of steel. They design cars as abstract art and then figure out the least unsatisfactory way to make them, rather than seeking the best ways to manufacture with strategically advantageous materials and then designing cars to exploit those manufacturing methods" (Lovins & Lovins, 1995, p.84).

Lovins and Lovins are trying to get auto manufacturers and consumers to imagine a very different world, in which most of us drive ultralight cars that look very different from the ones now on the road. Creative engineers at General Motors have built at least one prototype that gets 62 mpg; Lovins and Lovins envision designs that could get over 300 mpg. "We Americans recently put our sons and daughters in .56 mpg tanks and 17-feet-per-gallon aircraft carriers because we hadn't put them in 32 mpg cars--sufficient, even if we'd done nothing else, to have eliminated the need for American oil imports from the Persian Gulf (Lovins & Lovins, 1995, p. 85).

Another example from transportation is the contrast between the bus systems of New York and Curitiba, Brazil. In New York, "a four-mile bus ride is a smelly, jolting forty-minute journey taken by the old and poor. In Curitiba, Brazil, it's a clean, fast trip half the city makes twice daily" (McKibben, 1995, p. 65). The bus system in Curitiba involves several innovations:

1. Special lanes for buses. 2. New tube stations, where eight passengers can board per second. 3. Special extra-large buses that can accommodate up to 270 passengers.

The mental model for this bus system was a subway--it is a surface subway, much cheaper than building an underground. In what sense is this above-ground

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subway an exercise in moral imagination? Why isn't this just a clever technological fix for a complex urban problem?

Behind the bus system is a vision--of a green metropolis where most residents own cars but choose not to use them, where the downtown is a pedestrian mall and citizens can still move freely and quickly around the city. The bus system is part of an overall city plan that emphasizes environmental responsibility and also tries to reduce poverty by allowing the poor to trade recycled trash for food, providing free medical care and a network of local libraries housed in lighthouses. Curitiba is not utopia--shantytowns still sprout on the outskirts and infant mortality is still high (Lewan, 1994). But there is a commitment to innovative solutions that simultaneously attack poverty and pollution.

In contrast, there is no guiding vision for New York. The accepted reality is survival--New Yorkers take a kind of gritty pride in their toughness as the city lurches along like its buses, barely working much of the time. Curitiba loaned a few buses and tube stations to New York and for a time, they ran well. But none of the balkanized agencies responsible for transit in New York appears to have learned anything from it--it had nothing to do with the 'realities' of life in New York. The first lesson of moral imagination is that this reality is a view.

4.6 Science, Superstition and Sustainability

But is all this change really necessary? What if dangers to the environment are overstated? Bast et al. (1994), in their provocative book Eco-Sanity, argue that many ecological crises are not founded on scientific evidence but are instead scare tactics used by environmental organizations. They cite such examples as global warming, ozone depletion and pesticides. In the first two cases, scientific evidence does not support increasing temperatures or decreasing ozone--nor does it rule them out.

The question is, what do you do when evidence is ambiguous, at best? Do you, to paraphrase Pascal, wager that there will be a greenhouse effect and take action-­or that there won't, and risk the consequences (Freeman, 1997). A cost-benefit analysis might suggest it is worth risking the consequences. An RP perspective might counter that we want to consider the rights of future generations and take measures to prevent any possible harms. One Wall Street Journal columnists put it this way: "Even if the doomsayers of environmentalism are overly pessimistic, we obviously can't consume the finite forever. Only business can create a renewable future, and only by following nature's own example" (Petzinger, 1997, p. Bl).

Regarding pesticides, the reduced risk is largely due to the work of Rachel Carson and others. Not all pesticides are harmful, and some have had an important role in controlling insect populations that lead to diseases. Robert

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B. Shapiro, the CEO of Monsanto, argues that as much as 90% of the chemicals sprayed on crops are wasted and end up in the soil. In his opinion, it is much less wasteful to put the information on the plant, using biotechnology (Magenta, 1997).

How is one going to persuade other CEOs besides Shapiro to reduce pollution and think more about sustainability? Instead of changing the tax-code, as Hawken and McDonough advocate, or adding more environmental regulations, Bast et al. would rely on the legal system:

The manner in which the common law system discovers the appropriate size of awards for damages makes the common law approach a promising tool in the battle against pollution. The judicial process is essentially an adversarial one in which the alleged victims of pollution present the strongest pOSSible case for their victimhood, while the alleged polluters put forth the strongest case denying their guilt. The finaf decisions of ~uilt or innocence and the size of the awards, if any, are made by mdependent judges and juries. This process measures, more accurately than any political process could, the true extent of injuries and the value society places on such injuries (Bast, Hill, & Rue, 1994, p. 221).

But the legal system does not guarantee the victory of science over superstition, as the next section shows.

4.7 Silicone nightmare

The Dow Coming corporation was considered one of the most ethical and progressive corporations in the world with a code of conduct that was cited as a model in case studies by business schools (Whiteside & Goodpaster, 1984). In the 1977 version of this code, the company agreed that, "Dow Coming accepts as our responsibility a recognition, evaluation and sensitivity to social needs. We will meet this responsibility by utilizing our technological and management skills to develop products and services that will further the development of society" (Whiteside & Goodpaster, 1984, Exhibit 5, p. 13). The Dow Coming code focused primarily on conduct in the global marketplace, covering issues like refusing any kind of payment or bribe, avoiding political contributions and respecting the rights of employees.

Here was a company that, on paper at least, was committed to making the world a better place. But one of its products, a silicone breast implant, became the focus of an ethical controversy that would force the company into bankruptcy and make it a pariah.

The Dow Corning Corporation was created in 1943 by The Dow Chemical Corporation and Coming, Incorporated as a jointly-owned business centered non-

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silicone48 technology. Dow Coming's first triumph was a sealant used to protect the ignitions in Allied fighter planes from failing at high altitudes during the Second World War. When the war was over, Dow Coming explored non-defense applications of silicone, eventually creating more than 5,000 silicone products. Dow Coming continued to emphasize research and expansion throughout the 1950's and 1960's.

During this time, the company ordered a substantial amount of testing on silicones' effects, both on organisms and the environment. Typically, silicone was found to be chemically inert, failing to cause harmful reactions in rats, monkeys, or even human embryonic cells. With such characteristics, silicone seemed the perfect candidate for use in medical applications, for instance, in synthetic coverings for bum patients and in a coating on needles to ease insertion.

To encourage research in this area, Dow Coming opened the Center for Aid to Medical Research (CAMR) as a source of silicone for in-house and independent medical researchers. Thus, in the early 1960's Dow Coming supplied Texas plastic surgeons Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin with silicone for their medical implant device research. Gerow and Cronin, using Dow Corning silicone, invented the first silicone breast implant as a device to aid women who had undergone mastectomies. At that time, the Food and Drug Administration had no regulations governing implantable devices. Companies like Dow Coming had to determine the safety of devices on their own. The surgeons conducted clinical trials of the implant prior to product introduction in 1964. In the next several years, the implant grew popular for cosmetic surgery as well as reconstructive, and Dow Coming cornered both markets.

Through their Center for Aid to Medical Research, CAMR, Dow Coming also invented many other important medical devices. For example, first introduced in the late 1950's, Dow Coming created the hydrocephalic shunt, a silicone valve implanted in a child's head to relieve the effects of hydrocephalus, "an excess of cerebrospinal fluid in the cranial cavity causing enlargement of the skull and mental retardation"49. In 1952, Doctors F. E. Nulsen and E. B. Spitz originally developed the technique of treating hydrocephalus by inserting a valve into the skull, diverting the excess water from the ventricle to the jugular vein. Later, they

48 Silicon is a chemical element, one of the 109 known substances into which all matter can be resolved. Second only to carbon in its presence on earth, one-quarter of the earth's crust is silicon. Carbon is also the only element capable of establishing more compounds than silicon; thus, silicon possesses immense potential for commercial application. One of the premier semi-conducting elements, silicon is used in many electronic devices, such as transistors and computers.

Silicone is a synthetic polymer, or macro-molecule, whose backbone is a repeating chain of Si-O molecules, with various organic atomic groups attached to some of the silicon. The most common silicone is PDMS, poly-dimethylsiloxane (CH32Si-O), the foundation of all silicones. Silicones are used in many products, including cosmetics, building materials and computers. 49 The New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary o/the English Language, Lexicon Publications,

Inc., New York, 1988: p. 475.

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used a shunt valve developed by a Dow Corning employee, with encouraging results50.

4.7.1 Development of the First Breast Implant51

The original Cronin implant was developed for use by mastectomy patients to replace ones made of sponge, which tended to harden and appear less natural over time. This new mammary prosthesis was a breast-shaped silicone sac filled with silicone gel. The sac was in elastomer form, and the gel was high-density. The elastomer had a much more tightly woven atomic pattern, which kept the gel inside the sac. The gel was firm, yet pliable, so that it successfully simulated natural breast tissue. With over 10 years of research already completed on it, silicone was a natural candidate for use in breast reconstruction. In addition, it had already been utilized in other medical applications, such as the hydrocephalic shunt and life-saving pace-maker. These cases could provide information on the long-term effects of silicone on the host.

Nineteen sixty-two marked the first implanting of a mammary prototype. For the next two years, selected surgeons used the implants in clinical trials to obtain information on their performance, both long and short term, before Dow Corning took the Cronin implant fully to market in 1964. Additional support for the implants was found in the hydrocephalic shunt's performance , since it used the same elastomer. By 1962, about four-thousand shunts had been placed in children's brains without any apparent ill effects.

Also, in 1962, the National Institute of Health funded the Battelle Memorial Institute to conduct research on the stability of silicone implants in animals, among

50 Carrington, K.W. "Progress in the treatment of hydrocephalus," The Bulletin, Dow Coming Center for Aid to Medical Research (CAMR) newsletter, Volume I, Number I, October, 1959: p. I: In a paper delivered to the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in New York City on October 9, 1956, Dr. E. B. Spitz reported on the first installations of the SiiasticAl tubes and valve designed by John Holter. During the 8 months following the first installation of this valve in February 1956, the same technique was employed in 68 cases. His procedure was successful in decompressing the brain in 57 cases, a feat he had previously achieved by other means in only 16 out of 122 cases. With about 4 million babies born per year in this country and an incidence of hydrocephalus in infants estimated at I in 500 per year among infants born in the United States, more than 1200 Holter valves are being installed a year.

51 This section and the rest of the discussion of the breast implant case uses information obtained by Julie Stocker, a graduate student in Systems Engineering, from corporate literature, numerous other case studies, and interviews with members of the Dow Coming Corporation. For more information, see Stocker, J. M., Gorman, M. E., & Werhane, P. (1996). Dow Coming A: Breast implant design (Business case No. E-OI04)., Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia (darden@virginia.edu). Some of the names of participants in this case-study had to be altered, due to pending litigation, but we have tried to report all other details as factually as possible.

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them, SilasticA3, which was used in breast implants. 52 In particular, the study concentrated on the polymers' tensile strength and elongation, along with the reaction of the implant site to the polymers. (Tensile strength is a measure of the polymer's pliancy.) The studies used mongrel dogs as test sites, implanting samples of all five materials in each. The plastics were recovered after six, eleven, and seventeen month intervals. Their tensile strength was recorded before implantation and after each removal, to track any loss, along with any elongation due to implantation. After 17 months, SilasticA3 showed little decrease in tensile strength and slight elongation. At the same time as the introduction of the Cronin implant in 1964, Dow Corning contracted Food and Drug Research Laboratories, an independent research company, to complete more long-term testing on the implants, which had already been followed for two years in the clinical studies and seventeen months in the Battelle study. Results encouraged the continued use of silicone in medical implants, especially in mammary prostheses.

Although implants were first targeted at mastectomy patients, even Cronin and Gerow would have been able to foresee a market for breast enhancement as well. Thus, other manufacturers developed similar implants, in response to a market which grew as women opted for cosmetic breast procedure. However, Dow Corning, where the implant originated, remained the industry leader.

4.7.2 A "New and Improved" Implant?

In 1968, Dow Corning started updating the breast implant, a process that would take approximately seven years. First, they developed a seamless envelope, which provided a smoother finish and a more natural appearance. Now came the tough part. Doctors were requesting a softer, more natural gel formulation, so the breast implant product team went to work. Research scientist Jack Roberts worked on the new gel formulation.

By the first half of 1971, he had found one, and sent it for preliminary toxicity testing. Dow Corning employed a standard, widely used chemical test involving human embryonic cells. The experimental gel was introduced to some embryonic cells, to investigate if any of them changed. Although the cells rarely reacted adversely, they did so when introduced to this gel. However, such a reaction did not necessarily indicate that the gel was unsuitable for medical use. Dow Corning had two options: complete a large, expensive battery of tests to determine if this gel was suitable for implantation, or substitute a similar polymer into the original test.

Dow Corning chose the second option, since Roberts already had a gel similar to the first. Although Roberts' second gel overcame the embryonic cell hurdle, it

52 Leninger, R. I., Mirkovitch, V., , A. & Hawks, W.A., "Change in Properties of Plastics During Implantation.", Trans. Amer. Soci. Artif. Int. Organs, Volume 10, 1964, p. 320-321.

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also had to undergo a penetration test to measure its stiffness. For example, the gelatin we eat is a fairly stiff gel. Roberts and associates allowed a weighted probe to descend for a span of time into the gel. The farther into the gel the probe made it, the softer the gel. After tracking this characteristic in the second attempt gel, Roberts found that this gel was growing softer over time. This tendency was undesirable for an implant gel, since softer consistency could cause more diffusion. Also, if the implant ruptured, more gel would migrate from the area of implantation. Thus, this gel, too, was rejected.

By June of 1974. Roberts had joined another product team, and Kim Anderson had joined the mammary prosthesis team in his place. She was a chemist by training and had been with Dow Corning since February of 1970. Taking over where Roberts left off, Anderson sought to understand the objectives of her mission clearly. As the team members explained to her, they had been trying to develop a more responsive implant gel, one that more closely simulated the behavior of actual breast tissue. Originally, breast implants had been designed for women with mastectomies. Now they were being used increasingly for cosmetic reasons. Dow Corning's competitors were marketing new gels, softer and more responsive, partly in response to this increased need.

An important restriction given to Anderson was to include only ingredients in her gel formulations that had previously been safety-tested, and/or had successful medical implant histories. This meant the new gel would be a conservative design, which should ensure a safer implant for the customer. By January of 1975, Anderson and the Implant Development team (PMG) had created a product with a more responsive gel that passed the embryonic cell reaction and weighted probe tests.

Dow Corning geared up to engineer a major effect on the breast implant market with this new, improved product, creating a special Mammary Task Force to complete the final development of this new product for marketing by June of 1975. However, Dow Corning knew that two more questions had to be answered before the new gel could go to market:

1. Can we manufacture the product? 2. Can it suitable for long-term human use?

While Anderson had been working on the new gel formulation, she had simultaneously addressed a manufacturing issue. Presently, the gel was divided into Parts A and B for production, with the ratio of ingredients needed A to B at 100: 1. This incongruent ratio would not allow for true simultaneous production in Dow Corning's batch processing. (Since a batch of A required 100 times the number of ingredients as B, it took much more time.) In order to improve efficiency, DCC asked Kim Anderson to divide the batch ingredients for production more equitably. Her work ended in the masterbatching of the gel, with the ratio of ingredients needed A:B a much more equitable 3:1, allowing for improved efficiency in production. The new gel formula could essentially drop

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into this new process, and the question of whether Dow Corning could manufacture the new formulation was easily answered in the afftrmative.

Anderson and the development team moved on to the second question, concerning the safety of the product. In addition to Anderson, other scientists on the task force included a biocompatability expert along with Anderson's laboratory manager. Chemists and biologists disagreed on the second question. In the chemists' opinion, no additional testing of the new gel was needed, since it utilized only components which had been previously tested and used in medical implant devices. In contrast, the biologists argued that, since the softer, more responsive gel was made from a novel combination of familiar ingredients, it needed further testing. The biologists recommended to management a two to four week study of the worst case scenario, the insertion of silicone gel without any elastomer envelope. This kind of study simulated a situation where there was total leakage, with silicone flowing freely throughout the body; no human being would ever experience this. The studies would be performed in monkeys, rats and rabbits. In the interest of safety, Dow Corning delayed production until the biologists' tests had been performed.

In March/April 1975, the results of a Dow Corning two-week study on the effect of silicone gels injected subcutaneously into rats and monkeys were delivered. The current Cronin gel acted as the control gel, and the scientists at Dow Corning tried out three new gels, including the New Production gel, the one they tentatively planned on producing; an experimental High-fluid gel; and a Low­cross linker gel. Specifically, Dow Corning wanted to investigate any tissue reaction, tendency to systemic migration, or differences in general response to the gels among the rats and the monkeys.

One iteration of the study produced an increase in the silicon in the axillary lymph node of the rats, but this result could not be replicated. No "grossly observable" tissue reaction in the monkeys was seen.53 However, in at least one monkey, gel moved from its original implant site. Another monkey was injected with the same formulation at multiple sites, and the gel migration result was replicated. 54 Although this was an experimental gel and not the one tentatively scheduled for production, Dow Corning was concerned, and narrowed the acceptability criteria to rule out this gel and others with similar formulations.

53 Franklin, Benjamin H., Annelin, Ronald B., "Subcutaneous Implants of Developmental Prosthetic Gels in Monkeys and Rats: Examination of Tissue Deposition and Urinary, Fecal, and Respiratory Elimination Routes," Dow Corning Corporation File Number 2726-1, Dow Corning Corporation, December 12,1975, in the summary section.

54 Franklin, Benjamin H., Annelin, Ronald B., "Subcutaneous Implants of Developmental Prosthetic Gels in Monkeys and Rats: Examination of Tissue Deposition and Urinary, Fecal, and Respiratory Elimination Routes," Dow Corning Corporation File Number 2726-1, Dow Corning Corporation, December 12,1975, in the summary section.

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In addition, Dow Corning also contracted out the requested rabbit study to Biometric, an independent research laboratory in New Jersey. The experiment involved the four gels previously discussed, as well as 28 rabbits, certain of whom were to be sacrificed after 7, 14,21, and 90 days to reveal what, if any, effects the injected silicone gels had on them. At the end of the first twenty-one days, the only negative effect was a moderately acute inflammatory reaction at the implantation sites.55 This reaction was less in the twenty-one day rabbits than those sacrificed after seven and fourteen, so the inflammation appeared to decline over time. Overall, the test results had proved positive. Eager to get its implants out, Dow Corning asked Biometric if the test could be shortened by 10 days without incidence, and Biometric answered in the affIrmative. After 80 days,

The majority of implant sites were entirely free of any reaction at all. These histopathologic changes observed during the 80 day course of this study were, in our opinion, due to the trauma of implantation and not due to the test gels.56

Thus, the extra studies were complete and could be added to the collection of independent and in-house research on silicone already available. Anderson knew that the product team had been working for upwards of four years on this project, and it seemed like the new gel's time had come.

4.7.3 Enter the ethicist

John Swanson was the one permanent member of Dow Corning's Business Conduct Committee and therefore played an important role in shaping and maintaining the company's award-winning ethical policy. His wife Colleen decided to get the new Silastic breast implants in 1974. Almost immediately afterwards, she experienced debilitating symptoms: migraines, lower back pain, rashes and fatigue that plagued her for years. In the late 1990s, her daughter told Colleen about a television program in which another woman with similar symptoms blamed them on Dow Corning implants.

Now Swanson was caught in an ethical dilemma. At work, he listened to his colleagues complain about lawsuits like the Stern case, in which the plaintiff was awarded 1.5 million dollars in damage on the grounds that Silastic implants had caused her auto-immune disorders. They also expressed concern about the Food and Drug Administration's new role in regulating medical devices. The FDA was asking all breast implant manufacturers to prove their devices safe and effective, or

55 Carson, Steven, Ph.D., "Implantation Study in Rabbits with Four (4) Mammary Gels,"Biometric Testing Inc., April 25, 1975, p. 4-5.

56 Carson, Steven, PhD., "Implantation Study in Rabbits with Four (4) Mammary Gels," Biometric Testing Inc., April 25, 1975, p. 4.

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face a moratorium on further sales. 57 At home, Swanson heard Colleen's arguments that the company he worked for had hidden the true risk of her implants. She wanted them out--right away.

John Swanson was in a position to see the breast implant problem from both the standpoint of a woman who was sure the implants were destroying her body and from the perspective of the company that had created them and saw them as a safe product, given the scientific evidence. Here was the classic hero's call to an inward journey, in which he would have to exercise moral imagination to decide whether his wife was right, or the company he had worked foro-or whether it was possible to reconcile these two opposing views in any way.

For Dow Corning, this was a great opportunity, too. The managers and employees believed they were virtuous. The breast implant was created in response to a surgeon's need, and the company followed an expanding market. Of course they wanted to make a profit, but they also felt they were providing a service, particularly to those women who had mastectomies.

Therefore, the company felt blind-sided by the controversy surrounding its new breast implants, and were not prepared for the wave of public outrage. Dow Corning's ethical practices had been the toast of business schools for over a decade. Dow Coming's Code of Conduct included the following statement:

We are committed to providing products and services that meet the requirements of our customers. We will provide information and support necessary to effectively use our products.

We will continuall}' strive to assure that our products and services are safe, efficacious ana accurately represented for their intended uses. We will fully represent the use and characteristics of our raw materials, intermediates and products--including toxicity and other potential hazards--to our employees, suppliers, transporters and customers.58

57 Prior to 1976, the Food and Drug Administration could not take action against a device until it was already produced, and the FDA had to prove its allegations of defects. The businesses were not even required to inform the FDA if they were involved in the medical device industry.

On May 28, 1976, the Congress required manufacturers of medical devices to register with the FDA and provide a listing of their medical products each year. The FDA could now also devise regulatory requirements for the devices, in proportion to the degree of risk the device entailed, that is, riskier products would have to meet more stringent standards. The FDA divided medical devices into three classes, with Class I requiring the least regulation and Class 3 the most. At first, breast implants were grandfathered into Class I, since they had already been on the market for twelve years without incident. However, in response to allegations of implants causing cancer by Sidney Wolfe of public watchdog Ralph Nader's Public Citizen group, the FDA proposed to reclassify breast implants into Class III in 1982, which would mean they would have to submit the 'premarketing approval' documents that would be required of someone manufacturing a new medical device [Angell, 1996].

58For more on this code, see Robert A. Flax and Patricia Werhane, Dow Coming and ltiformed Consent (A) and (B), case E-OI06 in the Darden Case Bibliography, available from the Darden

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Dow Coming's policy committed the company to total honesty and integrity, and this policy was reinforced by the Business Conduct Committee, on which John Swanson served. When I first met with Barie Carmichael, Vice-President and Executive Director for Corporate Communications at Dow Coming, to discuss doing a case, she seemed surprised that I saw ethical issues in the scientific testing the company had conducted. If the science said the product was safe, that was the end of the story. But she was coming to realize that, "We were naive. This is a company in the middle of a cornfield in Michigan. We were not publicly traded and didn't have to answer to public stockholders. And we were naive about politics and did not fully appreciate how Washington, D.C. worked, or how politics could affect the company. Not only that, but most of management saw the implant issue as a scientific one, not one of communications".59

But science, as John Burnham (Burnham, 1987) and others have shown, is not held in universal esteem by the public and in some quarters, is even seen as a tool used by the powerful to oppress groups that are underrepresented in the scientific community--like women. The case of Lise Meitner and dozens of others show how hard it has been for women to break into what for years has been a primarily male fraternity. Is it any wonder many women felt suspicious about Dow Coming's scientific claims--especially when other 'scientific experts' appeared to disagree?

According to Carmichael, Dow Coming was not surprised that some women were skeptical of the science. What surprised the company was that these individual reports of suffering seemed to carry more weight than scientific studies. Dow Coming did not value emotional ways of knowing as much as scientific ones. They also did not pay much attention to anecdotal reports of problems with the implants, preferring scientific data. Dow Coming was learning the importance of case-based reasoning the hard way. Real cases of human pain are more salient to the public than mountains of scientific evidence.

In 1991, a jury awarded Marian Hopkins $7.3 million in damages against Dow Coming on the grounds that her implants contributed to connective tissue disorder­-even though she had been diagnosed before having implants (Angell, 1997). In April of 1992, the "Food and Drug Administration announced that breast implants filled with silicone gel would be available only through controlled clinical studies and that women who need such implants for breast reconstruction would be assured of access to these studies" (Kessler, 1992, p. 1713). This decision was interpreted by many women as meaning the FDA thought breast implants were not safe, when in fact the agency really intended to keep the product off the market

Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, V A 22903 ( darden@virginia.edu).

59 This quote is from an excellent case entitled Dow Corning by Paul Argenti of The Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College. The cases' central dilemma concerns whether Carmichael should recommend that the CEO of Dow Coming appear on the Oprah Winifrey show.

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until more testing could be done. The Hopkins suit and the FDA moratorium led to a wave of lawsuits that forced the company into bankruptcy. Colleen Swanson's was one of them.

Here we go back to the issues we discussed at the beginning of Chapter 2, where we talked about science and truth. A relativist might argue that scientific truths are always the product of social negotiations. A sociologist with a more realist bent would amend this statement to say not solely the product of social negotiations, but negotiations can and should play an important role in what counts as truth--especially when this truth has important policy implications.

The scientists at Dow Corning were realists; they felt that they had the data and were astonished that anyone else could have failed to see it as they did. They did not realize that in order to establish a scientific fact, it is not sufficient to let the data speak for itself; one has to build a network of allies, and as the network grows, the scientific knowledge is transformed (Latour, 1987). As we will see below, studies of rats and monkeys were gradually supplanted, in terms of importance, by human epidemiological studies.

Irwin & Winn argue that, in general, "science ... misunderstands both the public and itself' (Irwin & Winn, 1996, p. 10). Even within science, the process of creating consensus can take years, as in the controversy over continental drift (LeGrand, 1988). Indeed, i~ some areas of research, a single experiment may involve a large network of collaborators and funding sources and take as much as twenty years to complete (Knorr-Cetina, 1995).

One of the characteristics of scientific development that most plagues historians is the enormous diversity of viewpoints that can continue to Eersist long after it appears that a consensus has been reached. The aifficulty arises not oofy oecause consensus is never total, but also because of the fact that consensus always means the consensus of a particular community. Scientists make up many communities, and these communities vary by subject, by methodology, by place, and by degree of influence. Science itself it s polyphonic chorus. The voices in that chorus are never equal, but what one nears as a dominant motif depends very much on wnere one stands. At times, some motifs appear dominant from any standpoint. But there are always comers from which one can hear minor motifs continuing to sound (Keller, 1983, p. 174).

One of the 'minor motifs' was Barbara McClintock's work on gene transposition in corn, which was not integrated into the dominant consensus, or paradigm, for almost thirty years (see 2.2). The cold fusion case is also instructive (see 3.1). Initially, other scientists claimed to get a cold fusion effect, though the effect itself was a moving target: was it mainly temperature? did it include neutrons and increased tritium levels? did it require heavy water? Eventually, most of the scientific community concluded that there was no validity to claims for the existence of cold fusion, but Pons and Fleischmann continue to work in this area and receive funding from industrial sources (Bishop, 1994). This 'minor motif

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may lead to a new discovery, but as of this writing, it looks like a consensus over cold fusion has been achieved in the space of a few years.

Similar time-frames and complex networks can be required for epidemiological studies on health issues (Angell, 1996). One example is the controversy over whether silicone breast implants cause cancer, which began in the early 1980s and peaked in 1988. By 1993, animal, epidemiological and clinical studies showed no carcinogenic link and a consensus was achieved.a> It took about a decade for a consensus to emerge in this area, helped by the fact that the controversy shifted to other conditions, like autoimmune disorders. In their obligation to prove safety, Dow Corning and other implant manufacturers were confronted with a moving target; one problem like cancer would get settled as another like autoimmune disorders arose.

Irwin & Winn argue that the boundary between science and the public is uncertain and often re-negotiated during controversies (Irwin & Winn, 1996). Cases like the Swansons' might have helped Dow Corning anticipate where the controversy was shifting and develop strategies for further testing. According to Keith McKennon, who became CEO of Dow Corning in February of 1992, Swanson raised the possibility of a meeting between McKennon and Colleen. McKennon thought it was a good idea; this was an opportunity to meet directly with someone who was having a problem with silicone breast implants.

On March 19th, McKennon took Dow Corning out of the breast implant business. He also provided $10 million in funding for more research, provided up to $1200 a piece in financial aid for women whose doctors recommended that their implants be removed and tried whenever possible to talk to women (Byrne, 1995). But Colleen remained suspicious of McKennon's motives and did not want to meet with him.

John Swanson and McKennon eventually had a second meeting, at McKennon's request. McKennon had finally heard about Colleen's lawsuit, filed three months earlier, and he was angry. He would have liked to have talked with her. According to Swanson, McKennon asked what Colleen wanted-- 'a zillion dollars?'--and offered to discuss a resolution (Byrne, 1995, p. 20-7). McKennon says he might have asked whether Colleen really wanted lots of money or whether there was another way to resolve the conflict. Swanson had moved into the legal, adversarial mode, in which you cannot afford to trust the other party, whereas McKennon was still searching for a more cooperative solution.61

60 If anything, results suggest a slightly lower risk of breast cancer among those who have had augmentation mammaplasty (Deapen & Brody, 1997).

61 I have relied on Swanson's book with John Byrne (1995) for his side of the conversation. Keith McKennon's came from a brief telephone interview I conducted in May of 1997. In this chapter, I have focused on the role of science in this controversy. Byrne and Swanson's book is an excellent starting-point for those more interested in corporate conduct--how Dow Corning initally faced, or failed to face, potential problems with its breast implants.

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Colleen did eventually settle her lawsuit with the company, and John retired in 1993 with full benefits, to work as an ethics consultant and criticize his former employer. The conversation that never took place between Colleen Swanson and Keith McKennon might have represented a missed opportunity for Dow Corning to get a better understanding of the reasons why an intelligent woman who had every reason to be loyal to the company thought one of its products was causing her major health problems, and why she did not trust the company's efforts to deal with the problem.

Richard Hazleton, who took over the job of CEO and Chairman of Dow Corning in June of 1993, had Swanson in mind when he asked,

How do you respond ethically to someone who is questioning your ethics? For instance, the major contributor to a book that has just been published about the breast implant controversy is an ex-employee who actually played an administrative role in the Dow Corning ethics program. He and his wife firmly believe that her current illness is due to lier implants. That belief lias led him to question the ethics of decisions and actions, some of which he was involved in, and some of which he wasn't.

On the other hand, there are ethical guestions around this individual's actions. For instance, what were nis responsibilities to act on his convictions while he was still employed at Dow Corning rather than two years after he retired? What were his obligations, while still an employee, to investigate his concerns regarding the company's conduct and find out whether the accusations were true rather tban waiting to raise them in a book for which he will be compensated? (Hazleton, 1996, p. 3).

Did John Swanson do enough to help the company he loved cope with its growing Frankenstein monster? Consider Gioia and the Pinto case, discussed in 4.3 above. Gioia played his role of Ford's recall coordinator according to the schema and scripts he had learned; he was never able to step out of them and imagine how the problem would have looked to someone outside the organization. In Swanson's case, the reverse seems to have happened. Understandably, he started looking at the problem from the perspective of his wife Colleen, adopting an outsider's schema. He would have been well-positioned to try to see the problem from an inside view, as well--to try to understand why the company believed this was a safe and effective product, despite the experiences of women like Colleen. It is unfair to place too much burden on John Swanson, a decent person who felt his company had not lived up to its ideal.

He knew he had a conflict-of-interest on the breast implant problem and tried to walk a tightrope that would allow him to do his job while offering his wife the support she deserved (see Byrne, 1993, for more details).

I think most of the people at Dow Corning were decent, also. Virtue is a necessary but not sufficient condition for moral action. Swanson might have been

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able to help his company understand why so many reasonable people saw their product as a monster. McKennon and Hazleton, in turn, might have helped Swanson see that, scientifically speaking, there was no monster. What some customers and outsiders saw as a monster other customers and company insiders saw as technological progress. Virtue needs to be complemented by moral imagination, by the ability to switch between perspectives and ultimately transcend them to arrive at another point of view. Could Keith McKennon and Colleen Swanson have worked jointly to create a compensation program that would have addressed the needs of dissatisfied customers without admitting that sicilone implants could cause disease? Dow Corning is moving towards such a policy now (see footnote below).

In the wake of the FDA's moratorium and the wave of litigation, McKennon had to decide whether to take Dow Corning out of the implant market which was still only a small percentage of the company's overall business. At first glance, this looks like an ethical no-brainer--until one considers patients with mastectomies who relied on Dow Corning to supply a product for which they felt a genuine need. As one women said after her mastectomy,

You just didn't feel like you're all there, you know, you just, it, my clothes didn't... fit. It was just that, you know, 1 looked so suriken in, you know you could tell that I didn't hcive anything .. .! came home from Hie hospital and my husband said, "Let's see what you look like," and I said "No." I said, "1 cannot believe what I look like, what a person looks like, what a woman looks like without breast tissue. And I just could not wait till the day came that I could have something done" (Vanderford & Smith, 1996, p.64).

After getting her silicone implants, another mastectomy patient described her feeling as follows:

So I just wanted to, sort of, to look like I did before I started this, and I'm very happy with the result...And I just think it's, it's sort of a self-esteem ... thing for a woman, you know, it makes you feel like a whole person ... ? (Vanderford & Smith, 1996, p. 72).

A 1991 study suggested that about 90% of the mastectomy patients were satisfied with their implants and about 95% of the augmentation patients were satisfied with theirs (Vanderford & Smith, 1996). Even so, in March of 1992, McKennon announced that Dow Corning would leave implant business and would fund a $10 million research program to determine the effects of silicone in the human body. McKennon also announced a fund for women who were unable to afford the removal of implants.

Dow Corning pulled the product, sold the medical devices part of their business and declared Chapter 11 in May of 1995, after an effort to settle the huge number of lawsuits (almost 20,000) failed. Was this just desserts for a company that had produced a faulty product, or a victory of superstition over science?

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4.7.4 Junk Science?

John Burnham lamented that by the 1980s, "science probably did not exist any more at the popular level. Superstition did" (Burnham, 1987). Similarly, Marcia Angell, editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, portrayed this controversy as a victory of superstition over science.

The breast implant controversy shows every sign of continuing on its irrational course for years. Onfy an unyielding commitment to scientific evidence can stop it, and that does not seem very likely, given the money and passions involved. If all parties had accepted the discipline of evidence at the outset, the controversy would never have reached such proportions. It would hardly have gotten off the ground. But without a commitment to objective data, people were free to believe whatever they liked. Instead of basing their conclusions on the evidence, they willed the evidence to their favored conclusions (Angell, 1996, p. 209).

What does the 'discipline of evidence' show? The only way to determine whether silicone implants pose a health risk in humans is to conduct epidemiological studies. In such a study, one compares a sample of women with implants with a sample who have none, to see if a significantly higher proportion of the former have a disease or complication than the latter. Several major studies of this sort were conducted recently, focusing on what is called 'connective tissue disorder' --a broad category of auto-immune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus that can cause the kinds of symptoms experienced by Colleen Swanson.

In 1994 the Mayo clinic reported that 749 women with implants did not show a greater rate of connective tissue disorder than a similar group without implants. Similarly, in 1995, a Harvard Medical School questionnaire study of 1183 nurses with implants, including 876 with silicone implants, again found no association between implants and connective tissue disorder. The most recent and comprehensive study, conducted again by the Harvard Medical School, involved sending questionnaires to 395,543 women involved in the health professions, of whom 10,630 reported having implants. In this case, there was a small but significantly greater chance that women with implants would report connective tissue disease, at a rate of about one extra case of disease per year for every 3000 women. But even this very slightly higher rate could be explained by a tendency for women with implants to overreport symptoms because of the controversy surrounding implants--or, conversely, for women with implants to refuse to participate in the study because their attorney's advised them not to. The only way to be certain is to check medical records. Whenever this has been done, no relationship has been found between silicone implants and diseases (Angell, 1996).ti2

62 -An August 14, 1996 memorandum from the Dow Corning Corporation cited twenty studies that compared women with and without breast implants; none found any significant association between

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Earlier in this book, I referred to 'willing the evidence to fit one's favorite conclusions' as confirmation bias. Angell saw most of the signs of confirmation bias in the plaintiffs and their attorneys, fueled by the prospect of multi-million dollar awards.

But there was a kind of confinnation bias on the part of Dow Coming. Not a bias in terms of scientific evidence, but in tenns of moral imagination. The company took the scientists' view: if the data showed there were no problems, then everyone would agree. For the women like Colleen Swanson suing the corporation, the 'data' was their pain. Many of the women discounted the science altogether; others, looking at the fact that Dow Corning had funded many of the studies, thought the science had been bought from a Kuhnian standpoint, this might be evidence that the two sides are holding incommensurable views, meaning that they literally cannot understand one another. On the one hand, you have scientists like Marcia Angell and Kim Anderson, who think of themselves as seekers of truth. On the other hand, you have women like Sybil Goldrich who believe that the Kim Anderson,s and Marcia Angells have been bought.

Dow Coming was also surprised by the FDA's finding that they had not proved the product safe. From a Popperian standpoint, the FDA presented Dow Corning with an impossible dilemma. In the same way you can never prove a theory true, you can never absolutely prove anything will be safe--tomorrow, you might discover an unanticipated interaction with other drugs, or chemicals, or a new medical condition. (Popper here borrows from Hume's classic critique of induction). A company following Popper's dictum would only be able to say that, given everything we know at this time, there is no evidence that this product is unsafe, but that we will continue to test for any possible future problems.

David Kessler, the head of the FDA at this time, defended this decision by noting that the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1976 required "a positive demonstration of safety--and the burden of proof rests squarely with the manufacturer" (Kessler, 1992, p. 1713). 'Positive demonstration' is vaguer than proof, and may allow for more 'wiggle room'. Kessler goes on to deal with the classic PopperianlHumean criticism: "It is never possible to predict with certainty how a device will function 10, 20 or 30 years after its implantation; however, even basic characteristics that have some value in predicting future perfonnance, such as tensile strength and fatigue resistance tested through cyclic loading, are missing in this case (Kessler, 1992, p. 1713).

Popper brings us back to the crux of Dow Coming's dilemma. They felt that they had done state-of-the-art testing and found no serious problems. Furthennore, given the long track record of silicone, they had reason to believe no

implants and diseases like scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, auto-immune disorders or connective tissue disease.

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major problems would emerge in the future. Kessler and the FDA felt the company had not done adequate testing to support this view.63

One of the problems with research into implants is that new potential hazards kept being hypothesized. First there was a concern with cancer. After that was dismissed, scleroderma became a concern. Then it was connective tissue disorder. Epidemiological studies take several years, although one can sometimes 'piggyback' onto an existing study, searching for evidence of known diseases in the medical records and correlating them with implants. But such records do not contain information on new disorders like the special silicone syndrome hypothesized by Mark Lappe (1993) and Nir Kossovsky (19931 who developed their own theory--that silicone, an inert substance, can get coated with proteins in the body and then denature these proteins, changing their shape. The body's immune system would then attack these proteins, creating an autoimmune disorder.

Kossovsky tested his theory by running a standard, but very difficult, test for antibodies (TaubesI995). In March of 1992, the Autoimmune Disease Center at Scripps Research Institute sent him blood he could test, from:

(a) 40 women who had auto-immune disease, but no implants; (b) 10 healthy women with no implants; (c) 10 women who had auto-immune disease and implants.

The blood samples were sent blind, meaning Kossovsky didn't know which were which--he had to send his results back to Scripps, then they would tell him whether his test distinguished between women who had implants and autoimmune disease and woman who had no implants and autoimmune disease. If his theory were right, the test should show more or different antibodies among the 10 women who had implants, presumably because the immune system was attacking the proteins that were denatured by the silicone.

There were no differences between the no-implant and implant blood samples. Kossovsky's test did distinguish between women who had autoimmune disorders and those who did not, but this had nothing to do with his theory. The initial result, therefore, was a disconfirmation of Kossovsky's hypothesis.

He rejected the result. Instead, he took the Scripps data on 40 women with his own data on 249 women with implants and 47 healthy women who did not. He reported that 9 of the 249 women with implants had scored higher on his test than any other women in the sample. These 9 women showed no real distinguishing

63 Dow Coming's insurers agreed; they refused to pay the company any part of the costs of the lawsuits on the grounds that studies had not proved the product safe, and furthermore, that Dow Coming had withheld information about problems with implants. On February 14, 1997, a jury supported Dow Corning, and told the insurance companies to pay (http://www2.nando.netinewsroomlntnlnationl021496/nation2_2367.htm).

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symptoms, but Kossovsky concluded that they were suffering from some kind of silicone-related disease, supporting his theory. But even if he did the very difficult test properly, a result of this sort could be due to the difference in sampling size between the groups--he was comparing a group of 249 to groups of 47 and 40, and so the 9 women in the larger group were equivalent to about 2 in the smaller ones. If he had taken a larger sample of women without implants, he might have found a few had scores on his test as high as those in the top 9 of the implant group (see 2.3.8.1). Combine this ambiguous, positive result with the negative Scripps result and the best one can conclude is that more research is needed, preferably by an independent lab.

Instead of continuing research, Kossovsky took a cold fusion tum and applied for a patent for his new blood test. He promptly marketed it as well, targeting trial lawyers who were looking for clients with breast implants or other silicone devices. Kossovsky also appeared in many trials as an expert witness. When lawyers for the defense asked to see his laboratory notebooks, he claimed they were lost in an earthquake. When results of epidemiological studies showed no link between silicone breast implants and autoimmune diseases, Kossovsky countered that the studies were not looking for the right kind of diseases--the breast implants might be producing some new kind of illness.

This example illustrates how confirmation bias can be maintained by a moving target: when studies disconfirm one relationship, simply propose another. Marcia Angell also points out that

Kossovskv's observations .. .focus on one link in a long chain of postulated events. a'ut before focusing on one link in a chain of possible causation, scientists usually first try to establish a connection between one end of the chain and anotfter--that is, between the suspected cause and the disease. For example, first we found out that cigarette smoking is associated with lung cancer. Only then did scientists turn their attention to how cigarettes might cause the disease ... In the breast implant controversy, there has been a tendency to do it backwards. Assuming there is a connection, some people have sought to explain how it works (Angell, 1996, p. 108).

Angell is defending an inductive model of science, here, in which interesting findings lead to hypotheses. In fact, the reverse quite often happens--interesting hypotheses lead to novel findings. There is nothing wrong with proposing a causal mechanism to explain a possible phenomenon--it could lead to focused research that would demonstrate the phenomenon. But Kossovsky's results, like the early cold fusion claims, have not been replicated.

Kossovsky, Lappe and others were paid substantial sums to serve as expert witnesses in trials, testifying that silicone implants cause medical problems. The old discovery/justification distinction in philosophy of science would suggest that this does not matter--a scientist's motives for introducing an idea have nothing to do with the truth value of the claims, which need to be independently tested. The important point is independently. The fact that Kossovsky confirmed his own

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theory could be dismissed as a bias motivated in part by financial incentives--not that he is lying, any more than Pons and Fleischmann were, just that he is human and more likely to see positive evidence in an ambiguous setting when there is a tangible reward.

Similarly, critics of much of the scientific research which shows no association between silicone implants and diseases have faulted the studies because many were funded by Dow Coming. The important question here is whether Dow Coming could buy the results it wanted, or whether the studies were genuinely independent. Marcia Angell defends the epidemiological studies on the grounds that they were published in refereed journals; the referees were not funded by Dow Coming. Furthermore, the studies are sufficiently detailed so the data can be inspected and criticized. Still, those scientists who cannot obtain funding may find it hard to participate in the debate--they may not be able to conduct studies of sufficient quality. Funding sources can create a kind of confirmation bias by leaving some voices out in the cold.

Federal District Judge Robert E. Jones, overseeing breast implant cases in Oregon, appointed an independent panel of scientific experts to assess the evidence that silicone breast implants cause disease. Based on the panel's findings, in December of 1996, Judge Jones ruled that lawyers cannot introduce evidence that implants cause disease since such evidence is not scientifically valid (Lasalandra, 1997).

In effect, Jones was declaring that Kossovsky and other similar expert witnesses represented 'junk science'. If this ruling is upheld, it will encourage other judges to appoint independent panels of scientific experts, rather than relying on the defense and the prosecution to find competing experts and see which side convinces the jury. Judge Samuel Pointer in Birmingham, Alabama, has appointed a national panel of scientific experts to answer two questions:

1) Does existing scientific research indicate that breast implants filled with silicone can cause or exacerbate chronic conditions like autoimmune diseases?

2) To what extent would disagreement with the conclusion to the first question "represent a legitimate and responsible debate within the field"? (Technology, 1997, p. 69).

Thousands of cases have been consolidated under Judge Pointer's jurisdiction, so this panel could have a great influence, though the Judge will decide how much weight to give to their conclusions. His second question suggests that he is trying to determine if scientific consensus is emerging on this issue. As of this writing, the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, the American College of Rheumatology, the British Council on Medical Devices and the Food and Drug Administration "have concluded that there is no evidence that silicone breast implants" cause any kind of autoimmune disorder (Rosenbaum, 1997, p. 1524).

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A recent article in Science argues that, "the experts need to have appropriate credentials, including knowledge, neutrality, and diligence. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) now maintain a roster of potential scientific reviewers who are checked for conflicts of interest. The NIH, universities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and other neutral organizations are existing resources to provide scientific guidance in the classroom. Scientific bodies should not wait for the court to seek advice: as scientists we should ensure that every court has at its disposal a listing of neutral experts with specified areas of expertise and acknowledgment of potential conflicts" (Rosenbaum, 1997, p. 1525).

The independent-panel-of-experts approach assumes that jurors and judges are not competent to decide what constitutes good and bad science. A complementary approach would be to make sure the public was better educated concerning the actual process of scientific investigation. This case shows how hard it is to understand the science, and how easy it is to manipulate to make it appear to confirm one's perspective. For example, lawyers frequently would isolate single findings and results, whereas scientists know that one must look at a larger pattern of evidence--hence, their reliance on multiple epidemiological studies.

But this kind of research takes time. For example, a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) looked at the issue of what variables are confounded with silicone implants, and whether any of these variables were risk factors for connective tissue disease. Even if there were an association between implants and connective tissue disease, this would not necessarily imply a causal relationship. Another factor associated with both might account for the apparent relationship.

The JAMA study compared the characteristics of 80 women who had breast implants with 3520 women who had not (Cook, Daling, Voigt, deHart, Malone, Stanford, et aI., 1997). According to an American Medical Association press­release,

When compared to other women, the researchers found that women with breast implants were:

--nearly three times more likely to drink seven or more alcoholic beverages per week.

--more than 1.5 times as likely to be pregnant before age 20. --twice as likely to have at least one terminated pregnancy. --more than twice as likely to have ever used oral contraceptives. --about 4.5 times more likely to have ever used hair dyes --nearly nine times as likely to have had at least 14 sexual partners. --mud'i less likely to be heavy (Michalski, 1997).

Of these factors, hair dyes have been associated with an increased risk of connective tissue disease. Therefore, any association between silicone implants

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and connective tissue disease might be explained by a third factor--the fact that women who undergo breast augmentation are also more likely to dye their hair.

More research will be needed to determine if there are other relationships of this sort. It is even possible that women with implants are more likely to engage in some behavior that reduces the probability of connective tissue disease, thereby masking any problems caused by the implants themselves. It is impossible to absolutely prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no complex relationship between implants and some disease will ever be found. That is the nature of science.

How does this translate into advice for a company that wants to avoid what happened to Dow Coming? Based on this case, I would suggest the following:

1) Get potential stake-holders involved in the design process. Dow Coming felt it had done this--surgeons were intimately involved in the creation of the product, and also in the many modifications Dow Coming made to improve it. But there were other stake-holders, including the women who carried the implants and the FDA. For most drug manufacturers, interaction with the FDA is built-in. It wasn't for Dow Coming, which was an insulated, privately-held company that had little interaction with government agencies or the broader public before this nightmare began.

2) Pay attention to cases. When women reported symptoms, even though the science showed no problems, the company should have been all over it, making a concerted public effort to find out what was going on, sponsoring more research, etc.--all without creating any impression that the company believed the product was flawed. Similarly, in the Pinto case, Gioia admitted that he should have paid more attention to isolated reports of fiery explosions involving the car (Gioia, 1992) On April 4, 1993, a six-year old girl in Ohio was mortally injured by an air bag which expanded when her mother hit another car. This incident was the first of a series of similar cases that signaled air bags could injure small children who were not wearing seat belts (Brown & B.Ottaway, 1997). But it was another 3 years and sixteen more deaths before warning labels were issued, and a debate over the cost and benefits of air bags still rages.

Anecdotal evidence can be an important warning sign. In the case of silicone breast implants, it is not clear that the warning signaled a real problem. A company needs to take anecdotal reports seriously without privileging them over scientific data. At the very least, consumers need to be informed of all possible risks. But how to do this without causing unnecessary panic, especially when the scientific evidence does not support the anecdotal concerns?

It would be refreshing if companies and regulators could be totally honest in a situation like this, saying that while the scientific evidence suggests no problems with silicone breast implants, some consumers do complain of symptoms like the following, and include a list and where to get more information. In our current

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adversarial system, this sounds like a ridiculously naive strategy, almost an invitation for lawyers to sue. But what if we adopted a different model, one in which stakeholders worked together to create a safer product? We will have more to say about this in the next section.

3) Document what you do as a company to anticipate and avoid future negative impacts. Barie Carmichael lamented the 'killer memos' that caused Dow Corning trouble in court. One example is a memo written by Chuck Leach to Bob Levier, head of biological testing at Dow Corning. Leach was concerned about research on the problem of capsular contracture. He noted that Dow Corning's competitors were studying these problems, and noted that Dow's customers among the plastic surgeons were asking whether Dow Corning was conducting similar research. Leach said, "I assured them, with crossed fingers, that Dow Corning too had an active contracture/gel migration study underway.,,61

This memo was taken by the Associated Press and others as evidence that Dow Corning was lying to its customers, and it was used in court to discredit the company. Leach objected that he crossed his fingers as a sign of hope--he did not lie. He managed to get the AP to issue a correction, but the correction was published only in the Midland Daily News. (Associated Press, 1992).

Sometimes a 'killer memo' has to be written to draw attention to a problem-­but the resolution of the problem contained in the killer memo should also be recorded. In this case, Leach pointed out that he knew Dow Corning had already done extensive safety research, but he was not sure whether the company had research under way to test a new hypothesis: that the well-known problem of gel­bleed might exacerbate the well-know problem of capsular contracture (Leach, 1992). In fact, Leach's hopes were well-founded: research was under way on this topic. But the resolution to the incident was not remembered; only the 'killer memo'.65

4) Have a coherent framework for deciding whether new products will be harmful or beneficial, one that is easy to explain and justify to a broad spectrum of stake­holders. Dow Corning had a general code of conduct that included a commitment to "operate our facilities in a manner that meets or exceeds all applicable regulatory requirements. We will also plant and strive for continuous

64 Memo to B. Levier from C. Leach, March 31,1997, on the subject of "Contracture Formation".

65 Diana Vaughan noted similar 'killer memos' that gained wide attention in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster: "Incidents that when abstracted from context contributed to an overall picture of managerial wrongdoing became ordinary and noncontroversial. For example, after writing a 1978 memo objecting to the joint design, Marshall engineer Leon Ray helped develop corrections to the joint that assuaged his concerns, leading him to believe the design was an acceptable flight risk. Ray's memo became part of the official record, creating the impression that managers had been overriding engineering objections for years; his subsequent actions did not" (Vaughan, 1996, p.60)

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improvement in process efficiency, waste generation, and emissions to the environment. '>66

But these commendable goals were not accompanied by a philosophy like McDonough's principles or the Natural Step that provided a mental model for how to accomplish them.

Consider the system of product classification developed by the environmental chemist Michael Braungart, who is the head of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency in Europe and has formed a partnership with William McDonough called McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (http://www.mbdc.coml). Braungart classifies products into three categories:

1. Consumables: These are items like food and detergent that need to be free of toxins and any chemicals that will not biodegrade.

2. Products of Service: These include products like automobiles and televisions that cannot be biodegradable. According to Braungart, these sorts of materials would have to be leased from the manufacturer, who would take them back after use and recycle all the parts and materials into new products. This kind of recycling is not the same as what McDonough calls 'downcycling", in which a complex technical product like a computer is melted down to make plastic parts for automobiles. In Braungart's system, all the special metals and materials in the computer would have to be used again to make a new computer.

3. Unmarketables: These include things that should never be produced, like toxins that cannot be degraded into something harmless when recycled. DDT and radioactive waste might be examples. Those unmarketables that have to be manufactured while alternatives are being sought should have molecular tags that identify the manufacturer (Hawken, 1997).

Consider where silicone breast implants might fit in Braungart's scheme. They are not consumables. Firstly, there are groups that regard it as toxic. As this section has shown, these claims are dubious, but research continues. The point is, when has one done enough research to show that a product is not toxic? For any system of classification, one can only work from the best knowledge available at a particular time. Silicone one of the most bio-compatible materials, though it certainly could act as an irritant when it leaked.

Secondly, silicone breast implants should not be biodegradable, unless it could be guaranteed that they would not degrade over several lifetimes. The fact that

66 This quotation is from the "Principles of Environmental Management" section of the "Dow Corning Code of Conduct." More information can be obtained by contacting the company at P.O. Box 994, Midland, MI 48686-0994.

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silicone is relatively inert is an advantage from the medical standpoint, but not from the standpoint of converting wastes into food.

Could these implants become products of service which could be recycled by the manufacturer? The silicone in the implants would last well beyond the life of their owner. There are all sorts of ethical issues about how you would get the implants back after use. One could ask people to voluntarily donate the silicone in their bodies, in a manner similar to organ donations. One might even be able to offer some kind of discount for a Willingness to recycle, although this raises all kinds of ethical issues about the wealthy and the poor. Should rich people be the only ones whose bodies remain intact after death? Should Medicare cover the cost of recycling? Even if some kind of voluntary recycling program could be implemented, not everyone would agree to it.

Would silicone breast implants have to be classified as unmarketables, on recycling grounds? Silicone is used in a wide range of implants: it "is a component of artificial joints and heart valves, shunts and other tubings, disposable needles and syringes, and contraceptive implants (Norplant), as well as testicular and penile implants. Indeed, probably no American is without some silicone in his or her body, put there by some type of routine medical care--such as injections with silicone-lubricated needles and syringes" (Angell, 1996, p. 36).

Is there any alternative to silicone that would not have the same recycling problems? Implants made from triglyceride, a vegetable oil, are being offered as an alternative to silicone; this substance is used in intravenous injections; it can be metabolized by the body, but is also resistant to bacteria and fungi. Furthermore, Lipomatrix, the company that created it, is also including a code number on each implant on a miniature microchip, which will facilitate an audit trail that can incorporate disposa1.67 Therefore, implants made from triglyceride appear to follow the 'waste into food' analogy.

But it is not clear that soy, or any alternative, could cover the wide range of additional medical uses for silicone. One cannot have any medical device that would biodegrade in the body, nor can one recover such devices without patient consent.

Similarly, The Natural Step's second principle holds substances produced by society should not systematically increase in nature. Again, silicone-based medical products--and all other silicone products--are likely to increase over time as human beings continue to use them.

It is not clear that either of these frameworks will work in the medical device area, in their present form. But remember that their emphasis is on continuous

67 See "Plant oil and microchips imvprove safety," Chemistry & Industry Magazine News, Friday, September 26, 1997, http://ci.mond.org/95IS/95ISlO.html).

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improvement--on adding environmental criteria to design and working towards them. Perhaps a way could be found to make medical devices that would take a long time to biodegrade--perhaps a thousand years--but would still eventually turn into organic materials that could be absorbed by the biosphere. Perhaps there should be some incentives for recycling medical devices, or at least a donation program similar to the ones for organs. Perhaps medical devices need their own classification system.

Having such a system or framework both forces a company to reflect and also provides a defense against future litigation and regulation. It shows that a company is not merely reacting to regulation, it is proactive--it has a long-range vision that promotes safety and sustainability. It is to be hoped that companies in the medical implant business will work with people like McDonough and

8! Braungart on the development of such a system.

4.7.5 Can the legal system act as guardian against pollution?

Did the legal system protected the public from dangerous substances in the case of breast implants? Evidence suggests that Dow Coming underestimated the risk of rupture and silicone leakage and that there may be a very small additional risk of connective tissue disorder. Was that worth a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, bankruptcy and taking the product off the market? If this is the model for how medical devices ought to be handled, it is hard to imagine many companies being willing to pursue this market.

In the Dow Coming case, the legal system severely punished a company for polluting the human body in the absence of any real scientific evidence. The recent book A Civil Action describes the opposite: a case where a judge decided that groundwater from a site where toxic chemicals had been dumped could not have reached an aquifer (Harr, 1996). An appeals court upheld this conviction despite the fact that by the time of the appeal, the EPA and the USGS had established that the waste site had contaminated the wells drawing water from the aquifer. Here again, the court ruled against the science.

Carolyn Merchant, in her discussion of the partnership model of relations with nature, cites examples of companies, environmentalists and other stakeholders that form partnerships. The network formed to create Climatex Lifecycle is an example of such a partnership; it included the EPEA, an agency that functioned like a combination of a regulator and a consultant; Rohner Textil hired the EPEA to tell it what standards to meet and help it figure out how to meet them.

68 Susan Carlson, a mechanical engineer who specializes in design at the University of Virginia, is working on applying Braungart's product classification system to medical waste. It is collaborative teams like this one that will produce better classification systems as well as improved products.

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Could there have been a partnership between Dow Corning and its unhappy customers, a sense of working together towards a just solution that would keep a product many women wanted on the market, while helping those who wanted to get it out of their bodies? The legal model demands an adversarial relationship in court. Any effort to reach out to the other side can be interpreted as an admission of guilt. Of course, part of the goal of the adversarial court model is to promote settlement outside of court. But even these settlements can be motivated more by a need to eliminate the expense and grief of gambling on a trial than by a genuine desire to cooperate with another party in a just agreement.

One alternative is an independent panels of experts, like the one Federal District Judge Robert E. Jones used in December of 1996. These panels are supposed to be neutral, unlike the experts hired by attorneys to appear in court. But a sociologist of science who takes a radicru. perspective on Kuhn might argue that such panels could never be unbiased: the would probably be composed of normal scientists who would support the current paradigm and would not even understand a radically different view (Pinch, 1997). Such panels of experts are really a statement about our lack of confidence in the ability of the judicial system to understand science. Certainly the record on patent controversies has been poor, with frequent flip-flops in decisions about who invented what depending on which court was considering the appeal (Lewis, 1991:Hanson, 1982).

Under ideal circumstances, scientific experts presenting evidence would not be committed to either party in a litigation and juries would be so well-educated in matters scientific that they could reach an intelligent verdict. As Jasanoff argues, participants in the judicial system need a better understanding of science and scientists and engineers need a better understanding of the judicial system (Jasanoff, 1995). Public understanding of science is essential in a democracy, and reinforces the need for improved education in the processes by which invention and discovery really occur (see chapter 5).

Dow Coming is attempting to work out some kind of consensual agreement with all stakeholders that will enable it to emerge out of Chapter 11. As Gary Anderson, Dow Coming's President, said, "We are committed to continuing negotiations and hopefully achieving a resolution acceptable to all parties. We are also committed to compensating legitimate claims in our case based on implant rupture or problems caused by our products. But we continue to believe that sound scientific evidence should be the basis for resolving those claims."tII

69 This quotation is from a July 30, 1997 press release issued by Dow Coming, copies of which can be obtained by contacting T. Michael Jackson at (517) 496-6443. On August 26, 1997, Dow Coming announced a 2.4 billion dollar settlement plan that would include funds for women who wanted to have the implants removed and also for claims that implants contributed to disease. The company did not admit that there was any scientific proof that implants could cause disease, and still insisted on a causation trial for those women who did not vote for the settlement. The more women who vote for the

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A spur to this sort of agreement is a ruling by Judge Arthur J. Spector, of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Eastern District of Michigan, calling for common issue causation trials to resolve whether scientific evidence supports the claim that silicone breast implants cause disease. If this question is put to experts selected by an independent panel of scientists, the answer would clearly be no.

What if one had a moral framework and protocols that would protect one from almost any kind of possible future litigation, and that rendered regulation unnecessary? McDonough actually got started on his path to such a framework by the threat of litigation. He agreed to design a building for the Environmental Defense Fund, then found out they were going to sue him for any health hazards associated with the air in the offices. He carefully researched all the possible hazardous chemicals and materials, and made him realize how many ordinary products released gases he considered toxic.

McDonough's is not, of course, the only framework one could use (Shrivastava, 1997). Both Braungart's classification system and the Natural Step are complementary frameworks that could potentially be applied to a wide range of situations, though as we saw in the last section, they may need modification to work for medical devices. Any such framework should establish standards that guarantee, given everything that could have been known at a particular time, any product would exceed current standards for safety and environmental intelligence. It would put the company on record as having the goal of restoring the environment, demonstrating a real concern with long-term consequences. The commitment would have to be backed up with policies that ensured employees owned the companies values. Potentially, such a system could provide at least some protection against future legal action. To see how such frameworks could be used to produce and evaluate actual products, we need to consider a series of cases.

plan, the greater the settlements allowed. Initial reactions from implant plaintiffs have been negative; it remains to be seen whether this plan will gain wide acceptance (Miller, 1997).

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4.8 Design of an Environmentally Intelligent FabriclQ

Susan Lyons, Vice President of Design at DesignTex, a fInn specializing in the design and manufacture of textiles for commercial interiors, wanted her fIrm's next design to focus on sustainability. In February of 1991, she had helped launch a new line offabrics called the Portfolio Collection71 , a design that evolved out of collaboration with famous architects, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, and John Richard Meier. This collection was aesthetically innovative. Lyons wanted the next line to be about more than aesthetics; she wanted it to embody an issue.

Environmental responsibility seemed like a perfect choice. From a marketing standpoint, "green" design and manufacture were hot topics in the trade literature and she had been receiving inquiries from customers about how environmentally responsible DesignTex's products were.

But her desire to pursue an environmental agenda was not simply the result of customer demand. Ms. Lyons said she was raised not to waste. Her mother remembered the depression and "put her money where her mouth was before it was hip to do so", teaching her children to recycle and compost. She even rinsed out and re-used plastic bags! These values stayed with Lyons, who looked for an opportunity to apply them in the textile industry.

This new product line, thought Lyons, could maintain DesignTex's leadership in the commercial-fabrics design market. DesignTex was also a member of the Steelcase Design Partnership, a collection of design industries purchased in 1989 by Steelcase, a giant corporation located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that manufactured offIce furniture and supplies. Steelcase formed this partnership to capture a market that otherwise eluded the fIrm. Although the company was able to mass-produce profItably, it was not responsive to customers such as architects, who demanded specialty or custom designs. Small, nimble and entrepreneurial companies were able to meet the demands of this growing market better than Steelcase, and DesignTex was such a company.

In order to maintain DesignTex's ability to respond to the rapidly-changing, custom design market, Steelcase permitted DesignTex's management to operate autonomously. In fact, as a fabric supplier, DesignTex sometimes competed against Steelcase for contracts. Steelcase typically brought in DesignTex as a consultant, however, in matters involving specialty fabrics design. Susan Lyons

70 This section was prepared with the assistance of Matthew M. Mehalik, who wrote a series of educational cases based on the creation of this new, sustainable fabric. See Mehalik, M. M., Gorman, M. E., & Werhane, P. (1996) Des;gnTex. Inc. A & B (Business Case Nos. E-0099, E-OIOO), Mehalik, M. M., Gorman, M. E., & Werhane, P. (1997).Rohner Textil AG (A-D) (Business Case Nos. E-0107 to E-OllO), Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia. Also see Matthew M. Mehalik's Master's thesis in Systems Engineering, "Integrating an Environmentally Intelligent Design Protocol," available from the library at the University of Virginia. 71 "Portfolio Collection" is a registered trademark of DesignTex, Inc.

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summarized the relationship, "DesignTex is very profitable, and Steelcase receives a large amount of money from DesignTex's operation with no oversight, so Steelcase is happy to let DesignTex do its own thing. However, this situation could change if DesignTex's profitability began to decline." By taking the lead in the market for 'green' products, Lyons hoped DesignTex would maintain its autonomy.

Note here the mixture of motives that are often seen as separate: the desire for market leadership coincides with the desire to create a better world. There is a well-established market for 'green' products, exemplified by catalogues like Seventh Generation.. But Lyons would be selling her new line in a furniture­fabric market that did not have a 'green niche'. Lyons knew she "couldn't sacrifice anything for green agenda"; the next Portfolio collection had to be as beautiful and durable as the last.

To launch her project, Lyons began surveying the trade literature, contacted yarn spinners who claimed to be environmentally "correct," and paid attention to competitors who were also attempting to enter this market. She contacted some of the 40 different mills that contracted with DesignTex as suppliers. In December of 1992 she became interested in a sample of a fabric product line called Climatex.72

Mr. Albin Kaelin, Managing Director of Rohner Textil AG, a mill located in Switzerland, sent Lyons a sample.

4.8.1 The Making of an Environmental Manufacturer

Kaelin had been thinking about environmental design for years. His backyard is an organic garden. On a recent visit, Kaelin took me to the summit of Santis, a nearby peak, to admire the Alps stretching away forever. I went to college in Los Angeles and recognized the ozone haze that smeared our view. Los Angeles is surrounded by impressive mountains, but they can often be barely discerned, great gray lumps in a brown haze of nitrous oxide. What would the Swiss Alps look like from here in twenty years, I wondered? You didn't need to be the mythical 'rocket scientist' to realize something had to be done.

Rohner Textil is situated in a comer of Switzerland a few hundred yards from the Rhine, which in turn empties into nearby Lake Constance. Rohner Textil was dyeing much of the fabric in house. This meant that it had to treat and dispose of its waste water, which, if not properly treated, posed a potential threat to the largest drinking water reservoir in Europe. The cost of meeting strict Swiss regulatory requirements was high. Therefore, Kaelin had to think about environmental responsibility.

72 "Climatex" is a registered trademark of Rohner Textil AG.

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The Rohner mill was the smallest component of a much larger enterprise: Forster-Rohner, a company that consisted of five European textile mills with specialties that ranged from socks to jerseys and embroidery. Embroidery was their largest segment, consisting of over fifty percent of Forster-Rohner's manufactures. In addition, the embroidery output was the largest in Europe.

Rohner Textil had a total of thirty employees. In order for such a small company to remain useful to the larger enterprise and be competitive in general, it needed to remain at the cutting edge of providing the most creative and high quality upholstery fabrics, like DesignTex. The mill needed to be able to adjust quickly to the demands of customers who wanted small lots of unique upholstery designs. They also needed to remain price-competitive, and Kaelin wanted to increase production.

One of the first steps was to improve their looms to high-speed, Jacquard looms in 1987. These new looms would have produced more noise and vibrations than the old looms. This was a major problem, since the mill long had been part of a residential neighborhood in Heerbrugg. The building had been constructed in 1912, and the former parent company of Rohner Textil, Jacob Rohner AG had occupied it since 1947. A kindergarten stood across the street to the east, and houses surrounded the mill less than ten yards away on the other three sides. The vibrations from the new looms would disrupt the neighborhood and force regulators to eliminate the evening shift.

Moving the mill was not a viable option. Land in the region was prohibitively expensive, and the mill's current location was right next to the parent company, facilitating communication and cooperation.

Kaelin thus proposed to construct a special, independently-suspended floor on which all of the weaving equipment would be mounted. The floor would be designed to dampen the noise and vibrations. Kaelin succeeded in convincing Rohner to provide the necessary capital for the improvements. The new floor made the mill quieter than before the new looms were installed, and the looms increased flexibility, product quality and speed of production. With this new equipment, Rohner Textil was the first upholstery fabric weaver in the world to be able to produce fabrics with sixteen different colors in the weft, or crosswise, yarn. This ability permitted Rohner Textil's designers to create fabtics with richer, more complex and more beautiful color patterns. Kaelin showed that one could increase production and improve product quality without compromising one's ethical obligations toward the surrounding community.

An additional factor made Kaelin sensitive to environmental issues: it was expensive to dispose of his waste selvages. As the fabric came off of the loom the edges were cut to a uniform length and were sewn to secure the edge. Additionally, some fabric at the beginning and end of the fabric needed trimming to the proper length. These end-trimmings are the selvages, and they had to be disposed of carefully, because they were considered too toxic to put in a landfill.

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Some of the selvages were burned in the regional incinerator to generate electricity. The air pollutants were scrubbed before being released into the environment. This disposal procedure was very expensive. Overall, the waste selvages consisted of about thirty percent of the total environmental costs at Rohner Textil.

This cost was an extra burden for a company such as Rohner Textil which processed smaller lots of fabrics. For instance, Rohner might process a sixty­meter order for a fabric from which one meter of waste and selvages was generated. A company which processed larger orders might generate 2.5 meters of waste selvage for a 240 meter order. This meant that it was easier to distribute the disposal cost of the selvages to customers who ordered a larger lot size than those who ordered a smaller size.

In 1989, Kaelin realized that the only way to decrease these disposal costs was to pursue a more environmentally sustainable agenda. By late 1992 the mill had received certification by the German-based association, Eco-Tex. The institute, concerned with human ecology issues, tested Climatex for pH value, content of free and partially releasable formaldehyde, residues of heavy metals, residues of pesticides, Pentachorophenole (PCP)content, carcinogenic compounds, and color fastness. Having passed these tests, Climatex could bear the Eco-Tex trademark and was certified as containing no chemicals harmful to human beings and allergy­free. The process by which the material was manufactured was also free from harmful chemicals.

Such an approval constituted one of the most stringent environmental tests that could be performed on textiles at the time. This approval was an important step for Albin Kaelin and Rohner Textil; however, they had only slightly reduced their disposal costs. The tests did not certify that the products were completely ecologically safe outside the human sphere. Plants, domestic animals, wildlife, and ecosystems could be harmed potentially by the chemicals used in Climatex.

Here we return to one of the central ethical dilemmas of the environmental movement. Do we adopt what Carolyn Merchant (Merchant, 1997) calls an ecocentric view, in which ecosystems ought to be preserved for their own sake? Or do we adopt a homocentric view, in which the primary goal of environmental sustainability is to preserve human welfare? Eco-Tex standards were designed from a homocentric perspective, and Climatex met them. But one would have to do additional testing to be certain Climatex was also safe for the eco-system.

4.8.2 The OesignTeX/Rohner Textil Partnership

Susan Lyons asked Kaelin whether Climatex could be recycled. He responded that because Climatex was a blend of wool, ramie and polyester, no recycling was possible. Wool could potentially be recycled, if it were not treated with synthetics

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or dyes that made this impossible; ramie was a nettle and therefore also potentially recyclable. But when these two natural materials were mixed with a synthetic like polyester, they could not be recycled. In addition, recycling any commercial fabrics was questionable, because they were typically glued as upholstery, and the glue itself made recycling difficult.

But since the fabric was created without any chemical treatments, Kaelin pointed out that ..... the yarn in the fabric can be burned without any damaging chemical reaction." He explained that the fabric released a large amount of energy when burned, and he proposed using this energy in the operation of the mill.

By the middle of 1993, Susan Lyons had several options to consider for an environmental design in addition to Climatex. One of the obvious ones was organic cotton. But in order to get a full range of colors, the cotton had to be treated with chemicals, and required dyes that might or might not be safe from either a human or environmental standpoint. Paradoxically, the consequence was that organic cotton, as usually treated, could neither be recycled nor composted. Patagonia had gotten around this problem by using natural dyes, but the range of colors was limited. The Esprit Clothing Company had also put out a promising line of clothing based on organic cotton. Lyons contacted Esprit, but this company's designers felt uncomfortable with a collaboration that would take them into the commercial-fabric area. In general, cotton was a better fabric for garments than for furniture, which needed materials like worsted wool that could wear better under constant use.

An alternative solution using cotton was provided by Sally Fox, who spent a summer working as a hand-spinner for a cotton breeder and fell in love with the natural brown shades of cotton. Fox decided to try breeding natural cotton in different colors, strengthening the natural fiber so it could be spun directly without chemical treatment. The result was a natural cotton that needed no chemical processing. Furthermore, she was able to grow it organically, without pesticides. Potentially, it could end up being cheaper than commercial cotton, because of the high cost of treating and dyeing.

Foxfiber was another alternative for Susan Lyons, but again, it came in a limited variety of colors--Sally Fox was able to make shades like mocha brown and sage, but not the variety of colors furniture designers typically expect. Furthermore, the Foxfiber colors tended to fade. Washing would bring them back on garments, but furniture fabric could not be regularly washed in this way. Lyons wanted to make an environmental statement without sacrificing the full range of aesthetic possibilities.

Polyethylene Terephaltate (PET) yarn was another option. This yarn was made from recycled Coca-Cola bottles. Again, dyeing options appeared to be limited, though a range of colors was possible. Furthermore, what dyes there were contained environmentally 'unfriendly' chemicals. This meant that although PET

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was made by recycling, it could not be recycled itself. Finally, the suppliers were oriented towards apparel, not contract textiles of the sort used in furniture. Still, it told a good story about the virtues of recycling and had potential as a furniture fabric.

From a cost standpoint, Susan Lyons saw the options as relatively equivalent. From the standpoint of availability, Climatex had an edge because she knew Kaelin and trusted him to deliver. From the standpoint of aesthetics, organic cotton might have the greatest range, with Climatex PET and Foxfiber having more limited options, although in every case, it might be possible to work with designers to expand the available colors.

Which of these options would be best, if one put environmental sustainability first? In order to answer this question, Susan Lyons had to decide what environmental sustainability meant. Was being organic most important? If so, Foxfiber looked best. But what about waste? PET was designed to encourage recycling. On the other hand, Climatex could be used for fuel, thereby saving energy. Was saving energy the main issue? Everywhere she looked, Lyons saw trade-offs, and no obvious way to decide among them.

Lyons needed help deciding what counted as environmentally sustainable. The mental model behind the Portfolio Collection involved not only building a new fabric line around a theme, but also hiring a 'high practitioner' to guide development of the line. One name stood out from all the rest in the environmental area, as far as Lyons was concerned.

4.8.3 William McDonough's Contribution

In section 4.4.1, we presented an overview of McDonough's philosophy, in conjunction with his colleague Paul Hawkens. Like Susan Lyons, McDonough's concern for the natural environment began during his childhood. He was born in Tokyo and lived for a time in Hong Kong. It was his time in the Far East that opened McDonough's eyes to the limits on water, food, and energy. He recalls that at his first school in the United States, his peers thought he was eccentric for shutting off dripping water and urging others to take quick showers (Calmenson, 1995). Even though McDonough was the son of a Seagram's executive, his family had instilled a message similar to the one Lyons got from her mother. Nature abhors waste.

Susan Lyons knew McDonough's reputation as the world's foremost environmental architect. His architectural firm had created sustainable designs for a Wal-Mart store in Lawrence, Kansas, a daycare center for children in Frankfurt that allowed the children to manage the temperature through the use of shades and windows. He and Michael Braungart, one of the founders of Greenpeace (see 4.8.4 below) had written the Hannover Principles for the World's Fair in 2000, "a

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set of maxims that encourage the design professions to take sustainability into consideration. They are descriptive of a way of thinking, not prescriptions or requirements" (McDonough, 1992). These principles included eliminating the concept of waste and relying on natural energy flows and emphasized the interdependence of humanity and nature.

In October of 1993, Lyons and McDonough met. Reflecting on the meeting, Lyons said, "Two key principles hit home really hard, the idea that waste equals food and the idea of a cradle-to-cradle design, not a cradle-to-grave design." According to McDonough, in order to meet the waste equals food and cradle-to­cradle design criteria, the product had to be able either (1) to compost completely and safely, thereby becoming food for other organisms or (2) for all of its constituent materials to become raw material for another industrial product. Furthermore, one should not mix these two alternatives, or one would end up with a product that could be used neither as food for organisms nor raw materials for technology. McDonough was explicit: "I want a product free of mutagens, carcinogen~ bioaccumulative and persistent toxins, heavy metals and endocrine disrupters". He described this method of design as "environmentally intelligent" because it involved having the foresight to know that poisoning the earth is not merely unfriendly, but unintelligent.

McDonough went to visit Kaelin in Heerbrugg, Switzerland shortly afterwards, in October 1993. Kaelin picked him up at the airport and on the way, was stunned by McDonough's principle, "Waste equals food." He realized that his waste selvages problem could be eliminated if he pursued McDonough's philosophy of zero emissions. If what was coming out of his factory was suitable to be food for biological cycles, he would have no disposal costs.

For both Lyons and Kaelin, McDonough's waste equals food provoked moral imagination. Both saw that their prior mental models of environmental sustainability constituted only one of a set of possible views. Instead of trying to minimize wastes and work within a utilitarian system of trade-offs, one could work from a mental model based on the analogy of nature.

But coming up with a new mental model is not the same as making it work. Lyons and Kaelin had to reconsider all their options. According to McDonough, Climatex was no longer viable because it mixed the organic and technical nutrient cycles; you ended up with a product that could not be composted or recycled. PET had the same problem. According to McDonough, cotton was often raised in oppressive circumstances, so one would have to check carefully on how organic cotton was raised. Foxfiber would have fit McDonough's criteria, but there was still the problem of colors.

73 This quote is from the brochure on the William McDonough Collection issued by DesignTex. Copies can be obtained by writing DesignTex at 200 Varick Street, New York, N.Y. 10014.

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The only way to meet all the design constraints was to come up with a new fabric. If Climatex could be altered to make the result compostable, then it would fit McDonough's principles. Kaelin found that a mixture of wool and ramie would do the job. Wool was compostable, of course, and Ramie was a nettle, so it could be composted, too--if there was nothing in the dyes or the way the fabric was treated that would leave any toxic residue.

In order to be sure, every process used in the creation of the fabric would have to be thoroughly inspected and certified. McDonough suggested that his close colleague, Dr. Michael Braungart of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA) in Germany, could do this. In the 1970s, Braungart was inspired by the ideas put forth by the Club of Rome on waste disposal. He obtained a degree in Chemical Engineering because he saw this kind of expertise as a way of having maximum impact in this area. He met and married Monika Griefhahn, the founder of Greenpeace, and Braungart became the head of Greenpeace' s chemistry department. Greenpeace adopted an adversarial position towards industry, protesting practices that produced waste.

An opportunity for partnership came when Braungart lowered himself down a smokestack at Ciba Geigy, to stop production until the company's emissions permits were renewed. The CEO Alex Krauer approached him and asked if they could work together, instead of fighting. Unlike Swanson and McKennon, who were never able to work together in the breast implant controversy, Braungart and Krauer began a path to collaboration.

Braungart founded the EPEA in 1987 so he could consult with companies like Ciba Geigy on improving their processes and improving their products. Originally, the word 'Enforcement' was in the EPEA's title, but McDonough convinced Braungart to change it to 'Encouragement' and the two began an active partnership in the 1990s.

In 1989, Braungart created the Hamburg Environmental Institute, a non-profit organization that would complement the EPEA. One of the first projects was a system for cleaning up waste water in developing countries. Sewage-contaminated water is a leading cause of disease, globally. The Institute's system involved digging a series of settlement basins that were specifically designed to recycle fertilizer and depended on a tropical climate. These tanks gradually became ponds with algae, plants and fish. The idea was to create a system that could be used in the poorest areas because recycling fertilizer would greatly reduce the amount of new fertilizer needed. In some areas, this system could even produce biogasses that could be used for heating. In this cycle, waste becomes food and energy and water is purified.

Alexander Graham Bell based his mental model for a telephone on an analogy to the human ear. Similarly, I think this system is an embodiment of Braungart's mental model. Instead of trying to install expensive new sewage systems in poor towns, the Institute created a technology based on an analogy to nature that would

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treat water while providing food and energy. One could apply a similar mental model to the elimination of waste in other technological systems.

Braungart traveled to Kaelin's mill in December of 1993. His evaluation required him to examine all stages of the fabric-construction process. Because the mill was involved with the fabric weaving, he also inspected the mill's suppliers: farmers, yarn spinners, dyers and twisters. Yarn spinners created a cord of yarn/thread from the pieces of individual material fibers, such as wool. Yarn twisters take two or more cords of thread/yarn and twist them together, producing a much thicker and stronger piece of yarn. Dyers added the colors to the yarn. Finishers added chemicals to the finished weave to make it more durable, flame resistant, static resistant, and stain resistant, if such qualities were required.

By the end of January 1994 Albin Kaelin had created a new blend of ramie and wool that he called Climatex Lifecycle14• Kaelin had sent Braungart all of the security datasheets and production details pertaining to the chemicals and dye substances used in the manufacturing of Climatex Lifecycle.

At the beginning of March 1994, Braungart gave Kaelin and Lyons bad news. The chemicals used in the dye materials did not meet the design protocol. Furthermore, questions involved in the manufacture of Climatex Lifecycle's dye chemicals could not be answered by examining the security data sheets, even though they had passed the Eco-Tex standards. To make certain every element of this fabric could become part of a natural cycle, Braungart had to gain complete access to the manufacturing processes of the dye suppliers. Dye formulas are closely-guarded secrets. The dye companies would have to open their books to one of the leaders of Greenpeace, someone not exactly known for his sympathy to large corporations

More than a fabric was at stake, here--McDonough saw this design process as one of the first steps toward a second industrial revolution. Climatex Lifecycle was going to be an existence proof of this revolution, an embodiment of the design principles that would constitute an answer to those who said, "But this kind of uncompromising environmental protocol is impossible to implement."

Initially, it looked as though the cynics would be right. Kaelin contacted Rohner's dye suppliers and asked them to cooperate with Braungart. By the end of March, Braungart had contacted over 60 chemical companies worldwide; none had agreed to open their books for his inspection.

Fortunately, Braungart and the EPEA had consulted with Ciba-Geigy in 1991 and 1992, advising them on how to improve their products. Braungart was able to persuade Ciba Geigy to open its books by arguing that if there were nothing toxic coming out of Ciba Geigy's factory, there would be nothing to regulate, and Ciba

74 "Climatex Lifecycle" is a registered trademark of Rohner Textil AG.

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Geigy would not have to worry about unforeseen litigation due to long-term toxicity.

Here we come back to the issue we raised at the end of the Dow Corning section (4.7). Can a protocol like Braungart's protect a company against future litigation and regulation? If so, it will have enormous economic as well as ethical benefits over the long run. But note the way in which implementation of this kind of protocol depends on a regulatory climate that encourages companies to innovate their way out of regulation.

Braungart conducted tests throughout April and May 1994 and found that only 16 out of the 1800 available dyes passed the protocol. Any color could be created from a combination of these 16 dyes, but when they were combined to create black, the resulting chemical reaction produced a chemical that would not pass the protocol. McDonough made a virtue out of this by comparing the Model T and Climatex Lifecycle:· in the first industrial revolution, you could get any color as long as it was black, in the second, any color but black.

After overcoming this hurdle with the dye companies, DesignTex and Rohner made preparations to sell their product to a very large customer, Steelcase, which averaged a dominant 21 percent of the United States office furniture industry. Recall that Steelcase owned DesignTex, but gave it a great deal of independence-­which meant that DesignTex could sell to Steelcase, or one of its competitors, or both.

Still a sale to Steelcase would be a big moral boost, as well as a financial milestone. Susan Lyons made arrangements to use the McDonough Collection fabric on Steelcase's award-winning Sensor chair, over one million of which had been sold from 1986 to 1990, and which was now considered an industry benchmark. This was an opportunity for the McDonough Collection to reach beyond any kind of 'green niche' market to a large customer base.

However, Steelcase introduced a new test required of all fabrics to be used on its furniture. Climatex Lifecycle had already passed or exceeded all International Standards Organization (ISO) and Swiss textile standards. The new Steelcase hurdle was not the result of a new standard, but a consequence of Steelcase's introducing robotics into its manufacturing processes. During the upholstering process for molded seating, robotic machinery gripped the fabric tightly and wrapped the fabric around the shells of chairs. The new test made sure that the fabric would not slip out of the robotic machinery.

Climatex Lifecycle failed to pass the new test: the ramie content of the fabric made the fabric unable to stretch in order to pass the new test. The test was ripping the fabric instead of stretching it. Lyons wrote to Kaelin, "Well, this is an adventure--everything failed on Steelcase... The reason for failure was cited as a lack of stretch in the filling direction. I am thinking that the ramie may be too rigid ... ".

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At Rohner, Kaelin and the other textile technicians proceeded to make the fabric less rigid so that it could pass the new test. They tried a number of approaches, but the only ones that were successful involved adding chemicals to the fabric. The chemicals were applied after the fabric had been dyed and woven during the finishing process. The chemicals made the fabric more stretchable. The team came up with four different finishing chemicals that permitted the fabric to pass the Steelcase robot test.

All four chemicals were from Ciba Geigy, and were open to inspection by the EPEA. The EPEA approved only one, and the EPEA expressed its dissatisfaction with the addition of any chemicals. It could pass the EPEA protocols, but only with the caveat that Rohner would have to commit to eliminating it. Plus, the addition of the new finishing chemical meant that the fabric would now have to be re-tested according to all of the ISO and ACT standards.

Kaelin decided that it was more important to compromise the protocol just a little in order to have access to such a large market for the fabric. He decided to permit the use of the finishing chemical the EPEA had reluctantly approved and dedicate future efforts to eliminating it.

The economist and psychologist Herbert Simon has discussed how most administrators like Kaelin are more interested in satisfying than optimizing (Simon, 1981). Ron Giere has applied this approach to how scientists choose among alternate hypotheses (Giere, 1988). The McDonough/Braungart protocols focused on optimal environmental sustainability; instead of a set of utilitarian trade-offs between waste and economics, they seek no emissions. A satisficer in a similar situation might look at the set of alternatives that fulfill the minimum regulatory requirements, then rank them, and pick one.

Kaelin, up until this point, has been optimizing, searching for the absolute best solution. At this stage, in order to fulfill the demands of a customer, he satisfices, picking an alternative that fulfills the letter of the protocol. But he is not really a satisficer, because he remains committed to continuous improvement. The extra chemical was merely a stopgap measure to be used until Braungart, Kaelin and the rest of the team found something better.

4.8.4 Employee autonomy within a moral framework

The fabric was released to the public in a grand display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in June 1995. It won "Best of the Show" award in Chicago in June 1995 at the NEOCON convention, the largest annual gathering of textile design companies. The fabric became available to the DesignTex sales offices in late August 1995. The sales force learned about the fabric by watching a video presentation of McDonough and listening to an audio tape conversation of

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Susan Lyons. Both presentations underscored the importance of the design protocol in creating "environmentally intelligent" products.

Initial sales reports from DesignTex and Rohner were very positive. Swiss TV dedicated two reports, one seven minutes, the other three minutes long, to highlight the operations of the Rohner mill in October 1995 and in April 1996. The product was introduced to the European Market in January of 1996. It remains to be seen whether it will serve as a model for a 'second industrial revolution', as McDonough hopes, but it is serving to inspire other companies to develop new environmentallY sustainable products following the McDonoughlBraungart protocols.

One day, during the Spring of 1996, Kaelin noticed on the shelf a dye auxiliary container bearing a label not from Ciba Geigy, the company whose chemicals had been approved by the EPEA for Climatex Lifecycle yarn. Paul FlOckiger, dyemaster at Rohner Textil AG, decided to substitute one of the dye auxiliary chemicals a salesperson offered for one they were currently using in their compostable fabric line, Climatex Lifecycle. The salesperson argued his dye auxiliary contained no chemicals harmful to the environment and was much less expensive than the one they were currently using. FlOckiger knew the salesperson was right. If Rohner Textil used this dye, the fabric would still be compostable, and it would now be a little cheaper to make.

Mr. FlOckiger believed he acted within his authority. His autonomy had been reinforced by Kaelin, who believed that employees with appropriate expertise like Fltickiger should be given the authority to take measures to improve quality in every process and product. FlOckiger was literally a dye Master, having gone through an apprenticeship to learn his craft as well as a formal degree program. Kaelin's management style was to act as a collaborator with his top-level employees, turning them into a team of leaders.

Kaelin thought that FlOckiger's judgment was probably correct, meaning that he understood the overall 'waste equals food' mental model; however, the protocol required that all decisions affecting the manufacture of the fabric be checked with the EPEA. This problem relates to Roger Schank's (Schank & Abelson, 1977) classic distinction between schemata and scripts, which we discussed briefly in the section on moral imagination (4.3). To review, a mental model is a kind of schema, in that it is a way of representing one's expectations about what will happen. 'Waste equals food' became a principle which Kaelin translated into a mental model of the design process, based on an analogy to nature, in which all wastes are food for other organisms.

75 William McDonough and Michael Braungart have created McDonough!, Braungart Design Chemistry as a joint venture, and are pursuing projects with companies like Guilford of Maine and Ben & Jerry's. For more information, see their Web page at http:www.mbdc.com.

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But mental models alone are not sufficient. One needs plans, heuristics and what Schank calls scripts, borrowing from theater, where actions among players are scripted in advance. Similarly, Schank thought a lot of our everyday interactions were scripted.

Kaelin was concerned that Fliickiger had fallen back into the "old" way of thinking. But the evidence suggests that Fliickiger understood the overall mental model that guided the development of Climatex Lifecycle. What he had failed to internalize was a new script that required him to check with the EPEA before making any decisions.

In order to invent a fabric, Kaelin had to create a network of suppliers, consultants, and employees. Like most such networks, Climatex Lifecycle's was operating in a hostile environment (Law, 1987). The textile industry was in a recession, companies near Rohner Textil were going out of business, the EPEA was a new, experimental organization, DesignTex needed to have Steelcase as a customer. Every day presented new challenges that threatened to destabilize the network.76 Each decision that impacted the network had to be owned by others.

As Fliickiger predicted, when the EPEA inspected the new dye, they approved it. But Kaelin realized he had to work harder to communicate the delicate balance between autonomy and scripted actions. Climate x Lifecycle was the invention of a system of distributed and shared cognition. There were certainly individual heroes and champions, but no one of them could safely be labeled the inventor. Therefore, decisions had to be shared.

This case does illustrate how moral imagination can be translated into action. William McDonough supplied Susan Lyons and Albin Kaelin with a new mental model for creating products, based on an analogy to natural systems. This mental model had to fall on fertile ground for it to succeed. Both Lyons and Kaelin were capable of working together with McDonough, Braungart and others to create a network that would actually produce the new fabric, surmounting obstacles like the dye company's initial resistance and Steelcase's new tests.

At a number of these points, there one would have expected a temptation to abandon the project, or at least postpone it, doing further research while sticking with safer alternatives like the original Climatex. But one senses no hesitation on the part of Lyons and Kaelin; they were willing to make some compromises, like adding a chemical to satisfy Steelcase's tests, but never considered abandoning the project.

In part, this is because both Lyons and Kaelin were in an 'innovate or die' situation. DesignTex depends on a steady flow of new products for its existence,

76 For other challenges faced by Kaelin, see the Rohner Textil series of cases authored by Matthew M. Mehalik under the supervision of Mike Gonnan and Patricia Werhane, Darden Case Bibliography E· 0106.

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and Kaelin needed a way to survive the recession in the textile industry--he needed to create a new market, and be the leader in it. But their decision to innovate in the environmental direction was a fundamentally ethical one.

Lyons and Kaelin are heroes, but not in the classic Campbellian sense of the lone innovator who goes on a voyage of self-discovery and comes back with a discovery or invention that transforms the world. McDonough is more in this mold, with his inspiring vision. Instead, Lyons and Kaelin are both people who would be very uncomfortable with the label 'hero'; they work by creating networks and sharing credit with others. Innovation demands charismatic entrepreneurs who seize the pulpit and 'lead the charge' towards change; it also demands entrepreneurs who work out of the limelight, helping create and maintain the networks that make change possible.

One of the greatest threats to such networks is the urge for each individual to claim more than her or his share of the credit. Mihaly Csikzentmihaly's interviews of creative individuals included people like Hazel Henderson, founder of Citizens for Clean Air, and John W.Gardner, founder of Common Cause, who have devoted their lives to bringing about a better world (Csiksenmihalyi, 1996). One of the major lessons they learned was that they had to share credit and indeed, eventually step out of the way and let their fledgling networks learn to operate without them. If Climatex Lifecycle continues to grow and expand as a model for new products, it will be because newcomers to the network feel they can both help make the world a better place and receive credit for doing so.

4.9 Current solar income

The Climatex Lifecycle case illustrates the importance of waste equals food and cradle-to-cradle, not cradle to grave. Another one of the pluses articulated by Hawken and McDonough involves running off current solar income--or, as The Natural Step puts it, "substances from the Earth's crust must not systematically increase in the biosphere." Climatex Lifecycle does not fulfill this principle; its manufacture produces no waste and due to the increased efficiency of new equipment, Kaelin's mill uses less energy across the board than it did a few years ago. But Climatex Lifecycle would be even more intelligent if it were run off current solar power.

Conservation is one way to achieve the "run off current solar" goal and technology can help this process, via development of new energy-efficiency power generators, creation of new insulation materials and other important designs (Lovins, Lovins, & Zuckerman, 1986).

Another, complementary way is to tap into alternate energy sources like wind, biomass and the source of solar income. In the following sections, we will

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consider the tale of two inventor/entrepreneurs in the solar energy area, neither of them inspired directly by McDonough's framework or The Natural Step, but both seeking to tap the sun's energy in different ways for different markets.

4.9.1 A.C. Rich and Sun

While writing this morning, I was interrupted by a gurgling sound in the hall behind my office. It was my attempt to work from current solar income--a solar water heater, sold to me by an inventor/entrepreneur who seemed to me to have Campbellian qualities. I met A.C. Rich when he came to fix the installation of this solar water heater in our home. My wife and I had two children, and were concerned about the impact of our growing family on the environment, particularly as we were using cloth diapers and washing them ourselves. We will return to the installation and gurgling problems later, because they are important parts of building the network necessary for successful environmentally sustainable technologies.

Rich had an original design for a solar water heater that looked like it might help alleviate our concerns about the possibility of a global greenhouse effect. As a brochure from his company, American Solar Network, Ltd., said:

The a:vera~e home water heater emits over a ton of hydrocarbon pollutants mto the atmosphere each year, as much as the average car! A solar water heater can prevent over 1,400 lbs. of these pollutants from being emitted. 77

Rich also claimed, "If 50 percent of the homes in the United States had a solar collector, it would eliminate 12 large nuclear, coal, and oil generating plants."

Rich's salesman was careful to point out that statistics in brochures are not a sound basis for estimating the effects of a solar heating unit in a particular climate. In our part of Virginia, we might realize 50% of the gains that one would get in a climate with more sunlight. Still, we felt it was bound to reduce the amount of energy we consumed. The payback period, in terms of savings, would be five or six years; we were happy about that, but more concerned about the environmental benefits.

Our motive illustrates a fundamental problem with many environmentally beneficial technologies. The initial cost of Rich's system, with installation, was very high--around $2000 for the high-capacity system we bought. Most families could not afford this without a loan, and if they got a loan, they would have to be certain that the monthly savings on energy would equal or exceed their loan payments. There were obviously no guarantees.

77 Unless otherwise noted, all information in this section is from Michael E. Gorman, American Solar Network A and B, UV A-E-0097 TN in the Darden Case Bibliography (www.darden/caselbib)

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So for us, and I suspect others who bought this system, it was an ethical decision, more than an economic one. But how many people are willing or can afford to invest in the environment in this way? To have a major environmental impact, systems like Rich's need to be on thousands of homes.

To put it in other terms, Rich could probably sell to a small, 'green' market, but the competition would be tough: catalogues like Real Goods are full of other solar designs. Like Lyons, Rich wanted to reach people who wouldn't ordinarily have considered solar.

Rich called his system a 'Solar Sky lite' because it looked like a skylight--it would not detract from the appearance of the house. Furthermore, the panels were made of plastic, not glass, which meant it was very light and relatively easy to install and remove. It also appeared to be low maintenance--all we had to do was add water once in a while.

Water sat in black plastic tubing on our roof, which had a good southern exposure, until it was warm enough to trigger a sensor that started a pump, which circulated the hot water around a tank that held the water coming into our house. The water in Rich's Skylite never came in contact with the water we used to wash diapers or take showers. The system worked on the exchange of heat between water on our roof and water coming in from the city, with the pump operating only when the water in the collector was significantly warmer than the water in the house. This is called a 'closed-loop' system.

His innovative design included two inventions. He had patented a 'floating valve manifold' which allowed the water to fall into the drainback tank whenever the pump was not operating, thereby preventing the water from freezing. When the pump started up again, a floating ball rose and closed an L-shaped joint which prevented water from falling into the drainback tank, instead forcing it into the solar collector.

He also patented vents in the solar panel which released steam when the water became too hot. In other words, Rich's system could use water and not anti-freeze, and the only thing we had to do was add a little water every now and then to replace what had vented.

Rich had a team of local contractors install our system. Plastic tubing ran down from the roof to our basement, where it went into a separate hot water tank. The water from the city came into this tank, where it was pre-heated by the water from the roof before it ran into our regular tank. The man who installed our system made a mistake--the pump that circulated the water on our roof began overheating almost immediately, and we had to turn it off. Rich came down personally to solve it, which he did by moving the pump from the top of the water tank to the side. His installer had followed a script that did not work for our situation.

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I took this as an opportunity to ask Rich a few questions about how he came to be an inventor and marketer of solar heating systems. What emerged was a kind of Campbellian hero's tale, characteristic of many passionate inventors who are obsessed with their work. When asked about his motivations for entering the field of solar power, Al Rich answered, "As a young boy, I was aware that what I was 'going to do when I grew up' wasn't invented yet." But, he added, "I didn't know that I was going to invent it."

Born in 1950, Rich spent part of his youth as an auto mechanic. He liked to re­tool cars for speed and drag race them. In July of 1977, he took ajob at a summer camp in Colorado, where he was asked to help install a solar water heater for the camp pool. He said he 'lit up' at the thought of doing this. He saw solar technology as a way of combining his love of tinkering with an emerging awareness of global ecological problems. During his college years, he became active in the environmental movement, organizing and participating in senior seminars and conferences. His exposure to environmental issues at school, as well as the mid-70's oil crisis, further developed his interest in solar power and the environment.

After graduation in 1979, Rich started selling a solar water heating system designed by his father-in-law. Rich was dissatisfied with the design, but his father-in-law didn't want to improve it, so he and Rich parted ways. Here we see the classic inventor, who is impatient with what is, looking always for what ought to be.

Recall that Bell also had differences with his father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard; the former wanted to focus on the transmission of speech, while the latter argued that multiple telegraphy was the real opportunity. Bell eventually managed to convince Hubbard that speaking telegraphy was worth supporting, and Hubbard's support was critical to Bell's success. In contrast, Rich was not able to convince his father-in-law to support a novel design.

It was at about this time that the U.S. Government implemented the Energy Efficiency Tax Credit that encouraged energy conservation and the development of alternative energy sources. The 1973 energy crisis made the United States realize its dependence on natural resources, particularly fossil fuels. The OPEC oil embargo led to gas lines and huge increases in the price of oil, forcing Americans to conserve. In 1978, the U.S. Government and many states decided to implement tax credits for anyone who installed a solar water heater prior to January 1, 1985. Federal income taxes allowed a credit of 40% off the entire solar domestic water heater expenditure, up to a maximum credit of $4000. (A tax credit is a reduction in the total amount of taxes owed to the IRS. It generally saves more than a deduction, which is applied only to the taxable income, not the total amount owed.) A combination of increased energy awareness and the government tax credit led to a surge of growth in the solar industry, including the installation of approximately 950,000 active solar systems and 200,000 passive solar systems

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were installed during this period of remarkable growth in the solar industry. An active system requires electricity to run the pump that circulates the water; a passive system needs no energy other than the sun. Al Rich saw the tax credit as an opportunity to capitalize on his expertise; he founded his own solar services company, A.C. Rich and Sun, in July 1979. He also worked as a consultant and trainer for companies entering the solar market, and he installed the ftrst two solar systems used by the United States Navy.

In 1981, Rich became the district manager for Sears Solar at the Herndon, Virginia branch. The fact that Sears entered the solar heating market is an indication of the expanded business made possible by the Energy Efftciency Tax Credit. Over the next four years, Rich succeeded in making the Herndon offtce the top· producing sales branch of the company in the United States, selling a volume of $2.5 million annually. He was in charge of the management and training of 53 employees from all areas of the company, ranging from sales to installation. In 1985, however, the tax credit that had given such a boost to the solar industry expired, causing Sears Solar to be one of over 5,000 companies to close its doors.

After the end of the era of federal tax credits, American consumers on the whole were disenchanted with the high-priced, unattractive solar water heaters that were available. The poor reliability and prohibitive cost of these systems, coupled with rapidly declining fuel prices, spelled the demise of a vast majority of companies selling solar water heaters. Fuel prices had dropped from those experienced in the mid-70's, and the country became apathetic to matters concerning the conservation of natural resources.

Rich kept his company alive during this difftcult period by taking out a second mortgage on his home, scrambling for backers, and obtaining grants from states like New Hampshire, which provided him a $14,900 grant under its Appropriate Technology Project in 1991. Although still based in Virginia, he installed his solar water heating system in several homes in New Hampshire as part of a model project and documented that it saved on heating bills. He was clearly committed to his invention and has sunk most of his own resources into it. He had an ambitious goal: "Henry Ford had a vision of an automobile for every family, and I have a vision of a solar water heater for every family." Here was an inventor who wanted to 'do well by doing good'.

A.C. Rich and Sun continued to operate; it was one of the remaining four percent of solar companies to stay in business after the tax incentives were removed. Rich started servicing the solar water heating systems that were installed during the tax credit era. Over 1 million of these systems had been placed in homes between 1978 and 1985. This work made him acutely aware of the problems with existing solar water heaters; they were over-priced, unattractive, and cumbersome.

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In 1987, Al Rich decided to use his expertise to design and market a new domestic solar water heater, one that would be less expensive and pleasing to the eye. Actual work began on the "Skylite" water heater in 1988. AI Rich created another company to further the development and manufacture of the "Skylite" system: American Solar Network, Ltd. (ASN), which was incorporated on February 2, 1989. This meant he could seek investors in his new product.

4.9.1.1 The Skylite System

A customer's needs are not given or discovered, but must be created. (Bucciarelli, 1994 p. 149)

When Al Rich decided to design his own solar water heater, he asked himself, "What do people want?" as well as "Is there a need?" In Rich's opinion, the answer to the second question was "Yes." For evidence, he cited words of one of his satisfied Skylite ·customers who said, "I had always liked the idea of solar water heaters because they could save my family a lot of money. My main objection to them is that, to me, they were ugly and far too expensive." Rich did not do a market survey to determine whether his invention was needed; instead, he set out to create a need.

William McDonough likes to remind his lecture audiences that design typically involves three components: cost, performance and aesthetics. This quote from a customer emphasized cost and aesthetics. Performance was also an obvious factor. To these components, McDonough wanted to add the kind of environmental intelligence exemplified by the Climatex Lifecycle fabric. 18 Although Rich knew nothing about McDonough's framework, he obviously hoped he was creating an environmentally intelligent product.

Rich's experience suggested that most consumers thought of solar water heaters as expensive and unattractive, based in part on the fact that the tax credits had led to a proliferation of inferior systems which also failed on the performance criterion. Rich felt that if he could design and market an inexpensive, aesthetically pleasing, solar water heater, the customers would emerge. As he worked on his design, it occurred to Rich that his ideas might be patentable. On June 16, 1989, Al Rich submitted an application for his first patent. After almost a year of revisions and debates about the uniqueness of his designs, Rich was awarded his first patent, #4930492, on June 5, 1990. In 1993, Rich was awarded a second patent that detailed further improvements to his original Skylite product.

Let's take a closer look at Rich's system (see Figure 19). The water on the roof is heated in the Skylight solar collector, made of light, plastic panels containing

78 McDonough also wants to incoporate social justice into design (see Salmeson, 1995).

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tubes made of black rubber. When the water on the roof is warmer than the water in the' Solar Tank', a differential triggers a pump which circulates the heated water around the tank. Inside the tank is the water the household uses to wash dishes, take showers, etc.; this household water is transferred to the regular hot water tank, where it can be heated to the desired household temperature. Rich's system included a timer and a drainback tank so that water could be drained out of the system at night and during the winter.

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Solar "SKYLITE"TM Water Heater Patented "Floating valve" manHold

5. Drainback Tank

1 r

2. Snap Sw~ch 1 . Solar Thermal Collector

110 von Timer

--HOi Water Cold Water Source Heated Solar WaterOul

rll---!h To Household

3. Pump -,..----r.-..

Superior ~ gtazlng: Unbreakable 1/4' double waled, single extrusion. ttansparent poIycatbonate glazing. Much stronger than gIa$s and far superior to 04her non-gIass gIazlngs.

High pertormance-. Long-IasIing, freeze- and conosIor>­proof EPOM rubbef absortler wi1h closely spaced now channels for superior heat transIet.

Figure 19

Rigid InauIatIon .,-n: Cfosad cellnsuIaIion wi1h protec1ive backing pnMdes structural rigidity and high heat retention.

4. Solar Tank

Schematic for AC. Rich's Solar Skylite system.

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Rich's goal was to make the system cheap and easy to maintain. He used plastic instead of glass on the panels to make them easy to install and remove, even though plastic reduces the amount of the sun's energy that reaches the water on the roof. He used EPDM rubber in his collectors because this material was light, flexible and could withstand freezing. Rich also designed the solar panels to look like skylights, so they would enhance the appearance of a house on which they were mounted.

The system on my roof has worked reasonably well for about six years now. The Solar Sky lite is designed to vent steam when the water on the roof gets too hot, and so the water level needs constant monitoring. So far as we can tell, the system has not leaked, though it made it hard to put in a new roof--we had to find a creative roofer who could work around our Solar Skylite, in effect sealing it into our roof. This means it would be very difficult to remove if we ever sold the house. We have also had to pay for repair of the drainback tank, which developed a leak and whose fittings rusted and had to be replaced. These are the sorts of repairs many homeowners could make themselves, especially if the inventor were nearby to consult.

Al Rich's original plan had been to mass produce the Solar Skylite, driving its costs below $1000 a system. He had a production facility set to go in Herndon, Virginia and a small pool of investors. Unfortunately, he never got the sales in Virginia, and we lost the benefit of local service and support.

One of the things Rich had tried to do to secure financial support was work with utilities in Virginia. Paradoxically, utilities have a strong interest in promoting technology's like Rich's that reduce power consumption. What utilities typically want to avoid is the construction of new power plants--the initial investment is high, and the payback long and uncertain. So utilities often encourage consumers to adopt technologies that will conserve energy, especially at times of peak demand for power.

In 1991, while struggling in Virginia, Rich heard about a Solar Domestic Water Heating Program, sponsored by the Sacramento, California Municipal Utility District (SMUD) which offered rebates and low-interest financing to customers with the goal of encouraging the use of solar water heaters. Consider an example. The cost of one of Al Rich's systems in Sacramento, fully installed, would be $2850. The rebate to the customer would lower the cost to approximately $850 to $2,000 which SMUD would finance to the customer for ten years at $25 a month, or about what the customer would save in electricity. ASN would get paid up front for the full cost of the system.

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As a result, Al Rich moved his company to Sacramento, California, in 1992 to participate as a contractor in the SMUD program. In addition to the financial incentives, the climate in Sacramento was perfect for solar collection.

Collaboration with SMUD spurred an increase in ASN's sales and revenues, even though ASN was in competition with other solar heating companies. Unfortunately, the program was shut down twice--once in 1992 for restructuring and again in 1993 to train the energy auditors sent out by SMUD. It was these auditors who provided the leads on which Rich and other solar contractors depended. Rich estimated that ASN lost over $150,000 as a consequence of these shutdowns. Furthermore, sales were far lower than he had hoped--an average of 1.5 per week, which was insufficient to maintain ASN. He was forced to sell an 80 percent stake in his other company, AC-Rich and Sun (ACRS), to payoff $25,000 in debts.

On February 15, 1995, a more serious problem emerged. The manager of the SMUD program accused ACRS of serious ethical abuses. ACRS installed and repaired a number of different types of solar heating system, not just those sold by ASN. One of ACRS's salespeople had recommended the replacement of at least two systems that were functioning well. The SMUD program provided insurance for faulty systems, and that replacement policy had allowed ACRS to file a claim with SMUD for replacing the systems.

SMUD put ACRS on probation without warning and based on what Al Rich felt were incorrect conclusions. Although ACRS was allowed to participate in the program, SMUD would pay for the next ten ACRS installations only if SMUD inspected and approved them. Furthermore, ACRS was not allowed to replace any damaged systems for six months. Competitors moved in to take advantage of this situation, and word spread that ACRS was not a reliable or ethical company. Because Al Rich's reputation was tied up with both companies, the small trickle of leads for ASN systems dried up. Sales went from $108,509 in February to $55,169 in April, and the two companies shrank from 22 employees to 10.

At first, Rich was mortified and contrite--his reputation meant a great deal to him. But further investigation into the problem led him to conclude that the salesman had not acted unethically--he had simply made a mistake. This salesman had seen evidence of leaking and assumed it meant that the two systems were freeze-damaged. In fact, both of these systems used a drainback design similar to Rich's so when the temperature dropped, all the water was drained from the system. Therefore, they could not have sustained freeze damage.

Furthermore, the salesman was accused of wearing a homemade SMUD badge and representing himself as being affiliated with SMUD, rather than ACRS. But when Rich checked, he found out this was not true.

The opinion of Rich and his attorney was that the salesman had made honest mistakes for which ACRS and ASN should not be penalized. If the salesman's

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bad advice had been heeded, and a new ASN system installed, then ASN and ACRS would have had to forfeit the cost of the system and installation. The SMUD manager should have held a conciliation conference before imposing penalties. Rich estimated his company lost approximately $50,000 from this incident alone. Eventually, he recovered $6000 in a settlement which recognized that he and his company had made a mistake, but not behaved unethically.

The problem here is somewhat reminiscent of the Paul Fliickiger case. The ASN salesperson (whose name, interestingly enough, was Joe Fleckinger) failed to follow the procedures outlined by Al Rich. Not only did he make a mistake on two systems, the paperwork calling for replacement of these systems was sent directly to SMUD without going through the usual internal checks at ASN. Like Kaelin, Rich had failed to communicate a complete understanding of the rationale for these procedures to every employee under him.

On June 6, 1996, Rich wrote to investors in his company, "Unfortunately, our major move across country has, for a number of reasons, not worked out. This last year and a half has been devastating, having gone from being Sacramento's 8th fastest growing company to virtual nonexistence, due to the effects of very serious SMUD errors ... Mter installing about 500 systems in Sacramento, AC-Rich & Sun, was also a victim and had to go out of business in July of 1995."

4.9.1.2 Confirmation bias or justifiable optimism?

But despite this devastating failure, Rich was ready to move on. He was constantly improving his design. New features included

1) using a single hot water tank, instead of two; 2) using photovoltaics to power the pump; 3) new methods for storing the heat overnight

Rich hoped these new ideas, and others, would eventually help him reach a global market. Right now, he is barely scraping by. When my system gurgles in the background, I have to figure out why. Fortunately, the design is still holding up pretty well, but maintenance can be expensive if done by someone other than the installer, and all the local plumbers laugh at us.

This magnificent obsession is characteristic of inventors. They plow on, convinced that their idea is right, scraping by sometimes for years. Bell recognized the importance of his telephone before anyone else, Chester Carlson worked for ten years to find a backer for the process that became xerography (Dessauer, 1971), Whitcomb Judson and others labored for twenty years to create, manufacture and market what we now call the zipper (Friedel, 1994). Perhaps all these inventors suffered from a kind of confirmation bias, from the failure to see

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the potential weaknesses in their vision for a new technology, but in their cases, this 'bias' turned out to be one of the keys to their eventual success.

The kind of confirmation heuristic these inventors employed might be labeled Lakatosian, after the philosopher Imre Lakatos, who argued that the 'hard cores' of scientific research programs that are protected by corollary assumptions. These assumptions can be modified in response to new evidence, but not the core ideas. All these inventors revised their technologies; for example, what we now call the zipper went through dozens of changes before it reached something like the form we are now familiar with. But all clung to their 'hard core' vision.

Similarly, both Al Rich and Albin Kaelin are constantly modifying and improving their technologies, but each has a core idea: in Rich's case, that the sun should be used to heat water on the roofs of homes and in Kaelin's, that fabrics should be compostable or completely recyclable.

Why was the former failing when the latter was succeeding? The markets for solar heaters and high-end furniture fabrics are entirely different, of course, so this is a problematic comparison. Nonetheless, I think in the end, regardless of the business, it comes down to networks. Lyons recruited McDonough and Kaelin who in tum recruited others into a powerful network that is constantly growing in surprising directions. Rich also tried to create a network, but he relied heavily on very small investors like us and when he found a larger potential backer in SMUD, he ran into difficulties--he still feels SMUD favored competitors over his company, and overreacted to any problems he was having.

Like Lyons and Kaelin, Rich wanted to reach beyond the 'green niche' market and sell to the kind of people who would not ordinarily put environmental concerns first. He knew he was addressing a real need, but he failed to consider all the energy-saving alternatives available for people that would be cheaper than his system--adding insulation, upgrading existing furnaces and appliances, and or replacing conventional hot water heaters with on-demand hot water heaters. Only a few romantics who were in love with the idea of getting power from the sun would take the risk and make the large initial investment in him and his system.

Lyons assembled a high profIle network that included internationally-known figures like William McDonough, under whose name the product would be sold. DesignTex had a long track record of success with this sort of marketing strategy.

Invention is not just about devices; it is about networks that include technology. Part of the networking involves creating a need. Who needs a compostable fabric? Who needs a solar water heater? If it is only a few 'green niche' consumers, then there will be minimal environmental benefits. The Aramis system studied by Latour was primarily needed by the engineers; they kept its technologically pure original form and did not negotiate enough with those who wanted to tum a mental model into an actual system (Latour, 1996). Rich built a

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system, but even that important step is only one of the first in a long series of negotiations, if one wants to put the technology on most homes in America.

4.9.2 Solar Electric Light Fund79

Rich's current plan is to go global. The greatest potential market for solar may be in those developing countries where thousands of people are 'off the grid'. A model of how to do this is provided by the Solar Electric Light Fund, which also provides a model of how you help customers with the steep initial cost of this new technology--a problem Rich will have to solve if he is going to market in countries poorer than ours, where many people are 'off the grid' and the need for power is consequently greater.

Neville Williams, founder of the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), understood that the important question is not whether the developing world will be electrified, but in what manner? Williams noted that "even if they [the developing world] could afford to run the wires out from power plants, which is not economically feasible--we would pollute the world beyond imagination." Although Williams was not explicitly using the Natural Step nor the HawkenlMcDonough principles, his efforts were consistent with running on current solar income ideal. He set out to demonstrate that technological change, improved standards of living and environmental respect are realizable and consistent goals, not merely utopian ideals. By using photovoltaic technology (PV) which harnesses the sun's rays and converts them into energy, Williams was attempting to avoid the mistakes that the West encountered from its technological revolution: "If the Third World develops in the way we did, the world would be a wreck. The biggest threat to global warming and to greenhouse gases in the future is the unbridled development of the Third World because 70 to 80 percent of the people in developing countries don't even have electricity."

Williams, who promoted renewable energy technologies for the Carter Administration, has traveled to over 50 developing countries. On such trips, Williams noticed how introducing electricity to developing nations drastically changes lives. However, at the same time, he was aware of the environmental damage done by previous conventional electrification efforts. For example, in 1990, carbon emission from fossil fuel burning in China was 661 million tons, or more than eleven percent of the world's total. From 1950 to 1990, world aggregate nitrogen emissions from fossil fuel burning have increased from 6.8 to 26.5 million tons, and sulfur emissions from 30.1 to 68.7 million tons.

79 Based on S. Sonenshein, M. Gorman, and P. Werhane, "Solar Electric Light Fund (A), (B), and Teaching Note," Darden Case Bih/iograph;; Charlottesville, VA: Colgate-Darden School of Business, 199, UVA-E-OI12. All quotations and information in this section are further documented in this publication

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Williams concluded that individuals living in developing nations "don't care about the environment," and only "care about getting electricity any way they can." This gets back to the fourth Natural Step systems principle: we ought to aim for fair and efficient use of resources with respect to human needs. The notion of fairness implies that people in developing nations have a right to the same kind of energy and amenities possessed by developed countries, and that it would be hypocritical to demand, strictly on moral grounds, that they use more environmentally intelligent sources of energy than industrialized nations. This is one of the divisive elements of the rain forest debate: developed countries that have already slashed and burned much of their forests demand that less developed countries save their forests to avoid global warming. Certainly it is in everyone's interest to avoid global warming, but why should Brazil be expected to make up for some of the 'sins' of the developed nations? As we noted in a previous section, one solution is to have power companies like AES buy stretches of rain forest, in order to preserve them.

For Neville Williams, the challenge was to show people in developing countries that it was in their own local interest to use solar power. To this end, in 1990 he founded the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), a non-profit, Washington, DC based company whose goal was to help provide persons in developing countries with an environmentally friendly power source. SELF's mission statement states that we must "address the issue of how 70 percent of the people in the Third World are going to get electricity without doing additional damage to the planet. Two billion people attempting to emerge from centuries of darkness into an electrically lighted future will be one of the critical issues of the 21 st century."

Williams' first goal was to provide environmentally safe electricity to China, a country where some 200 million persons had no reliable source of power. Despite economic growth in China during the 1980s of approximately 10 to 14 percent annually, energy growth was significantly lower, at 4 to 6 percent. The gap between energy supply and energy demand has been growing at an astronomical pace, and by the year 2000, sources predicted that there could be an energy shortage as high as 700 megatons (coal equivalent). 80

The growing gap between China's energy supply and energy demand can be attributed to at least four key factors:

1. Despite China's large population and energy production, China had a very low per capita energy use, only 40 percent of the world average. Economic growth, encouraged by the Chinese government's growing commitment to something like free enterprise, would lead to an increase in per capita income. More income would increase energy demands and therefore place additional strains on current energy sources.

80Yingjing Nan and Anhua Wang, Alternative Energy Options with Reference to China, p. 2.

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2. The average person in China would pay roughly four times as much for energy as a person in a developed country like Japan.

3. Investors infrequently funded the construction of power plants, opting for alternative projects which have shorter returns on investment.

4. Fossil fuel reserves were not evenly distributed: coal prices in Western Tibet were roughly 10 times higher than the average for the rest of China. Such high costs obviously interfered with economic growth.

Despite relatively high energy costs, China still relied heavily on traditional fossil fuels. According to the 1994 Trade and Environmental Database:

[W]ith the rapid exploitation and high dependency of coal productivity, China is damaging not only the physical environment, but China is also creating health problems for Chinese people, and people in surrounding countries.81

Since approximately 70 percent of China's energy consumption comes from the burning of coal, it is not surprising that China's energy use has posed large-scale environmental problems to the entire world and severe health risks to Chinese citizens. Increased emissions of sulfur dioxide (S02) from the burning of fossil fuel have resulted in large amounts of air pollution.82 This pollution has been far from negligible. In 1988, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, an ailment caused primarily by S02 (and cigarette smoking) accounted for 26 percent of all deaths in China. Additionally, lung cancer deaths have drastically increased.

Coal burning has also heightened carbon dioxide (C02) emissions, which has subsequently exacerbated global warming. Besides global warming, acid rain has been linked to fossil fuel burning in China, the effects of which are easily noticed in China's urban areas:

When rain falls in metropolis cities in China, the pollution is clearly visible. Soot coats the pavement turning it into slippery muck, and turns the leaves a black-brown color ... [Coal burning] has led to a rise in cancer and lung disease.&l

Even with such obvious health and environmental risks, little has been done to improve China's energy problems. Plans for the construction of a new 2,640 mega-watt coal burning plant are underway.

81Trade and Environment Database, "China Coal and Pollution, http://gurukul.ucc.american. edulted/CHINCOAL.HTML." (1996)

82 Ibid, Trade and Environment Database, 1996.

83Ibid.

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Desl?ite rroof of toxic air pollutants and acid rain, China is making minIma efforts in converting coal burning plants to more environmentally safe methods.84

4.9.2.1 SELF in China

Magiacha, a small village of about 200 families located in Tongwei County in Gansu, China, is situated about 1200 miles west of Beijing. In 1992, none of the 850 individuals living in the village had access to electric power. The villagers were not satisfied with their current power source. One villager observed:

We only had kerosene lamps, which gave us little li~ht, like the stars do. It's so aifficult for us to do any work in the evemng time. The most dangerous thing was when we got up in the moming, our noses and mouths were filfed with black ashes ... [Kerosene makes us feel] dizzy in the head and dim of sight.

Williams' company found that for each photovoltaic user, over one quarter of a ton of carbon dioxide gas would have been produced by kerosene lamps supplying the same amount of light. In addition to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, finding an alternative to kerosene lamps will eliminate toxic, and potentially fatal fumes. In fact, 780 million women and children who are exposed to kerosene fumes inhale the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day.

He needed to act quickly. The task at hand for him was to be the first person to reach the non-electrified individuals in China because, as he notes "the first person to show up with electricity wins!"11.1 Williams thought that if he did not electrify these people first with an environmentally safe power supply, another group would reach them using conventional fossil fuel power, thereby augmenting a rapidly growing environmental disaster. While Williams might be the first person to introduce electricity, his clients were poor. He notes: "You've got to give these people a way to afford 20 years of technology, which is what a PV panel gives them ... But the cost ... is generally what these people make in a year.,,111

PV technology is quite simple. Units harness the sun's rays and convert them into energy. For the most part, the energy is environmentally friendly. However, since the unit requires a battery to store energy when the sun is down, disposal of batteries is an environmental hazard that would violate the principle that all waste ought to be recyclable.

84 Ibid.

8SNeville Williams quoted in "Interview: 'SELF'-Working to ElectrifY the Third World," Greemvire. 1992 Feb. 4. 8~bid.

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Still, PVs seemed superior to other sources, in environmental terms. For example, on new source of power in China is the "Three Gorges Dam Project" located in central China, which will provide over 84 billion kilowatt-hours per year. 87 The dam will operate by harnessing river currents, providing electricity without emitting pollution. The 1.2 mile dam will greatly contribute to China's increasing electricity needs; however, various social and environmental costs would be incurred. Almost 2 million people will have to be relocated to complete the project, many of whom are farmers. Archeological sites will be covered with water, including almost all traces of the Ba, who date back 4000 years and are poorly understood; river wildlife will be threatened, including endangered species like the Chinese sturgeion, the paddlefish and the Chinese river dolphin (Zieh, 1997). The cost of the dam will exceed any other single construction project in hi II!

story.

Williams also felt that PVs were superior to coal, in environmental terms-­even clean coal technology. Williams selected individual PV house units with a 20 Watt capacity. Solar energy can be produced in generating stations that serve multiple homes and villages; China was experimenting with this sort of technology in Tibet (Jintang & Weide, 1991). But generating energy on the household level seemed like a good idea to Williams-expensive wiring and metering would not be needed, and each homeowner would be responsible for her or his own source of power.

Climatex Lifecycle was not only a product; it was also an 'existence proor, a demonstration of what was possible. Similarly, SELF's PV units would be a demonstration--of the 'benefits of clean, decentralized, renewable energy'. The days of the villagers would no longer end at sundown. This would allow children to have more time to read and become better educated. The units would provide energy for radios, a means of accessing information about the world. The villagers would become less dependent on oil or electricity brought in from outside, and more dependent on their own ability to maintain their PV units. Eventually, Williams hoped, maintenance, repair, improvement and even the construction of new units could be done by local industries.

But the $300 initial price, reasonable by Western standards, was equivalent to the villagers' annual incomes. SELF could not, and did not want to be, a charitable organization--could not, because according to Williams, "there isn't enough money in the world to give this stuff (photovoltaics) away" and would not because doling out electricity was inconsistent with SELF's emphasis on individual responsibility.

87 World Watch Data Disk, 1994.

88Trade and Environment Database, "Three Gorges Darn," http://gurukul.ucc.american.edultedffHREEDAM.HTML

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The developing world is littered with charity technologies that were given to villagers and never used. A student of mine in the Peace Corps worked in a village in Zimbabwe where the villagers had to walk several miles to obtain water. There were at least two water tanks, installed by charitable organizations, rusting next to the village. No one had made the villagers responsible for this technology.

Part of responsibility is ownership--if I have made a significant investment of my own resources in a technology, I will take responsibility for it. SELF provides power only to individuals who have the financial means to purchase it. This philosophy encourages villagers both to conserve energy and to take care of their individual units. Additionally, ownership of property helps individuals in the developing world obtain a sense of pride. However,

No market structure yet exists to handle the required capital flows [for solar technology] ... the emerging [solar] industry ... has been plagued by I'oor access to capital. Only about 5 percent of rural housenolds in developing countries nave the ability to purchase a system outright with

III cash.

Magiacha was only a beginning for Williams; he hoped SELF would "sow solar seeds", facilitating initial purchases of PV units to begin the process of forming an independent solar market in China. One possibility would be to secure funding from the Chinese government which could be used to partially subsidize the PV units. Since the Chinese government already was subsidizing current grid extensions, it easily could direct some financial resources to purchasing PV units. Thus, instead of the Chinese government funding electrification projects that produce environmental problems, it could finance environmentally safe projects, that at the same time, would produce equivalent electrification results. In fact, since SELF argued that any extension of existing electric grid structures would require copper wiring at the cost of approximately $lO,OOO/mile, ~ subsidizing PV technology would also be cheaper, especially given the way in which villages like Magiacha are spread out. The Chinese government could do something similar to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, providing down payments and low cost loans. But this would violate SELF's concern with local responsibility--an especially important point, considering the Chines government's human rights record in areas like Tibet.

Williams might also look to organizations throughout the world who spend millions of dollars to preserve the environment and promote humanity. SELF could first argue that all individuals are entitled to a decent standing of living, and that such a standard requires electric power. Thus, it would only be fair that

89Northrop. M. F .• Riggs. P. W .• & Raymond. F. A. (1995). Selling solar: Financing household solar energy in the developing world (Pocantico Paper No.2). Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

90 "Solar Electric Light Fund Photovoltaic Rural Electrification," Official World Wide Web Site­

www.self.org.

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Magiacha receive electricity. In fact, China had already electrified 85 percent of its citizens, mostly through electric grid extensions and out of fairness, some method of electrifying the rest of the country should be found. However, while most of China's electricity comes from fossil fuel burning, as an alternative, SELF could push for private sector charitable funding of PV technology to preserve the environment. This would enable the village to be electrified in an environmentally safe manner and would take advantage of the millions of dollars donated to environmental and humanitarian organizations. SELF would simply act as a catalyst in securing funds to individuals willing to purchase PV units. The funding would cover only down payments, ensuring that the villagers would pay for their electricity on a monthly basis and subsequently allowing the villagers to take individual responsibility for their own electricity. SELF would provide zero interest loans for the difference between the subsidy and the unit cost. Still, this would leave individuals dependent in part on charity. It would be better to find another way.

Williams also considered securing working capital from environmental groups. and governments to establish a "revolving credit fund" that provides zero interest loans to villagers who purchase individual PV units. SELF would use the initial capital to purchase units. SELF would then over the units to the villagers. SELF would collect a down payment on the units from the villagers, followed by monthly installments, thereby having the villagers pay for the entire cost of the unit. Payments would then be used to finance additional loans to other individuals wishing to acquire PV units. However, the villagers would need to pay back their loans in order for their neighbors to receive electricity and maintain the solvency of the revolving credit fund. In addition to providing more funding for other loans, the revolving credit fund also would promote borrowers to make timely, and sometimes early payments to allow others access to loans. The fund would grow as more people made their payments. Eventually, Williams hoped, SELF could exit China, leaving a growing solar industry behind.

Rich wanted every home in the U.S. to have a solar water heater. Similarly, Williams wanted every rural village in China to use photovoltaics. Both expected their goals to be achieved eventually by the free market. The difference is that SELF was a non-profit organization that wanted to 'prime the pump', getting the whole process started.

SELF completed a 1000 unit project in the GANSU region. It went very well and was capped off with a joint venture between SELF and the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for 600 units.

4.9.2.2 SELF in South Africa

China is not the only place SELF is trying to transform. Despite the end of Apartheid, South Africa is a country still plagued by widespread social inequalities

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between its white minority and black majority. While 74 percent of South Africans have electricity, 3.7 million of its citizens have no reliable electricity source. In rural (and predominately black) areas, only fifteen percent have grid electricity. Most of the electrification disparity between white urban and black rural residents can be attributed to two factors:

1) Differences in income between whites and blacks. The black population has an average income of $992 compared with $9,109 for whites.

2) The location of most blacks in rural areas makes electrifying their homes more expensive. While urban access to the grid costs around $800 per household, rural residences must incur costs of $2400.

Such factors led the Energy Economist to report that

Apartheid still haunts South Africa's energy economy. The country's emerging democracy has inherited two systems ... The largely white affluent minority expect and receive electricity at the flip of a switch. 2/3 of its black citizens have no electricity at all. Most live in uninsulated shacks, sweating in 30 degree Celsius plus temperatures in summer, shivering in winter, and breathing unhealthy air year-round. 91

The rural electrification problem in South Africa is consistent with SELF's long-term goal of introducing photo voltaic (PV) power into lesser developed countries (LDCs), hoping to stimulate long-term, sustainable, independent PV markets. Will Cawood, a project manager for SELF, was given the task of heading up the South African project. As in China, SELF needed to choose a specific area in South Africa for an initial pilot project. The pilot project would assess the feasibility of a country wide PV electrification program and would hopefully provide the groundwork for the formation of independent PV markets throughout South Africa.

The Maphephethe region appeared to be an ideal location for the pilot project. The community of approximately 20,000 residents is on the East coast of South Africa and is 80 km west of the city of Durban. The region's landscape is very mountainous, making access to it difficult during the summer, especially when rainfall amounts reach their average of 1000 mm/pa. Not only does the community lack electricity, it also lacks an adequate communication system: no telephone wires or significant cellular phone coverage.

One of the major problems in Magiacha was the large distance from the village to the grid. The nearest power-line was only 5 km away from Maphephethe. But neither ESKOM nor Durban Electricity, the utility companies responsible for

91 "South Africa Makes Some Decisions," Energy Economist, August 1996.

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conventional electricity in the region, had plans for extending the grid for at least five years,91 because the villagers could only afford, at most, 100 kWh of electricity per month. Grid extensions would therefore require ESKOM or Durban utility to incur large debts with a long payback period. SELF's PV power seemed like a perfect solution to Maphephethe's power problems.

The community's leadership is vested in a young, progressive chief who has brought peace to the region after his father's death. He has also been responsible for bringing fresh piped water to the community, thereby improving the standard of living in the community while simultaneously creating jobs for its citizens. The chief has also made his views on electrification clear, and has noted on several occasions that his goal is to see "electric lights shining forth from every kraal in his community." Since the cultural traditions of the community are strong, Cawood worked closely with the chief to establish a good relationship.

After working with the Chief, Cawood contracted with a group of researchers from the Energy & Development Research Centre at the University of Capetown to assess the receptiveness of the new technology from within the community. The team of researchers discovered that the Maphephethe residents were aware of the technological capability of harnessing the sun's rays for energy. But most of the residents lacked specific knowledgeable of PV technology. Despite their limited awareness of PV technology, the researchers found that over 80 percent of the residents seemed eager to try the new technology.

To increase the community's awareness of PV, Cawood obtained funding from South Africa's Department of Mineral and Energy Affairs to install a 225Wp solar lighting system in the local courthouse, providing community members with a live presentation of how such power works. This demonstration gave Cawood a lesson in how technology has to become part of the local culture. The community center

was relatively far from most residents, who did not like to travel at night-­therefore, very few of them experienced the benefits of light after dark. Cawood realized in hindsight the funds would have been better spent on individual units.

He decided on an eventual goal of electrifying 75 homes in the village with 53Wp units costing around $550.00. While the 53Wp units provide less energy than a conventional grid extension, the PV units do support several lights and small appliances. The cost of each unit, $550.00, was a steep price for the community members, roughly equivalent to a year's salary, but Cawood arranged for financing and loans through the KwaZulu Finance and Investment Corporation (KFC). KFC provided 3 or 4 year loans to PV purchasers at an interest rate of 16.5 percent, with a minimum 10 percent down payment. Loans for salaried workers were approved on the basis of their individual pay-slips, and such borrowers were encouraged to deduct loan payments directly from their salaries. For a non-

92 Philip Geerdts, "Case Study: The Maphephethe Solar Home System Dissemination Project (Energy and Development Research Centre, June, 1996), p. 1.

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salaried resident to acquire a loan, KFC needed to deploy a field staff to ascertain how a potential borrower intended to payoff the loan.

As more individuals secured loans and were able to afford PV, Cawood hoped that an independent PV market with financial support from an independent loan market would begin to develop. The next step then would be for SELF to leave the region, allowing loans to be presented to residents without external support. Cawood noted that "we hope this formula will ... provide an answer for at least half of the 3.5 million South African families who have yet to receive electric service from the grid."

Results from the first six homes were encouraging. Before the introduction of PV, residents relied primarily on car batteries, which they needed to charge every 7 to 30 days. The charging stations were accessible only by bus, taxi or car and still required that the resident carry the 20kg battery on foot from the main road to his or her dwelling (usually between 100m to a few km away). Since most families only owned one battery and the process of charging took as long as a day, given the time for transportation and actual charging, a family could be without electricity as much as one day a week. PV provided a more steady and reliable source of power. Some households were using PV to allow their children to read and do homework at night. Two of the six households operated manual sewing machines at night with the help of PV light. PV held the promise of upward social mobility.

However, the new opportunities created by PV were not equally accessible to all: "in Maphephethe, it seems that the most powerful and influential people are empowered even further by the SHS brought into the community." The Mathew effect appeared to be in operation: individuals in positions of power such as the Chief and the tribal courthouse secretary and persons with permanent jobs such as shopkeepers and teachers were the purchasers of the PV units. Those who purchased a unit were saving energy expenses that other, poorer residents of Maphephethe incurred and also were able to improve their social standing by pursuing other projects at night. This solidified the position of the "upper" class in the community.

Electrification efforts in the Maphephethe community promised to decrease the social inequality between whites and the largely rural blacks. But they also threatened to increase social stratification within the community. The solution is to provide power for everyone, as soon as possible--partial subsidies, especially for those who do not have steady income.

The SELF cases illustrates how "run off current solar income" can be a strategy for rural areas in the developing world. Getting local people to own and take responsibility for the technology is integral to SELF's philosophy. In this case, they do not have to buy into the sustainable schema--they just have to want power. It remains to be seen whether local industries will spring up to maintain these PV units, and even manufacture new ones. It also remains to be seen

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whether the PV units will continue to be used when the grid is eventually extended to areas like Magiacha and Maphephethe. Hopefully, the infrastructure will be present by then to keep solar power a viable supplement to the electronic grid, one that will give more independence to individuals and local governments as well as facilitating a more sustainable industrial revolution in the developing world.

Could Al Rich sell his technology in the developing world as well? The SELF cases is mostly about building networks of villagers, local governments and sources of financing--including organizations like the W. Alton Jones Foundation that fund SELF projects. Al Rich has had trouble building similar networks in this country--he would need to convince an organization like SELF to work with him.

4.10 Generalizations about ethics, invention and discovery

If it exists, it is possible. (William McDonough)

The cases of ethical invention in this chapter suggest some additional generalizations about invention, design and discovery. 1. Invention and innovative design are often shared activities--successful inventors create networks.

Who invented the atomic bomb? Robert Oppenheimer? He created a network at Los Alamos that built the actual device, but he and his team depended on a huge network of others, including other major laboratories like Hanaford and Oak Ridge, military leaders like Leslie Groves, scientific discoveries made by Lise Meitner and others and catalysts like Leo Szilard.

Who created Climatex Lifecycle? Albin Kaelin's firm, Rohner Textil, owns the patent, but he did not invent the fabric alone. William McDonough supplied the vision that inspired the project. Michael Braungart added expertise on the dyes and materials. Susan Lyons was a key catalyst, collaborator and financier.

There is no single inventor in either the invention of the atomic bomb or an environmentally intelligent fabric--no Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison. A.C. Rich, the one true solo inventor we have considered in this chapter, was also the least successful. In contrast, what SELF invents is a network and a financing scheme--it uses standard, off-the-shelf technology in photovoltaics. 2. Moral imagination is an important way of coming up with new ethical frameworks and designs that will make a better world. What does it mean to make a better world? In order to even think about this issue in a non-dogmatic fashion, one has to engage in moral imagination. Similarly, creative inventors have to be able to envision new mental models. An analogy to nature lies behind both Bell and Hawken's visions for new technologies. In the former case, the result was the telephone, in the latter, a new model for how business ought to be conducted. The goal of both is to make a better world, but only in the latter is this goal articulated in a moral framework. 3. Ethical inventors have to develop or use a moral framework as well as technology, and make sure all members of a network own this framework.

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Dow Coming had a Business Conduct Code and made great efforts to insure that all employees 'owned' it. However, this conduct code was seen as having nothing to do with safety issues in design: these would be settled by scientific testing. The Climatex Lifecycle network shows how environmental intelligence can be integrated into design. Much of this intelligence concerns the avoidances of threats to human health. Similar frameworks need to be developed as codes of conduct for the design of medical devices.

Al Rich had an ethical design idea, but not a detailed framework like the McDonough/Braungart protocols or TNS. Furthermore, he was not able to successfully instill his personal code of conduct in all salespeople or in SMUD.

Climatex Lifecycle embodies an ethical framework and was created by a heterogeneous network. At one point, one of Kaelin's top employees made a decision that threatened this network; this employee had not internalized the values. In fact, heterogeneous networks like this are always being threatened by this kind of unintentional defection, which sometimes contains the germ of creativity: Kaelin's errant dyemaster was right about the new chemical, and it was eventually adopted. It will be interesting to see how this network deals with increasing success, which sometimes drives network members to fight over who really deserves the credit for a new invention.

SELF also has a framework which it embodies in a network, not a device. In this case, not all the members of the growing network have to buy the philosophy-­they just want power. SELF has to build ethics into the mode of delivery. Similarly, it is possible that Climatex Lifecycle might be bought by customers primarily for reasons of aesthetic and performance, not because it is 'green'. But in both cases, the goal is to seduce people into environmental thinking by having them use environmental products, seeing their quality demonstrated every day. Ultimately, DesignTex and SELF seek to bring about a change in thinking via an existence proof experienced directly by customers who, in tum, will inspire other efforts to create similar products.

4. Ethical invention will provide models by transforming reflective cognition into experiential:

As noted at the end of Chapter 3, cognition is in the world; intelligence is embodied in devices. Similarly, environmental intelligence is embodied in devices like Climatex Lifecycle and energy networks like the one created by SELF.

Let us consider the framework created by McDonough and Braungart, for example. McDonough talks about design as a function of five factors: cost, performance, aesthetics, environmental intelligence and social justice. In conversation, Michael Braungart emphasized that environmental ethics should really be integrated into our idea of quality design. This suggests that McDonough's last two categories should really be part of the first three.

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Environmental and social damage should be part of cost; designs that benefit the environment and others are more aesthetic; cradle-to-cradle designs perform better.

5. Trying to solve one global problem will involve trying to solve all of them.

The Donner party realized, too late, that they were not going to be able to cross the Rocky Mountains--the living ended-up eating the dead in order to survive. The image that sticks in my mind is of an IS-month old baby, crying by the half-eaten corpse of his mother. The people in this party were decent folks, but the ruthless logic of survival drove them to cannibalism.

Similarly, the Polynesians who settled Mangareva found a paradise-a lagoon rich with shellfish that also had trees and soil suitable for farming. All the island lacked was stone for tools, and that was available on nearby Pitcairn Island. But gradually, over a period of several hundred years, the islanders deforested their paradise, thereby losing much of their topsoil and their ability to make canoes with which to fish. Modem ancestors of the few survivors descrioe civil war over the few remaining bits of arable land and widespread cannibalism, with the living digging up the corpses of the dead (Diamond, 1997).

The Donner party had backed itself into this box by a series of bad choices, including taking an experimental route south of Salt Lake on the promises of a guide, who left them in a lurch. Similarly, the Mangarevan islanders could have prevented disaster by exercising a bit of foresight.

Those who say global problems are greatly exaggerated may be right, and certainly some environmental extremists are guilty of crying wolf too often. However, long-term anticipation of possible consequences is the way to avoid getting stuck in a Donner party dilemma at a future date. The Donner party was warned not to take the new route by someone who had traveled it. Similarly, our species is often warned by its own behavior. Hiroshima was a kind of warning. The fact that there has been only one atomic war gives one hope, though the continued spread of nuclear weapons throughout the world is cause for concern.

The sustainability frameworks discussed in this chapter are an attempt to avoid a Donner party scenario, in which an overpopulated world faces limited resources and extensive pollution. Even if one takes the view that global resources are limited more by intelligence than by what is in the ground, the kind of intelligence we need must include this kind of anticipation of long-term consequences.

According to Mark Sagoff, in order to save the environment, we will have to eliminate poverty (Sagoff, In Press). Technology can help. SELF is an example-­bringing inexpensive power to rural areas will increase the opportunities for

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education, sanitation and communication with the outside world. One of SELF's goals is to gradually transfer the manufacture and maintenance of solar panels to local entrepreneurs.

On the face of it, Climatex Lifecycle may seem to have nothing to do with this poverty problem; it is a high-end furniture fabric that will be used only by the affluent. But it is manufactured by a small textile mill that is closely integrated with its community. The Rohner mill might be an example of the kind of business that could take off in developing countries, using materials like wool and ramie that could be grown locally.

War is another cause of Donner party scenarios that exist all over the world today. Refugees in Zaire and Rwanda are fleeing tribal wars. Refugees from Albania are fleeing a corrupt, feudal government that has collapsed into economic chaos. These examples illustrate the link between poverty, dictatorship and tribalism. The kind of dislocations that occur in Zaire and Albania have terrible environmental consequences.

The obvious point is that environmental sustain ability is a challenge that cannot be tackled in isolation. Technology alone cannot solve problems like poverty and war. But the same kind of moral imagination that can produce an intelligent fabric could also produce an intelligent future. The first step in moral imagination is recognizing that one has assumptions about reality which constitute a view, or perspective. When someone refers to the realities of the marketplace or the inevitability of poverty, they are confusing a view with reality. Their view may correspond to much of the world as it is now constituted, but not necessarily all possible future worlds.

The major lesson of this chapter is that we are not obligated by the realities of business or politics to design a future that includes war, poverty and environmental degradation. In the immortal words of Walt Kelly, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

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Are ethical discoverers and inventors born, or can we create them? How can we improve public understanding of the processes by which we have transformed the world? This chapter will discuss these issues, using the detailed case-studies in previous chapters as examples and the cognitive analysis as a framework.

5.1 What Students and Practitioners Need to Learn

I have adapted three broad categories oflearning from Mortimer Adler (1982). The ftrst two are also emphasized by Gilbert Ryle (Ryle, 1949).

1) Information: (What)

Often, the kind of factual knowledge a scientist or inventor possesses gives her or him an advantage over others. Kepler had to know what the latest data were on the orbits of Mars. Bell knew more about acoustics and the structure of the ear than other inventors. Jack Kilby deliberately read widely, scanning dozens of magazines and patent applications far removed from problems he was working on at the time. This strategy gave him a unique knowledge base. When asked to ftnd a way to print carbon resistors on a ceramic base, he remembered an article on tiny sandblasters he had read in a dental journal (Reid, 1984).

2) Skills: (How)

But information alone is not sufftcient. Kepler had to know how to solve mathematical problems. Krebs had his 'secret weapon'--from Otto Warburg, he had learned how to slice tissue. Bell hired Watson to provide the skill necessary to build the ftrst telephone.

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Other skills include writing, mathematical techniques--and even the set of skills involved in lifelong learning.

Gilbert Ryle emphasizes the distinction between knowing that and knowing how. About experts, he says, "we are interested less in the stocks of truths that they acquire and retain than in their capacities to find out truths for themselves and their abilities to organize and exploit them, when discovered" (Ryle, 1949, p. 28).93

3) Wisdom: (When and Why)

Novices and experts can often share the same pieces of information, but only the expert represents this information in a way that shows when it can be applied to a particular problem. "The expert sees the situation, and sees what to do" (Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 1991, p.156). Part of this representation is a way of classifying problems that also suggests what heuristics or algorithms will solve them. This kind of wisdom is often referred to as judgment.94

On unfamiliar problems, this kind of judgment is especially important, and experts frequently make it by referring to other cases that are similar in certain ways. One of the classic heuristics for making this kind of comparison is 'follow the analogy of nature'. Confronted with the problem of transmitting speech electrically, Bell 'followed the analogy of nature' and used the human ear as his mental model. He had to have knowledge of the ear , the skill to build a device like one and the wisdom to see the potential connection to the speaking telegraph. Similarly, The Natural Step and the McDonoughlBraungart design protocols are based on an analogy to nature. Again, this analogy is productive because the authors of these frameworks are able to use Nature's cycle to generate mental models that suggest promising directions for environmental design.

There is another aspect of wisdom that relates to "when". It is the willingness to ask "why". Frankenstein should have asked this question before creating a human being. Cloning researchers are asking this question now. Before and during the process of creation, there needs to be reflection on the consequences. Will this design or discovery make the world a better place? As Norbert Wiener said, "Our papers have been making a great deal of American 'know-how' ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb. There is one quality

93 Cognitive scientists like John Anderson referred to Ryles"'that" as declarative knowledge and"how" as procedural (Anderson, 1983). Typically, procedural knowledge is encoded declaratively first, then translated into production rules--much like the ones used by BACON (see 1.1). Bechtel criticizes this approach on the grounds that it does not capture the spirit of Ryle's analysis, because both declarative and procedural knowledge are coded in the same propositional format. Bechtel argues for a connectionist model of knowing how, and tries to show how knowing that could be represented by connectionist networks as well (Bechtel, 1991). Bechtel's book provides an excellent overview of these issues.

9~ I am indebted to my colleague T.C. Scott for drawing my attention to this important aspect of Wisdom. Eugene Ferguson (Ferguson, 1992) and Henry Petroski (Petroski, 1994) provide particularly good examples of engineering judgment.

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more important than know-how and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is the 'know-what' by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be" (Hanson, 1982,p.66). Wiener's 'know-what' clearly means 'know what to do', which I refer to as 'why'.

Moral imagination is an important part of this kind of reflection. In order to think about long-term consequences of technological innovation, one has to be able to see one's current paradigm as a view, and seriously consider alternatives. How would the world be transformed if all products followed Nature's cycle and there were no waste?

I teach mostly engineering students. Standard education in science and engineering is oriented towards categories one and two. Students learn a mountain of facts, procedures for testing and refining, and algorithms for solving problems. Only rarely are they ever prompted to consider why.

For engineering students, the courses I teach come in the category of 'other' -­'stuff that isn't engineering. My biggest problem is to convince them that this material is the essence of engineering. I belong to a Division within the engineering school--Technology, Culture & Communications--that has the mission of teaching engineering students communication skills and the sort of wisdom that will make them into virtuous practitioners. Humanities and social sciences courses that teach knowledge of these disciplines and their methods are extremely valuable for any student, but students often compartmentalize this knowledge and see it as irrelevant to engineering practice.

My goal is to produce students who will be:

(1) capable of making ethical inventions and/or discoveries themselves,

(2) capable of encouraging others to make ethical inventions and/or discoveries,

(3) capable of making intelligent decisions about policies that might encourage or hinder ethical innovation. As Roth and his colleagues argue, " ... members of a scientifically and technologically advanced society should be able to make critically informed choices. As part of this scientific and technological literacy, one would expect students to experience and learn how scientists and engineers produce new (arti) facts. That is, students should experience not only ready-made science (and technology) but also science-in-the-making ... " (Roth, McGinn, & Bowen, 1996, pp.458-9).

The focus of this book has mostly been on (1). It is the essential first step in making (2) and (3) possible. Creating a better world begins with understanding the kind of thinking and imagining that could produce it.

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5.2 Using Abstract Simulations to Teach Scientific Thinking

In Chapter 2, we made the distinction between in vivo and in vitro methods for studying science. To review, the former involves actual case-studies of scientific practice; the latter involves experiments that simulate aspects of scientific thinking.

The advantages of experiments come at a cost in terms of realism. A simulation can and should model only certain aspects of science, and therefore simulations need to be complemented by case-studies; experiments can suggest features that ought to be studied in cases, and cases can suggest variables that ought to be manipulated in simulations. Psychologists prefer experiments, in part because they want to appear to be scientific (Gorman & Carlson, 1989). Sociologists of scientific knowledge generally prefer 'thick descriptions' of actual cases (for a good example, see Latour, 1996). The obvious answer is we need both--and we need to connect these two, using experiments to isolate variables that seem to play a role in cases, then going back to do further case-studies looking, in part, for the kinds of patterns suggested by experiments (Gorman, 1992).

Experiments and case-studies can also be used in the classroom to teach scientific thinking. For example, I have used both the 2-4-6 task and a task based on the card game Eleusis to illustrate what is meant by verification and falsification, and how they work in practice (Gorman, 1986). I ask students to work in groups to try to solve rules like 'three different numbers'. On this particular rule, it is easy for students to imagine positive tests, because virtually every triple they try initially has number patterns that go up or down. I have them write down their hypotheses so when they are done we can talk about confirmation and disconfirmation. In discussion. I try to get them to identify examples of positive and negative tests from their own experiments, and get them to discover that whether a test is confirmatory or disconfmnatory depends on their hypotheSIs and how they represent the rule.

Once students have these analytic tools under their belts, they can apply them to notebooks or other detailed descriptions of invention or discovery (for an example, see Gorman, 1995). In the course of applying what they learned from experiments, students will also come to see the inadequacies of models derived from simulations. For example, I like to lead them on a discussion of how the 2-4-6 task does and does not model scientific practice, and how it could be made more ecologically valid. Then I can introduce the version with error, in order to show how one can add features that simulate additional aspects of real-world science.

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5.2.1 SIMSCI

Robert Rosenwein and I (Rosenwein & Gorman, 1995) have proposed a complex simulation based on William Gamson's (Gamson, 1991) "Simulated Society" (SIMSOC). In SIMSOC, class participants are placed in one of four regions, given unequal amounts of "Simbucks" and compete to get "simjobs" in simulated industries or political parties or a judicial group.

Bob and I proposed to convert SIMSOC into a SIMSCI, which would substitute scientific laboratories for industries, different theoretical perspectives for political ones, publication outlets for media and granting agencies for judicial group. Each participant would be assigned to one of several research teams, except for a handful, who would be left to work on their own or join a team. Teams would have to choose problems, compete for resources, and publish brief accounts of their work.

Teams would start with unequal resources, in terms of Simbucks and equipment. For example, one research team might have a computer that allowed them to work on an artificial universe task like the one created by Mynatt, Doherty & Tweney (Mynatt, et al., 1978). Other teams would have to pay for access to this equipment. Because experiments were costly, research teams would have to spend their resources carefully.

One of the ways of attracting more resources would be to announce a new discovery and have it substantiated, thereby increasing the likelihood that the funding agencies that are part of SIMSCI would support the team's research. A wide range of task variables could be manipulated to increase or decrease the likelihood of a discovery, including amount and type of error present in the problem.

This SIMSCI environment could potentially serve both research and pedagogical aims--it could be used to test the way in which a number of variables affect problem-choice and discovery, and also teach students about the way in which scientific thinking is embedded in a network of social negotiations.

The biggest advantage of in vitro simulations is that they allow the researcher or educator to manipulate variables that might affect discovery--like the amount of error present in a particular task, the distribution of resources, the agendas of funding agencies, and the like. SIMSCI could include the manipulable features listed below:

1. Resource allocation and control:

Scientists--especially senior scientists--spend an inordinate amount of time seeking funding for their laboratories. The effect of this struggle for resources could be simulated by including funding agencies and laboratories in SIMSCI.

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Resources could be located in laboratories, each of which would start with a director who would be responsible for keeping the lab alive by recruiting new members and obtaining further funding. Lab directors would begin with unequal resources, so that some would have great advantages over the others. Some participants would belong to no lab, and could be recruited to assist in research.

To get additional resources, labs could appeal to two funding agencies, one of which worked like a federal agency, with proposal criteria and rules that indicated funding priorities and a review process that included student participants as reviewers. Another funding agency might have a tacit agenda, simulating foundations like MacArthur that decide on winners without a standard application process. Labs that managed to guess the tacit agenda would be given funding. It would be interesting to see if the peer-refereed funding agency began to reward the same winners, thus creating a Matthew effect.

2. Nature of the Task:

Another manipulable feature of SIMSel will be the types of tasks participants could choose to work on. We want these tasks to simulate aspects of scientific thinking; fortunately, there is a long cognitive literature on such tasks, including ones that use numbers, or cards, or programmable devices, or complex artificial universes (again, see Gorman, 1992a, for a review).

(a) Experimental: This sort of task involves generating repeated manipulations of a phenomenon in an effort to discover and test hypotheses. Most of the tasks used in the literature on scientific reasoning are of this sort. For example, one could ask students to determine the rule that dictates how playing cards can be laid out in a series. To determine the rule, students would have to try different card sequences, and receive feedback on whether each was correct or incorrect.

(b) Observational: This sort of a task involves carefully watching a process without influencing it--except that the act of observation can itself be an influence. Tasks of this sort are less common in the psychology of science literature. We outline one which resembles a problem in astronomy below.

Tasks would require different resources. For example, a simple number problem like the 2-4-6 task might be relatively cheap--pencil and paper and access to a calculator that could give feedback on trials. An observational task, in contrast, might require a computer with a color monitor, access to which could only be purchased by a lab. Problem choice would be dictated, in part, by resources, but discoveries could be made on inexpensive problems. It would be interesting to see whether these inexpensive solutions are assigned less status than solutions to more expensive, resource-intensive problems.

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3. Communication:

Another important, related issue is communication. SIMSCI needs to be able to model sharing of scientific information and the 'publish or perish' struCture of the scientific reward system, including the emphasis on achieving priority.

(a) Journals:

Obviously, a time-limited simulation cannot simulate all the rhetorical features of actual science. But one can include competing newsletters--perhaps electronic ones, disseminated via e-mail--which report brief accounts of results and will be peer reviewed by students. Initially, newsletters will be based in competing labs with extensive resources, but any group of participants that can assemble sufficient resources will be able to start its own newsletter. Subscriptions will cost resources, which will be turned over to the newsletter. So again, an underfunded newsletter can gain resources by attracting subscribers.

(b) Conference presentations:

Just as any group or lab can organize a newsletter, so any group can organize a conference. But participants will have to spend resources to get to the conference. One alternative will be to be invited to a conference supported by a lab, or be sent by a lab to a conference. In both of these cases, the lab would have to pay.

(c) Informal contacts:

Participants will also be able to send written messages to other students whom they can identify by name and role. (This could be done via e-mail). This simulates the kind of informal communication that takes place in letters. The receiver of a message will, of course, be under no obligation to respond.

Again, constraints on all these forms of communication could be manipulated in a variety of ways in SIMSCI. One could, for example, have newsletters reward positive results and refuse to publish replications--or one could do the reverse. One could even attempt to assess the importance of rewarding priority of science by providing no reward for it. What if multiple, independent re-discoveries were given equal status? How could one be sure what counted as independent? The point is, SIMSCI does not have to mimic the structure of science as it usually appears--one can deliberately experiment with different kinds of reward structures.

4. Outside Events:

SIMSCI wiII also allow the controllers to introduce a wide range of outside events. For example, at a certain stage of the simulation, improved equipment could be made available which would provide higher resolution on the perceptual task, potentially making terrain or other features far less ambiguous. Use of this new technology might be very expensive. One might also introduce the possibility

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of 'lower tech' improvements that could be made and/or utilized by lower resource groups. Using mechanisms like this, SIMSCI could begin to explore the role of technological improvements in science.

One could also introduce a new theory, or task, or change the priorities of one of the funding agencies. Special awards like the Nobel Prize could be introduced. Controllers could select outside events that reflect the goals of their simulation.

5.2.2 Social and cognitive processes in SIMSCI

SIMSCI could include a variety of measures of the cognitive and social processes of its participants, ones that they could use to reflect on and improve their own efforts to solve problems and succeed as scientists and that could also be used to compare permutations of variables like differences in resources and changes in reward structure. The SIMSCI manual would include suggestions on how to get the maximum amount of information out of the minimum amount of data.

(1) Documents:

Each participant in SIMSCI will be required to keep a notebook, recording ideas for experiments and actual results. Participants could be shown portions of Faraday's notebook and Alexander Graham Bell's as examples.

Participants would also be writing e-mail messages and longer articles to appear in electronic newsletters. In addition, participants would be writing proposals to funding agencies. All of these public documents, and all drafts of them, would provide a useful record for further reflection, including those articles that were not accepted and proposals that were not funded.

(2) Protocols:

Selected participants could be protocoled as they work on their tasks, i.e., they would be asked to talk aloud as they work. Laboratory meetings could be taped, creating a record similar to the one produced by Kevin Dunbar's molecular biology laboratories (Dunbar, 1995). Conferences could be videotaped. Meetings of gatekeepers--journal editors, foundation boards, review panels--could be recorded as well.

(3) Interviews:

Selected participants could also be drawn aside for interviews at random times during the simulation. The interviews will allow exploration of cognitive/social relationships--they could be asked questions about their progress in solving the

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tasks as well as their career trajectories and their attitudes toward funding agencies, laboratories, etc.

These measures will reveal a variety of processes used by groups and in response to the simulation, responses that could be used by participants and researchers afterwards to analyze what happened in a particular version of SIMSCI. Probably the result would be more provocative new questions than answers; some of these questions would certainly lead to new case-studies. Experimental simulations have provided frameworks for the study of scientists like Faraday and inventors like Bell (see Gorman, 1992). Similarly, SIMSCI could generate frameworks for studying how cognitive and social factors interact in scientific groups.

5.2.3 Using SIMSCI to Explore Evidence Ambiguity

To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of a complex in vitro simulation, let us consider an example of a SIMSCI focused on a complex issue: evidence ambiguity. Evidence is rarely unambiguous; debates in science often revolve around what constitutes 'good' data and what should be dismissed as error. SIMSCI allows us to manipulate different types of error and note their effect on consensus formation and on the construction of order in domains where the level of randomness is high.

(1) E"or on an experimental task:

In Chapter 2, I discussed attempts to simulate possible and actual error in psychology experiments. Suppose the 2-4-6 task were one of the problems participants could elect to work on. To conduct an experiment, each student would have to pay a nominal fee to get access to a calculator or computer, which would give them the result. One could add a high level of error to this task--say, 40%. One could add the possibility of paying to use better equipment in order to reduce the possibility of error. Participants would then have to decide whether to spend more on a few good experiments, or run lots of relatively cheap ones, replicating to check for errors.

Again, laboratories with more resources will have substantial advantages on such a task, though those with less resources will still be able to make substantial progress if they design their less expensive experiments cleverly.

High levels of ambiguity, or error, also give more room for participants to construct rules and negotiate what constitutes progress on the task. Rules could be complex enough to allow for different hypotheses and constructions, especially on more complex tasks like the artificial universes created by Mynatt and his colleagues (Mynatt, et aI., 1978). One could even introduce a very complex task that had no rule, to see what rules participants would invent, especially if they suspected there was a lot of error in the task. SIMSCI therefore allows one to

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explore the relationship between resources, rule ambiguity, level of error in the data and research strategy.

(2) Error on an observational task:

This sort of a task often involves resolving perceptual ambiguity through careful observation. Examples include the relationship among geological strata, or resolution of terrain features on a distant planet.

Consider, for example, a SIMSCI task based on the controversy concerning the canals on Mars. Percival Lowell developed a theory and a set of supporting observations concerning the presence of canals on Mars. These canals were seen by other prominent astronomers, but still others remained skeptical. Interestingly, several critics conducted experiments to determine whether the canals might be an optical illusion, illustrating that even practicing scientists can tum to simulations to settle controversies. Eventually, more powerful telescopes established that there were no canals, but until the advent of this new technology, the controversy raged (Gorman, 1992, for a detailed account).

Participants could be allowed to select computer screens representing satellite images of terrain features on a distant planet; they would be told that the satellite is not functioning well, and therefore the resolution of the images is poor. Again, access to the computer screens will require commitment of resources; well-funded labs will have considerable advantages.

In addition, information on conflicting hypotheses could be made available to participants, along with evidence that proponents claim support each hypothesis. One hypothesis, for example, might argue that there were terrain features which suggested the presence of intelligent life; another might argue that these were all just natural features. The papers describing these hypotheses could originate from competing laboratories. At the beginning of this SIMSCI, each lab could be assigned a participant director who would have to decide whether to continue to support the lab's past position, or take a different tack. The risk of change would be losing funding from stable sources dedicated to a particular theory. For example, one of the funding sources might represent a space agency that wanted proof of intelligent life on other worlds. A lab that stuck with that agenda would increase its chances for funding.

One could use this sort of a SIMSCI to study under what circumstances data plays the largest and smallest role in determining the outcome of scientific discoveries. The SIMSCI might begin with enough ambiguity that teams could argue persuasively for their perspectives, but gradually introduce new equipment that gradually improved the quality of the data. One could vary the extent to which this improved data pointed towards a genuine discovery or simply showed no evidence of a pattern. One could even try to create paradigm shifts by introducing anomalous results. Then one could watch the negotiations that went on between groups.

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The kind of deep commitments to research programs seen in science are hard to simulate, but social influence studies like Zimbardo's prison simulation and Milgram's obedience experiments show that subjects can quickly identify themselves with arbitrary roles assigned by an experimenter. We might be surprised at the extent to which participants in SIMSCI become committed to different theoretical positions.

These three main manipulable domains and the manipulable features within them will allow SIMSCI to be adapted to explore relationships between social and cognitive variables. For example, one could study minority influence in science by introducing a trained confederate into the simulation, who would vigorously and persuasively promote a hypothesis at variance with the positions taken by the dominant labs on a particular task. One could train this confederate to adopt specific persuasion strategies to see which worked best.

Similarly, one could introduce a confederate who deliberately used fraud in an effort to bolster his/her career. (Note that SIMSCI does not automatically exclude the possibility of fraud--a student can always misrepresent the results he or she has actually achieved, and others will have to check by replicating).

5.2.4 Educational Implications of SIMSCI

I have outlined SIMSCI in a way that makes it ambiguous whether it is primarily a research platform or a teaching device. That ambiguity is deliberate. Clearly, this kind of a simulation, properly done, could teach students a lot about the way social and cognitive aspects of science blend in actual practice. It could also allow researchers to manipulate and measure factors that might affect the resolution of scientific controversies, as well as simulate different models of scientific progress. I think the research/teaching dichotomy should be transcended, whenever possible. A SIMSCI could be set-up in a class, such as the one I teach on scientific and technological thinking, and the student participants could be major players in conducting a post-mortem that would evaluate what we could learn and generalize from the experience. For example, student participants could discuss the conditions that promoted discovery and creativity, and those that did not.

Science education rarely includes much about the relationships between cognitive and social factors in science; typically, students learn about the context of science in separate courses on history and/or philosophy of science SIMSCI could complement these courses by making students active participants in science, allowing them to experience a small part of the joys and frustrations of a scientific career. Indeed, SIMSCI could be incorporated into a variety of such courses, and the tasks used in the SIMSCI environment could be linked to, and enriched by, a variety of case-studies.

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SIMSCI need not be limited to science and engineering students. Indeed, it is a perfect platform for teaching non-science students how science really works. SIMSCI can become a platform for studying issues in science policy and education; it can be used in classrooms and research laboratories. It cannot replace case-studies and thick descriptions; instead, it would complement these approaches. One could, for example, take the approach advocated by Dunbar (Dunbar, 1995) and iterate between a study of an actual scientific laboratory and a SIMSCI that allowed manipulation of variables that appeared to affect consensus formation in that lab. Data collected from SIMSCI could help explain the patterns of response seen in the actual laboratory and also suggest surprising new relationships to look for in case studies. SIMSCI could also complement historical case studies, as the canals on Mars example suggests, and computational simulations modeling the effect of the same variables on a multi-agent network.

5.2.5 Virtual SIMSCI?

Simulations like Civilization and SimCity suggest that a computer SIMSCI could be created and run over the internet.95 Consider Civilization. In this simulation, or game, one plays the role of a civilization-builder, from 4000 B.C. to the present, making all decisions about where to build cities, what structures to construct in them, which technologies to create and what relations to have with other civilizations. One has to maintain a simple economy, balancing taxes with expenditures and providing luxuries to keep people happy. One can compete with other computerized opponents or human opponents over the internet. Judging from the number of Web-sites and books of hints available for Civilization II, this kind of simulation is engrossing to the point of addiction.

In a computerized SIMSCI, the virtual world of laboratories, tasks and Simbucks could be enhanced by graphics and other features that motivate players to spend hours mastering Civilization. For example, just as one has to accumulate resources to pay for civilization advances in Civilization and urban improvements in Sim City , one could pay to improve laboratories in SIMSCI, buying research equipment, technicians, and even try to entice top-level researchers to leave others' labs and join yours. Part of a laboratory's income could come from users outside of the lab who pay for the use of its equipment. Labs could compete to offer the best facilities and services, while also competing for grants.

In Civilization, one simply buys technological advances and scientific discoveries. In a computerized SIMSCI, funding from foundations and agencies could depend, in part, on results achieved with the equipment--on discoveries and accomplishments. The funding agencies could be represented by internet

95 Civilization and Civilization II are trademarks of Microprose Software Inc. and SimCity and SimCity 2000 are trademarks of Maxis Inc.

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participants assigned those roles. Newsletter journals containing results and theories could be formed and distributed over the internet. Laboratories would have to gain reputations for expertise and quality. One could even simulate the kinds of negotiations that lead laboratories to collaborate on 'Big Science' projects like the Superconducting Supercollider, and introduce events that could affect their decision to stay with or abandon such projects.

In this manner, a computerized SIMSCI could simulate the complex relationships between basic and applied research and technological innovation. For example, Stokes talks about what he calls Pasteur's quadrant. If one thinks of benefits to basic science as one axis on a graph and applied benefits as another, then the quadrant corresponding to high potential for both is the area in which Pasteur worked: he created the field of microbiology and at the same time his work had immediate pay-off for brewers (Stokes, In Pressj>6 One could set up the funding agencies in a SIMSCI so that one encouraged basic research and another applied, and see if a lab emerged that could connect the two. One could also give a lab a 'work-in-Pasteur's-quadrant' heuristic and see how it managed to translate this idea into action.

One of the advantages of a computer SIMSCI is that the participants could actually create highly complex technologies, like a new weapons system. This capability could be used to set-up ethical dilemmas. Should the 'work-in­Pasteur's-quadrant' heuristic lab use creating weapons as a justification for its basic research?

From an educational standpoint, these computer simulations are highly motivating--indeed, one would have to be careful that students not spend too much time on them! From a research standpoint, they are highly manipulable, if programmed properly--one can introduce all kinds of contingencies as the simulation progresses.

One could, for example, introduce ethical issues. The possibility of producing fraudulent data and publishing it is always present. One could simply watch to see if this ever happened, and note the circumstances. Or one or two students could be given instructions to engage in forms of fraud, to see how the system responded. Similar opportunities exist for conflicts of interest, e.g., sitting on a panel that reviews a proposal from a competing lab.

One of the advantages of Civilization II is that participants can buy sustainable technologies like recycling and solar power, which helps them avoid local pollution effects.97 It is probably too much of a stretch to simulate this kind

96 I am grateful to Rush Holt for highlighting this important argument. Any distortions are my own, and not his--I have freely adapted it to my present purposes.

97 One of the weaknesses of Civilization II is that civilizations never permanently damage their resource base. At advanced levels, they can create local pollution, but they never eliminate forests,

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of sustainable technology in SIMSCI, though one might give participants the option of choosing a problem that promised to pave the way for sustainable technologies. Then one could experiment with how such attempts fit in with the shifting agendas of funding agencies, perhaps contrasting it with scientific developments supported by a military agency.

The point is, the possibilities are endless. Even just having a class try to design a SIMSCI would be a useful exercise in thinking about how science really operates.

5.3 Turning active learning modules into case-studies

As noted in Chapter 2, recent research in cognitive psychology supports the view that experts learn from oases (Kolodner, 1993a). Specifically, I think they learn that crucial aspect of judgment I call wisdom: when to activate a particular combination of knowledge and skill.

I would argue experts can learn aspects of reflective judgment from simulations. For example, one can learn tools for thinking about the costs of different career choices from SIMSCI. From simpler tasks, one can learn to be aware of the heuristic potential of confirmation and disconfirmation and use that awareness to decide how to employ these strategies.

But SIMSCI cannot provide the sort of existence proof or proof of failure that a case can. Nor are simulations as inspiring or depressing as stories about real practitioners who have succeeded or failed.

In science and engineering, reading about invention and discovery is not sufficient: students should be confronted with a problem that is open-ended enough for them to display creativity, but constrained enough so they can accomplish a solution; they should be encouraged to 'step outside of the bounds' of the normal process. As Roth et al. argue, "When we advocate open-inquiry laboratory or design activities for elementary and secondary students, it is not because we believe it (sic) to be a better way oflearning the same content. Rather, we have strong reasons to believe that students will develop a new relationship to knowledge: many students no longer consider knowledge as something foreign that they need to acquire just to take the next career step but as something that they construct for themselves, and they see themselves not only as reproducers of cultural knowledge but, more important, as producers of personal knowledge." (Roth, McGinn, & Bowen, 1996, p. 462).

empty mines and threaten the global environment. Civ II could become a powerful learning tool if it let civilizations destroy themselves through careless management of resources.

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Such active learning modules can be based on historical cases as well as contemporary ones. History creates a great opportunity for vicarious apprenticeship--for working on a problem solved by a master designer, or one in which a designer failed, and comparing one's processes with those of the historical figure. Historical designs typically involve equipment and concepts that are considered relatively simply, by modern standards--you don't need an oscilloscope, or a laser. But once students try to emulate or improve on these apparently simple experiments, they will find that these 'primitive' devices and manipulation embody a great deal of sophistication.

For example, one could take the exemplary work by Ryan Tweney (Tweney, 1986) and David Gooding (Gooding, 1990a) and use it to create an active­learning module based on Michael Faraday's discovery of fields of force. More specifically, one could turn Faraday's invention of a prototype electromagnetic motor into a module, giving students simple equipment similar to that which Faraday had. They could even be asked to construct alternate ways of demonstrating a similar phenomenon, like those generated by Faraday's contemporaries (Gooding, 1990a). Faraday's notebooks (Tweney, 1991) and Gooding's problem-behavior graphs could be used to help students get a deep understanding of Faraday's way of making discoveries. Students could use Gooding and Addis' CLARITY program (see 1.3.3) to simulate alternate paths to Faraday's discoveries, thereby suggesting possibilities for future experiments.

5.4 Turning Students into Inventors

Can invention be taught? The only way to find out is to try. Again, apprenticeship with a master inventor would be ideal. One way to have students experience science and engineering in-the-making is to have them apprentice with mentors--working scientists and engineers. It would be great if we could give significant numbers of students the opportunity to work with Alexander Graham Bell, or Susan Lyons, or Al Rich. Barring that, we can create a kind of virtual apprenticeship via the use of active learning modules, where they are confronted with open-ended problems like designing a portable shelter for the homeless; to solve such problems, they will have to conduct original research and build prototypes (Chou & Calkins 1994; Gorman, Richards, Scherer, & Kagiwada 1995).

5.4.1 An Active Learning Module Based on the Telephone

Like a module based on the first electromagnetic motor, a module based on the telephone would involve hands-on activities that are within reach of most students, even those without strong technical background. Readers of Chapter 3 will remember that most of Bell's experimental devices were made out of simple components, in part because of his lack of electrical knowledge and in part

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because of his limited resources. Elisha Gray and Thomas Edison built more complicated devices but some of their principles can be adapted by students, e.g., Edison's use of carbon as a resistance medium.

Bell's case is suited for science education as well as invention because he tried to be scientific in his approach. At the same time, his knowledge of mathematics was limited, so his process is accessible to students from a diversity of backgrounds. Modern students can reconstruct Bell's experimental prototypes using modern batteries, wire and magnets, though reconstruction is no guarantee that they will see the underlying theory.98 Bell also left extensive records, so students can compare their experiments and results with those of the master.

Vicarious mentoring is facilitated by the fact that Bell's notebooks are full of his own reflections on his problem-solving efforts. Donald Nonnan (Nonnan, 1993) distinguishes between experiential and reflective cognition. The fonner is exemplified by the expert in a domain, who does not need to reflect--the 'obvious' solution emerges from her experience. The latter is exemplified by the expert moving into a new domain, where her previous experience does not produce a solution; she will have to reflect on her problem-solving strategies and ways of representing the problem in order to come up with a new way of reaching her goal. Indeed, as a result of reflection, the goal itself may change. Bell's primary area of expertise was in speech and audition; for him, electricity was a novel domain, and as a result he reflected constantly on the best way to proceed. Students can see this reflection and learn from it, because they are in a similar situation--thrust into an unfamiliar problem area, and asked to come up with a novel solution. As (Schauble, et al., 1991) note, "if the eventual objective of instruction is to provide the additional capability to flexibly adapt various fonns of thinking when they are appropriate, then it is important that instruction not end precisely at the point where it should begin. All science teachers can tell anecdotes in which the classroom demonstration is completed, and two weeks later children recall the 'magic effect' but not the associated principle .. .interest in generating effects may help engage children in the reasoning process, but sustained effort is required for progress beyond that to a model of scientific inquiry oriented toward achieving understanding" (p. 878). The best discoverers and inventors are those who engage in the 'sustained effort' of reflection, improving their group or individual approaches to novel problems.

When I created a module based on the telephone, I had three major goals:

(1) To pennit students to compare their own invention processes with those of a master inventors working on the same problem. Students' reference materials included sections from Bell's notebooks, his original patent,

98 My student Tamar Lieberman rebuilt Bell's liquid transmitter and reed receiver and analyzed their function; copies of her undergraduate thesis may be obtained from the University of Virginia library.

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Gray's caveat, and additional material which we put on the Web (http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edulclasses/tcc315).

From this kind of virtual apprenticeship, I hoped students would learn the following skills:

(a) how to keep an invention notebook (b) how to reflect on, and modify, one's own invention process (c) how to write a patent

(2) To encourage students to experience the invention process first-hand, from idea to device to patent, thereby increasing their appreciation for the way in which human beings have transformed the world we live in.

(3) To promote the idea that invention is not mysterious, that it can be studied and taught.

In their packet of materials, stu~ents read the following problem statement:

You will enter the competition between Bell and Gray as a third party, similar to Edison whose Menlo Park team succeeded In making a major improvement on Bell's invention. Your goal is to desigIl an improvement or variation on the Bell and Gray devices that you will first caveat, and then try to eatent. You will also have to build and demonstrate an actual device that lllustrates the claims in your patent.

In order to establish that your invention is independent, you will have to demonstrate that even though you are aware of the Bell and Gray materials, your invention goes Significantly beyond them. In order to do this, you will have to document your J?rocesses, and be ready to describe them in detail. The bolder and more Innovative your al'proach, the less likely anyone can argue that anyone versed in tne art of the time could have done the same.

Because the increasingly cooperative aspects of scientific discovery and invention are well-documented (Passow, 1988) students were assigned to groups of three or four to work on the telephone module. This meant that the module could help fulfill an additional important goal: teach students how to work in teams, a goal that is receiving increasing emphasis in engineering education. For example, the new "Engineering Criteria 2000," which will be used to accredit Engineering programs, allows students to be able work in multi-disciplinary teams (Schachterlie, 1996).

In a book on using cases to teach Pascal, Michael Clancy argued that, "Using case studies, students help design solutions to problems they could not solve alone. The concepts of design are illustrated in the context of large complex programs where these ideas make sense. The case studies engage the student as a team member who contributes to the program design. Students learn aspects of design that apply to real-world programming where teamwork is prevalent" (Clancy & Linn, 1996, p. xvi).

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We were careful to mix majors in groups, though a stronger approach would have been to mix cognitive styles, as well. Two of these styles, for example, are visual and mathematical. During the development of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg developed a purely mathematical formulation of the way in which electrons changed orbits. Schrodinger's developed a visualizable alternative formulation "based on a wave imagery of electrons in which atomic transitions were continuous and visualizable like the transitions between the vibrational modes in a drumhead" (Miller, 1989, p.332). Similarly, Freeman Dyson showed that a visual approach by Feynman and a mathematical approach by Schwinger were formally equivalent (Miller, 1989). The point is, either visual or mathematical cognitive styles could lead to discoveries on these sorts of problems.

Howard Gardner has identified other kinds of cognitive styles as well, including verbal and kinesthetic (Gardner, 1983). Watson, for example, had a kind of kinesthetic style--he was best at building Bell's ideas. An optimal invention team would have a mixture of styles: a good visualizer, to draw and imagine, someone who liked to write, to keep the notebook and do the patents, someone who liked to build and someone who could work through the mathematical implications of Ohm's law. I tried to get some kind of balance among styles by making sure the majors were mixed and telling group members to utilize multiple talents--an English or Art major could be as useful on the telephone module as an Electrical Engineer.

Each group was allowed to select what it needed from a set of simple materials, including batteries of different voltages and several types of wire. Students were also encouraged to scrounge for materials like cans and nails, but they had to submit a proposal before purchasing any equipment. Their objective was to patent an electrical communication system potentially capable of working over long distances which:

(1) could transmit information rapidly and cheaply.

(2) represented an improvement on Bell's design, and those described in other materials the students were given in their packets. These materials included Gray's caveat.

In short, it would not be enough to build a replica of Bell's telephone; students would have to patent an improvement. The written and oral assignments for this module were structured around the patent process. Students first prepared a caveat, a document used in the 19th century to signal an intention to test and perfect a new invention. (The patent office now allows prospective inventors to file a disclosure document that fulfills a similar function). Students are given Gray's caveat for a speaking telegraph as an example to study (see Chapter 3).

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The caveat allowed students to signal the direction of their research. Students gave oral presentations of their caveats to the instructors, outside experts and their classmates, and demonstrated a prototype of the device they hoped to patent. After receiving feedback on their caveats, students began the testing and revision necessary to transform a caveat into a patent. They had Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent as an example, along with detailed instructions on preparing a patent. Their patents were presented to the class and an outside judge, usually a patent examiner, who decided which claims were worth granting. Students also submitted a written patent. In addition, students kept group and individual notebooks which included both details of their invention processes and comparisons with the work of actual telephone inventors.

This module emerged out of my desire to derive an educational pay-off from my research on the invention of the telephone. It wasn't clear how such a module would fit into the required courses that I taught, so I invented a new course.

5.4.2 A Course on Invention and Design

The process of inventing this new course modeled the process I would take students through, except that instead of a caveat, I built a team and wrote a grant proposal to the Leadership Opportunities in Science and Humanities program, a creative effort jointly funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fund for the Improvement of Post­Secondary Education. This program funded development of the course and its initial evaluation. There were design courses in Engineering and Architecture at the University of Virginia, but nothing on invention. I made it clear we would recruit students from a variety of majors; to make this easier, I was able to get the course cross-listed in psychology.

My three co-teachers were Larry Richards, a psychologist who specialized in design and manufacturing; Bill Scherer, a systems engineer who was an expert at supervising complicated team projects and Julia Pet-Edwards. Each of us agreed to do a module, but also to try to attend each others' modules, so this would be a real team-teaching experience. My module was the telephone, the first one the students did. I also took over the job of coordinating the class, with our teaching assistant, Julia Kagiwada. Our two consultants, Eric Bredo and W. Bernard Carlson, provided valuable expertise in the areas of educational evaluation and history of invention, respectively.

We intended the course as a kind of teaching laboratory for trying out new ideas. For example, the first time we offered the course, I piloted my rough ideas for a telephone module, refining them as we went along. We attracted 18 students: seven in their fourth year, seven in their third, three in their second and one in her first. There was a broad distribution of majors, with eleven students from a variety of Engineering disciplines and seven from liberal arts, including

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three from Psychology and Cognitive Science, and one from Architecture. Therefore, some students had extensive technical and mathematical backgrounds, while others had much less. The male/female ratio was roughly 60/40.

The breadth of student backgrounds was excellent, from our perspective; we wanted the modules to be usable in a wide range of settings. To accommodate differences in background, we placed background readings on reserve (see http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edu/classes/tcc315) and sent students with specific questions to these sources. We also carefully balanced expertise within groups, so that a political science student might be working with an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer and a psychology major.

We have since offered the course four times. We have not always been able to maintain this kind of student diversity; there were semesters when we had almost all engineering students, and then the course did not go as well, because the engineering students needed to be challenged by students who did not share their disciplinary paradigms and exemplars.

The best way to understand what students learned from the telephone module in this course is to follow the method we have used throughout this book and look closely at a fine-grained case study.

5.4.3 A student group tackles the photophone

Consider, for example, one of the groups in our most recent iteration of the Invention and Design class. Initially, this group, which included a third-year Cognitive Science major99 a third-year Computer Science major, and a fourth-year Systems Engineer, had to choose between three major alternate paths, as shown in Figure 3. Two paths were ones actually used by Bell, who developed a liquid transmitter (see Section 3.9.1) and also a device called the photophone that translated light into sound. Students were also given information on a carbon transmitter developed by Thomas Edison (Carlson 1989).

This group elected to work with Bell's photophone, on the grounds that it had the most room for improvement, resembled modem ideas like fiber optics and might be easier to manage than messy liquids and ground carbon. Their initial information about the photophone came from a brochure describing a December 1976, exhibit at the National Museum of American History entitled "Person to Person"; page 6 showed how one could build a simple photophone using a flashlight, a tin can, a solar cell and a couple of batteries (see http:repo­nttcc. virginia.edulclasses/tcc315/almltelephone/exhibitslbuild.htm1). They could also look at examples from previous classes; several groups had tried to improve the photophone, with varying results. I encouraged students to build off the work

99 This student, I. Kirby Robinson, wrote an article on this group's processes with me (Gorman, In Press); the account here is adapted from this article. I am grateful to Kirby for his assistance.

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of previous students, whenever possible, treating the earlier student work as part of the 'state of the art' they would have to go beyond.

This group knew they had to treat the "Person to Person" exhibit as part of the state of the art; they would have to improve on it. But it did suggest how to use modern materials to achieve Bell's goal. The group decided to build and test a photophone in which a paper cup served as the speaking tube, with a piece of plastic serving as the membrane. To this they attached a piece of a compact disk, which served as the mirror; a beam from a flashlight bounced off this mirror onto a solar cell. When they spoke into the cone, they hoped the mirror would vibrate enough to cause that famous undulating current of Bell's to emanate from the solar cell. They decided their major innovation would involve the use of magnifying glasses to increase the intensity of light reaching the mirrored surface and the solar cell. Figure 20 shows this design.

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Improve the concentration of light to the solar cell throught the use of magnifying glasses.

Mirror & Diaphragm

Speak here

Insert Magnifying Glasses

Silicon Cell

.... --tlU little or no current fluctuation L..--~_J little or no effect from magnification

improve reflection

enclose system

provide for vibration

Figure 20

First design by a group trying to improve on Bell's photophone in an invention and design class.

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The initial arrangement caused a small fluctuation in the needle of a multimeter when someone spoke or blew into the cone. I told groups that they could use a multimeter to test the effectiveness of their designs. Bell, of course, did not have this kind of tool available to him, but he did use crude galvanometers of various sorts. The fluctuating needle suggested that this group's photophone might indeed be producing an undulating current, albeit a weak one.

The group was concerned that this marginal effect might be due to ambient light and instability in the set-up. Like Bell, whose processes they were studying as the worked, the students focused on slots in their mental model that seemed especially likely to improve the quality of transmission. Initially, they worked in a reflection slot, trying to accentuate the fluctuations in the light by substituting a variety of reflecting materials. The most promising result was obtained with a piece of a CD. Then they experimented with the way in which the reflector was mounted, attaching it to the can with rubber bands and finally mounting it on a rubber membrane. They also came up with a kind of container slot, enclosing the apparatus in a cheesebox in an effort to stabilize it and minimize outside lighting. This set of changes produced a positive result, though students were careful to note that some of the fluctuation might be due to factors other than the voice.

Overall, the group concluded that there was still too little fluctuation. They worked for a while in a magnification slot and found that still did not make a significant improvement. Despite their reservations, they had to submit a caveat, signaling their intention to invent a photophone, and they felt the design still had potential. A real inventor would not have to submit a caveat before it was quite ready, but would be under enormous pressure to submit as early as possible.

I had a former student, Greg Morse, who was a patent examiner, come down and review the students' caveats. He brought with him a copy of Bell's original photophone patent. The group discovered that their main claim to novelty, concerning the manipUlation of magnifying glasses, was also claimed by Bell and therefore was part of the state of the art.

The day Elisha Gray submitted a caveat for a 'speaking telegraph' he had an experience similar to this student group: he learned that another inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, had just submitted a patent covering spoken transmission. The patent office declared that Gray's caveat and Bell's patent were in interference, meaning that Bell could not be granted a patent until it was clear that his claims were either prior to, or different from, Gray's. Bell learned from the patent examiner that the point of interference concerned a clause Bell had inserted at the last minute in which he claimed the possibility of using variable resistance to create an undulating current. Elisha Gray had featured a variable resistance transmitter in his caveat, and Edison would base his successful carbon transmitter on the same principle (Carlson & Gorman, 1992). After several weeks, the interference was declared invalid, on the grounds that Bell's patent had arrived in

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the office earlier. But Bell's conversation with the patent examiner may have suggested a change in his research direction and led to his first experiments with the liquid transmitter (see Chapter 3).

The students in the photophone group had to make the same kind of change in direction after they submitted their caveat, revising their original intentions in the light of their interference with Bell's actual photophone patent. They decided the solar cell simply could not detect the small vibrations of a mirrored surface. Instead, they removed the reflection slot altogether and they tried shining the light directly on the cell, jiggling it and varying its intensity. The most positive results were obtained when the intensity of the light was changed, rather than when it was merely vibrated.

They now had a new goal: to "find some way to vary the intensity of the light rather than just vibrating it." They brainstormed, then hypothesized "that somehow the vibrations of the membrane could be used in a circuit to intermittently open and close the circuit. This should cause the light to flash in a pattern corresponding to the vibrations." They were considering what Bell called an intermittent current--a succession of on-off pulses. Bell's first telephone patent described why such a design would not work--why one needed an undulating current instead. The group apparently did not recall Bell's analysis, and plowed ahead. This point in the photophone group's process was described by a member as follows:

Many times, the inspirations for what can later be seen as a breakthrough come from changing the perspective of your efforts. In this case, when confronted with the Bell patent obstacle, we had to change our entire focus. 'Stepping outside of the system' could be a good way of describing this action. We had to step out of the 'classroom' system which we following in thinking that this was an assignment, and not an actual 'inventive process'. We also stepped out of the 'historical' mode, and looked at our problem form a modem, multi-disciplinary vantage point.

To approach this goal, the group created a new contacts slot that resembled one Bell had created in his March 8th experiments with the liquid transmitter (see Chapter 3, Figure 17). They began a series of experiments in the contacts slot, beginning with a device that included a piece of aluminum foil on the membrane that was connected to the negative lead on the battery by a length of solder. The solder was put as close as possible to the foil without touching it. They tested this arrangement by shouting "Testing, 1, 2, 3" into the mouthpiece, and obtained a negative result, which they attributed to the fact that the foil was not rigid enough. So they replaced it with a tack pointing upwards, which made enough contact with the solder to cause the light to shine, but not enough to activate the solar cell. This was a somewhat positive result, promising enough to suggest that their current goal deserved further pursuit.

But it did lead to a change in their hypothesis. Instead of making the light flash on and off, they decided to let it stay on. Now they were back on Bell's idea

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of creating an undulating current, in this case by somehow varying the intensity of the light source. They found that the vibrations of the membrane caused the light intensity to fluctuate, but not enough to affect the readings from the multimeter.

They hypothesized that if the two contacts had more surface area, the signal would be improved (see Figure 21). They tried two tacks, with their flat surfaces facing each other. They then achieved a dramatic positive result: "a seemingly nice, reproducible fluctuation in light intensity was made. On checking the resistance of the solar cell (and thereby the current) we saw that resistance did change proportionally to words spoken into the mouthpiece." Similarly, Bell's first telephone had not produced distinct speech sounds, but a mumbling that Bell treated as a positive result--so positive that he went to patent on the basis of it.

300

A

J

8

/ contact slot

Figure 21

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silicon cell

cheesebox

contacts

/

power source ,..a-----'-, / (batteries)

light bulb

Final design of a student group improving upon Bell's photophone.

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The group then moved to stabilizing this arrangement, adding features like a platform that would make their experimental set-up into something more reliable. I permitted students to hook their devices into modern amplifiers and tape­recorders for demonstration; using the latter, this group was eventually able to obtain a scratchy recording of speech. They also produced a patent, which included the following summary of the design:

In response to sound sent through a cylindrical mouthpiece, a diaphragm stretched over the opposite end of the mouthpiece vibrates. This undulation alters the flow of current between two closely spaced metal contacts, one of which is attached to the taut diaphragm. When touching, the two contacts coml'lete a circuit containing a light and power source. The intensity of the light depends upon and fluctuates with the amount of current supplied to the light source. These variable emissions from the light are received by a means for transforming solar energy to electrical current. The means for transforming has analog outpufbased on the variable intensity of the light. This output can be sent to a generic receiver.

This detailed account of one group's progress shows the way in which students' invention processes can parallel those of a historical inventor, but still be original in important respects. For this group, there did seem to be elements of virtual apprenticeship. They were not explicitly aware of the close parallels between their invention processes and Bell's, but the way in which they systematically experimented in slots and re-discovered the importance of the undulating current suggests a tacit influence. Similarly, student teams could learn different patterns and styles from other scientists and inventors.

This group was not typical--indeed, there was no such thing as a typical group. Other final designs included a system that coupled a carbon transmitter with a photophone which amplified the signal, the combination of a resonant chamber with a carbon rod, which acted as a sliding resistor, several variations on the liquid transmitter and on transmitters that worked by electromagnetic induction. Not all groups followed processes that resembled Bell's; many tried to take short-cuts by hacking together an initial prototype and sticking with it, even when it didn't work very well. Students do not have the commitment of an inventor; therefore, many are not motivated to study the invention process in detail and follow it through all the unavoidable twists and turns.

Overall, students in the course learned:

(1). How to work in groups--particularly interdisciplinary groups. There was a kind of 'culture clash' in the Invention and Design class, which drew from two populations--students in a school of engineering and students majoring in other fields, including psychology, cognitive science, and architecture (Gorman & Kagiwada, 1995). In the latest Invention and Design course, several students commented that the engineering students were more bottom-up in their approach, whereas the students from outside of engineering were more top-down. Students from fields like mechanical and electrical engineering were more likely to jump into building a working device, while non-engineering students were forced to

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take a larger view of the project, trying to figure out the overall goals. This difference was far from universal, however; the course attracted a large group of systems engineering students, who were trained to adopt a top-down approach. As groups worked together, disciplinary stereotypes gradually disappeared and were replaced with a recognition of the advantage of taking multiple perspectives on a problem. The photophone group described above provides an example of the kind of close, multi-disciplinary teamwork that could emerge.

One-third of the students in a recent class emphasized that learning the strengths and weaknesses of individual group members and allocating work accordingly were two of the most important things in successful group work. Open communications and respect for group members were also considered extremely important in group work by the students. One student summed it up: "Every group is different, one person can radically affect a dynamic, delegation is important, but communication of expectations and ideas is most important."

(2). How to invent:

By the end of this module, students knew how to keep invention notebooks, write caveats and patents and revise them, based on comments from an examiner. They also knew how to build a prototype and demonstrate it. Naturally, some students acquired higher proficiency at these skills than others, but all experienced the invention process, first-hand.

We also tried to instill wisdom by asking students to reflect on their own invention processes and compare what they did with Bell and Gray. The photophone group described above is a good example of how students could unpack their own processes.

Comparison with the inventor was hardest, as the photophone group again illustrates. They followed a process very similar to Bell's, but were rarely conscious of that fact. I had to point out the similarities, in order to make them explicit. I did the same for other groups. I wanted them to see that they were adopting one style of invention; they could also study and follow the styles of other inventors. Bell, for example, was very verbal, adopted a conservative focusing heuristic and worked with one collaborator. I also talked about Edison, who was much more visual and kinesthetic than Bell, preferred a focused gambling heuristic and ran the first real R&D lab at Menlo Park. That's how Edison could afford to be a gambler; he could have members of his team construct several very different prototype telephones at the same time, and compare them.

5.4.4 Turning secondary students into inventors

I thought this kind of active learning module might inspire secondary students to take a greater interest in invention before they had decided on majors and made career choices. With support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, I set up a

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summer course for gifted students from 9th through 11th grades, collaborating with two colleagues in the Education school and a high-school physics teacher,

who agreed to run the class100 (Gorman, Plucker, & Callahan, In Press).

Using student test scores, responses to essays, and teacher recommendations, we selected 15 male and 16 female students entering grades nine through eleven to attend each of two three-week sessions. One-quarter of the students were from ethnic groups traditionally under-represented in technical fields.

The university course lasted for a full semester. The summer enrichment course lasted for only three weeks. (It was given twice, with sixteen students in the first iteration and fifteen in the second). But in the former, students were distracted by dozens of competing assignments, whereas in the latter, their sole focus was this course. In the former, we had grades to motivate students; in the latter, we had to rely on their intrinsic motivation and whatever inspiration we could give. We planned the telephone module to last for about ten days.

The students were eager and enthusiastic on their first day of class. They were immediately faced with a challenging set of materials similar to those I used with university students in my invention and design class, including detailed information on the challenge they would face, samples from Bell's patents and notebooks, and a workbench covered with batteries, wires, containers of different shapes and sizes and other materials they could use as they tried to create an improvement on Bell's patent (for a complete set of these materials, see http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edul-meg3c/id/id_sep/id_sep.html).

As with the college course, when we assigned students to groups, we tried to achieve diversity as much as possible. We mixed students according to sex, and ethnic background. Over one-half of the students were from groups traditionally underrepresented in science and engineering, so we were able to achieve good diversity on that dimension. We tried to infer learning styles from short essays the students had written to get into the program, looking for evidence of interest in mathematics, writing, building, and/or drawing. We tried to balance these indicators of different styles within groups.

The group experience was probably the most difficult and yet rewarding for the students. Most had the confidence that comes from considering themselves gifted; many were used to being the leaders in their groups in school. But now each talented student had to work closely with at least two others who were

100 I am grateful to Carolyn Callahan, a faculty member, and Jonathan PluckeJ; a graduate student in the gifted education program at the University of Virginia for their assistance, and to Michael Brittingham, who was an excellent teacher and mentor for the students. I am also deeply grateful to the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for making this project possible and to my friend and colleague Gary Tabor for giving me lots of good advice as I tried to create an educational design and a team to realize it.

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different in important respects, all of them collaborating intimately because the task was far too complex for any student to complete on his or her own. Students learned that invention is a process that requires numerous abilities or talents (e.g., building, sketching, writing, public speaking) and is enhanced by the engagement of persons exhibiting a variety of intellectual skills and styles (Gardner, 1983).

The classroom was often noisy and chaotic. At any given time, one group might be building a prototype, while another group argued about who should do what. In a third group, only one student might be working while the others appeared to daydream and disengage from the task. We quickly found that we had to play an even more open role than teachers in traditional guided discovery experiences (Bruner, 1956). In guided discovery, the student knows the goal of the activity. But in our case, we could only tell them when they were violating basic principles of physics and supply them with examples of similar designs completed by 19th century inventors. We could never be sure whether a particular alternative would work -- we had to wait breathlessly with the students to see.

Despite--or perhaps because of--the absence of grades or other contingencies, most groups rose to the challenge. One group successfully demonstrated that they could transmit speech using a photophone, a result that was as good as that achieved by the university group described above. The secondary students relied on the mirror approach favored by Bell and did not include the innovations in the contacts slot done by the college students; nonetheless, their final device worked as well. They achieved this result by careful and systematic testing of each component. One female student was the leader, but eventually, with our help, all group members became involved in some aspect of the task. For example, one member who distanced herself from the group throughout much of its activity showed initiative when it came time to write the patent. As facilitators, we spent much of our time encouraging groups to take advantage of the talents of all members, especially groups with a strong leader who tended to want to do everything her or his way.

In another group, the three students had trouble interacting from the second day of class. By the end of the first week, a communication barrier had grown between the two male students and the one female. For example, in a discussion following the film Mosquito Coast and other movies about inventors, one of the male group members noted that in many of the films the inventor was male, was seeking to satisfy a dominant father figure, and was driven by a dream. He continued by saying that the female group member could have definitely filled that role as an inventor, especially since she had such good ideas. But she perceived this as an insult, while the course instructors felt that the male student was attempting to give her a compliment.

At the beginning of the second week, each group conducted a "group progress discussion" in which they went over disagreements like the one above and tried to learn how to communicate better. As a result, the members of this group felt they "worked out" many of their problems, and they did not perceive any major

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difficulties during the remainder of the telephone project or the solar energy project that followed.

On the telephone module, they began with the idea of a button the speaker could press that would open the listener's phone and fire a bagel at her. This playful, silly idea actually got them involved in thinking about multiple telegraph circuits. Next, they considered having the speaker press a button to display a sign to the listener: a smiling face, or a frowning face, or a heart. The group sketched a workable circuit to implement this design, but abandoned it for a more conventional telephone transmitter, in which a coil would be attached to a diaphragm and move through a magnetic field. Individual group members appeared to contribute equally to the telephone project, with each person working on all aspects of the project design, construction and trouble-shooting.

Not all groups were successful. One group spent much of its time designing an elaborate phone with an elongated speaking tube. When they demonstrated it in front of the class, it worked poorly, and they had trouble describing how their design was an improvement over Bell's patent. The embarrassment of failing so conspicuously in front of their peers drove this group to work harder on the second project, which we will discuss later in this chapter.

Many of the final designs resembled those created by historical inventors. For example, one group put their diaphragm between two transformers without realizing this design closely resembled a polar relay Bell tried to transform into a telephone transmitter. Many of the problems encountered by students also resembled those encountered by inventors. For example, one group came up with a design that resembled one of Edison's in which the vibrations of a diaphragm compressed carbon, thereby alternately increasing and decreasing the current. They found that the carbon gradually lost its friability, and the current no longer changed. Edison had a similar problem; he eventually created a compact carbon button which he put right on the diaphragm (Carlson, 1989). These instances of re­invention suggested, again, that students were experiencing a kind of virtual apprenticeship.

5.4.5 Advice from an Inventor on Working in Groups

I was concerned that these gifted secondary students would see the telephone as an antiquated technology and conclude that any lessons they learned from building it would not apply to modern inventions. Therefore, I invited Duane Bowker, one of the inventors of TrueVoice at Bell Labs, to come talk to my students. Duane Bowker is one of the inventors of AT&T TrueVoiceSM. The following is an excerpt from an AT&T hand-out provided by Duane describing his invention:

AT & T TrueVoiceSM is a method that ~eatIy improves the quality of long-distance transmission by a) selectively amplifying lower speech frequencies to compensate for the low frequency attenuation introduced

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by typical telephone transmitters and receivers and (b) increasing the overall loudness of the voice to a level more typical of local telephone calls. The low frequency' emphasis makes the person's voice over the telephone sound more lIke the way that person's voice would normally sound in a face to face conversation. Tile low-frequency emphasis, in essence, widens the bandwidth of the end-to-end telecommunications channel at the lower end of the spectrum where many talkers have Significant amounts of speech energy. The increase in overall loudness makes the speech easier to hear on long distance connections and brings the speech level of typical talkers much closer to that which is considered optimal by most people. The loudness compensation is only applied to softer connections ana will not make already loud connections too loud. (http:/ / repo-nUcc.virginia.edu/ classes/ tcc315 / alm/ telephone/ advice)

At Bell Labs, where Duane Bowker works, every successful project eventually becomes a team effort. Duane created the idea for True Voice with his colleague, Jim James. They knew each other well, had worked together for a long time, were both cognitive psychologists, and did not need to divide labor. But when it came time to implement the idea, Duane became the product champion--he sold the idea to the rest of the company and helped organized the teams that took a rough prototype and turned it into a new technology. For example, Duane and Jim initially thought that the way to improve transmission was to work with the transmitter and receiver, but a group working on long-distance lines convinced them that was the place to make improvements, and then set about doing it.

Duane discussed the importance of keeping an invention notebook. AT&T owns his, and keeps it under lock and key. He also noted that he and his colleague had received several patents, which were held by AT&T. He was very careful not to tell us too much about how the technology was developed; hence the hand-out, which had been cleared by the company.

What he did talk about was how to work in teams, information that was especially salient for the secondary gifted students, who were not used to working together on projects of this complexity. Duane talked about six aspects of team invention.

(1) Goals: Typically, a group project begins with a set of goals like the ones described in the packet the students were given at the beginning of the telephone module. However, the goal is usually very general and leaves room for innovation. In Duane's case, the goal was to selectively amplify low speech frequencies. He and Jim James came up with this goal based on their experience as cognitive scientists; their unique expertise enabled them to identify this as the main problem with distortion over long-distance networks. But this goal could be attained in a number of ways. They started out with improving the telephone and ended-up focusing on long-distance lines, which required experts from other groups at Bell Labs.

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In the students' case, the goal was to improve on Bell and Gray's designs, which left a wide range of alternatives open. Groups still had to decide which direction to take.

Duane suggested using brainstorming, in which group members write down and discuss ideas without any criticism. No one can say anything negative. Brainstorming creates a climate where people can listen and share freely. My colleague Bill Scherer adds brainwriting to this--writing whatever ideas come into ones head before the brainstorming session, without trying to discriminate the good from the bad.

Eventually, these ideas need to be focused, most eliminated, some combined. Most of the university students found this brainstorming the hardest; they wanted to jump into an immediate solution, to guess the right answer, the way they would in a laboratory exercise. The secondary students were generally more willing to brainstorm, as exemplified by the group that came up with the bagel telephone, above.

There is no handy technique like brainstorming for the winnowing and focusing phase of invention. One benefit of brainstorming may be that it instills an attitude of mutual respect among group members, teaching them to really listen to one another. This kind of atmosphere is more likely to produce the kind of constructive criticism that must follow brainstorming.

(2) Resources: Groups also typically begin with limited resources--in this case, a set of materials. If a group in a corporation like AT&T needs to get more, they have to work together to persuade management. A group that has a strong consensus makes a much better case for additional materials than one where some members don't know what is going on, or disagree with others about the group's direction.

(3) Division of labor: In a bad team, nobody knows who does what. A good team divides the labor into micro-tasks. These tasks should be suited to the expertise and interests of individual members, as much as possible. One of the unrealistic things about the module in the invention classes is that students do not get to select their additional team members, based on expertise. This kind of top-down assignment often happens in companies, but most really creative teams organize themselves. I suggested to student groups that they do an expertise assessment right at the outset, to see what their strengths were. On an open-ended project, they could evolve a design that played to their strengths.

(4) Schedule: Groups often begin with a schedule imposed from the outside, but effective groups also develop an internal schedule that sets goals for the completion of micro-tasks. For example, while two people are building a transmitter, another two can be writing a caveat. Our schedule on the telephone module included only general deadlines, like caveat and patent. We deliberately

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refused to manage each group's internal deadlines--they had to generate their own set of smaller steps to achieve this goal. Interestingly, I felt the college students had more trouble doing this, in part because of other, competing assignments that had rigid deadlines.

(5) Rules: Groups often find that they need to set-up a set of rules or guidelines for participation and decision-making. For example, one of the dangers of dividing labor is that an individual working on one part of the device may get out of touch with an individual working on another--and the components will not work together. One way around that is to get the group together at regular intervals and discuss progress. Again, we encouraged groups to do this on their own, giving them advice and help.

(6) Leadership: Having a leader like Duane who serves as a product champion is great, provided the leader listens and makes sure the rest of the team is 'on board'. A group can make it a rule that everyone gets a chance to talk at meetings, to avoid one member becoming too dominant; groups can also pick a moderator who is not the champion to ensure that alternatives are considered, but the discussion does not bog down--one has to make decisions about what to do and move ahead.

An outside evaluator with expertise in gifted education made the following comment after seeing groups present their telephone projects: "[The groups] clearly reflected an understanding of what they had done, its meaning, its reasons­-why things work and don't, where their theory falls short of being realized and the steps necessary to span the gap--and the relationship of whole and part. It was clear they have read and heard much complex information which they can translate into practice and that they have a sense of where their inventions are relative to Bell's early work."

Duane Bowker commented that he was "surprised how well some of the experiences the students related mapped onto the way things often go in an existing engineering organization like AT&T Bell Laboratories ... The students showed a great deal of insight into the process and team issues their groups ran into. You and I appear to be in agreement that exposing engineering students to these process and teamwork issues, and giving them opportunities to develop those skills that make the effective team participants, can really enhance their long-term career success."

From the telephone module, both post-secondary and secondary students learned more about how to function in design teams and also about how the invention process really works. This knowledge consisted in a combination of information and skills. To help students develop the wisdom to know when and why to apply this new knowledge, I wanted them to have an opportunity to create a new technology of their own. In section 5.5, I will describe a module that tries to accomplish this goal. Before students experience that module, however, they have to work on cases like DesignTex and Dow Coming to understand how ethics is can be integrated into invention and design.

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5.5 Cases that Combine Invention and Ethics

The case-study approach is being used increasingly to teach engineering design (Fitzgerald, 1995) and engineering ethics (Panitz, 1995). In this section, I will talk about new kinds of cases that need to be created to complement those that already exist.

5.5.1 Case-studies of creative inventors and discoverers

Most case studies of creative individuals and entrepreneurs focus on the successful individuals. For example, (Csiksenmihalyi, 1996) has interviewed over two hundred creative individuals and attempted to make generalizations about what makes them creative, including the fact that they experience something called 'flow' when they are working at peak potential. The problem with this interesting set of cases is that there is no control group, no set of cases based on individuals working in the same areas who are considered less successful.

Robert K. Merton identified the Matthew effect, named after a passage in Matthew:

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath (quoted in Merton, 1973, p.445).

According to Merton, "the Matthew effect consists of the accruing of greater increments of recognition for particular scientific contributions to scientists of considerable repute and the withholding of such recognition from scientists who have not yet made their mark" (Merton, 1973, p.446). Merton saw this effect in the careers of some of the scientists he studied; when they started out, they had trouble getting credit for discoveries, especially if one of their collaborators was an eminent scientist. Later in their careers, after they had established their reputation, the reverse happened--they received credit for work done by junior collaborators, even when they tried to share. A classic case is the discovery of penicillin. In most accounts, Alexander Fleming is given virtually all the credit, but the actual refinement of this mold into a powerful antibiotic was due to Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and others (Macfarlane, 1984).

Many of the successful individuals in Csiksenmihalyi's studies, and others like Covey's Seven Habits of Effective People (Covey, 1989), will have benefited from the Matthew effect. Like Fleming, many of them will be given more credit than they deserve for their discoveries and inventions, and others laboring with them will have received less. One of the generalizations one can make about being labeled creative or effective is to be successful--success can be a cause, not an effect.

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All of which is not to disparage post-hoc cases of discoveries like electromagnetic induction and inventions like the telephone. These are valuable and important aids to education, and this book is full of examples of them. But we need at least some case-studies that focus on discoveries and inventions in the making, before the winners are known. In the telephone case, for example, Bell apparently kept better records than his rival Elisha Gray but Bell's records are also better preserved because of Bell's subsequent fame. We might still have Elisha Gray notebooks if Gray had received more credit for his successful telegraph inventions.

5.5.2 Combining ethics and invention

Most engineering ethics cases focus on moral failures like Bhopal and the Challenger and the Pinto rather than on successes like Climatex Lifecycle. The converse of the Matthew effect, evident in some of these ethics cases, is the tendency to blame the victim. The Dow Coming case is an example; because the company was sued successfully, it must have done something wrong. Again, one way of correcting for this potential problem is to study emerging designs with a strong ethical component.

A related problem is that few cases studies show how ethics can be integrated into the earliest phases of the invention process. For example, the Challenger and Bhopal cases focus on what to do late in the design process, when students or managers have to decide what mistakes led to these disasters. The equivalent would be a Frankenstein case in which one has to deal with the monster after it had been given life and labeled a monster--a valuable case, but one should add an earlier dilemma-point in which one looks at whether it was ethical to create this being. Similarly, in the Challenger case, it is useful to look at the original decision to create the shuttle and what constraints were accepted at that time. Cases of moral lapses late in the design process need to be complemented by others that raise ethical issues at the invention stage, when one can still consider whether bringing a human being to life makes sense, as well as how one might go about it.

In introducing cases into the engineering curriculum, in many instances (e.g., Harris, Pritchard, & Rabins, 1995), (Martin & Schinzinger, 1989) students are presented with short hypothetical scenarios or truncated vignettes from real events. These short cases are useful in pinpointing ethical issues. The danger of only using short cases is it might encourage students to attack the particular issue, while neglecting the actual context and practical constraints in which any decision process is imbedded. It has been shown that longer, real-life cases that describe actual ethical and engineering dilemmas are also very effective teaching tools (Rest, 1986). If so, then there is a role far longer, more detailed cases that are based on real-life events and include multiple decision points for which there is no one simple "right" answer.

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At the University of Virginia, we have created a Web site (http://cti.itc.virginia.edul-meg3c/ethics/home.html) which contains a series of such case-studies. This Web Site was awarded first prize in a competition sponsored by the MIT's Ethics Center for Engineering and Science. The site features primarily cases that have been researched and written by students, with faculty support from the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Darden School of Graduate Business Administration. The website consists of a collection of cases that focus on ethical considerations in the early stages of the invention and design process, rather than as aftermath of a completed design. Because of the growing use of cases in engineering courses, and because it is difficult to separate out design issues from those in ethics and in the environment, we are developing cases that encourage students to think imaginatively about design in light of the increasing concern for the environment and other issues that will be challenging to them in their work as engineers. We hope to produce engineers who will be better able to make ethical decisions about creating and marketing new technologies (Martin & Schinzinger, 1989).

Gioia, in his discussion of the Ford Pinto case, makes the distinction between ethical decisions, which accord with accepted professional standards and codes of ethics and moral decisions, which stem from a higher conviction about what is 'right' (Gioia, 1992). Similarly, in Kohlberg's scale of moral development, the most advanced stage involves this kind of 'higher conviction about what is right' (Kohlberg, 1984} Gilligan argues this kind of conviction ought to emerge from a deep sense of compassion for others (Gilligan, 1982). If Gioia had really been able to put himself in the shoes of a parent whose child was driving a Pinto, as well as looking at the problem from Ford's perspective, he might have arrived at a better decision.

Codes, like algorithms, are helpful. But codes cannot cover all possibilities, and must be tempered by compas~ion. Creativity requires going beyond what is known. Similarly, to apply ethical guidelines like the McDonoughlBraungart protocols to novel situations, one must grasp their spirit. Lyons and Kaelin were particularly well suited to do that, because of their previous experiences trying to make environmentally-intelligent decisions. Students need to be taken through a series of case dilemmas in order to get a vicarious version of the same experience. In the section that follows, I am going to describe the dilemmas we use for each of the cases we discussed in Chapter 4.

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5.6 Ethics case dilemmas

5.6.1 OesignTex

When we ftrst used this case with students, we told them the story up to the point where the dye manufacturers resisted letting the EPEA inspect their production methods. The purpose of multiple dilemmas in cases is to allow students to think about problems that require wisdom for a solution. This dye dilemma is too late in the process. Now, we begin by asking students to evaluate the four options Susan Lyons considered before she brought McDonough in as a consultant, including Foxftber, organic cotton, PET and Climatex. Which would be best, if one considered criteria like cost, availability and aesthetics?

From a cost standpoint, Susan Lyons saw the options as relatively equivalent. From the standpoint of availability, Climatex had an edge because she knew Kaelin and trusted him to deliver. From the standpoint of aesthetics, Foxftber had a very limited range of colors, organic cotton was better, but still had limited colors. The range of dyes available for PET was uncertain. Climatex again had an edge.

Which of these options would be best, if one put environmental sustainability first? In order to answer this question, students have to consider what environmental sustainability means. Sally Fox's product looks best' from many environmental perspectives--there are no toxic chemicals used in treating or dyeing, and it is grown organically. Climatex is certifted by Eco-Tex as human ecology safe; it has to be incinerated, instead of recycled, so students have to decide whether incineration is an acceptable alternative. If one values turning existing wastes into products, PET is particularly attractive, because it makes soda bottles into fabric. In the end, the choice depends on having a framework for deciding what counts as environmental sustainability. Students typically realize this in class discussion. They also have to think about the extent to which sustainability ought to take precedence over other design criteria.

After McDonough supplies a framework, we ask the students to re-consider Lyon's choices. Climatex fails because incineration does not ftt waste equals food. Chemicals are required to dye organic cotton, so one must check each carefully for potential toxins. McDonough also points out that cotton is frequently grown under oppressive conditions, so one must check whether the cotton is grown by poorly-paid migrant laborers. The question of organic cotton illustrates how sustainablity involves looking at the whole process by which a technological system is created and implemented.

PET may be made from recycled fabric, but cannot itself be recycled because it mixes organic and technical products in a way that prevents their separation. Foxftber ftts the McDonough criteria, raising the question of whether one pick a

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fabric with limited colors and availability because it is the best environmentally. Is it more important to make a statement or sell a product?

The solution is a new design. Students need to see why adopting a novel sustainable framework forces Lyons and Kaelin to come up with a new altefI!.ative. One cannot make a statement without creating a viable, marketable product--the statement is the product. As McDonough says, "It exists, therefore it is possible."

Now students are ready to try our initial dilemma, at the point where the dye companies have refused to let Michael Braungart and the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency inspect their manufacturing processes. We ask the student what to do next. Typically, we put them in roles---one group pretends to be McDonough, another Braungart, another Kaelin at the mill, who will have to pay for Braungart and the EPEA, another a fictitious group of customers who get to indicate whether they care about the extra environmental benefits--this customer group can be sub-divided into mainstream and 'green niche' consumers. Depending on the size of the class, we sometimes add other roles. lOi

In one memorable class, both McDonough and Braungart came and talked to the groups that filled their roles. Naturally, these groups suggested no compromise--persisting until they found a company that would make the dyes.

When asked to give their personal opinions, over half of the students typically elect to market Climatex and keep doing research on dyes. A smaller group tries to argue that Kaelin should become a dye manufacturer, but we point out how nearly impossible that is. Then we bring in the fabric and show them that sometimes you can succeed by sticking to your principles.

5.6.2 Rohner Textil

Then we shift to the Rohner Textil mill and put the students in Albin Kaelin's shoes. He has to create a network of suppliers who will agree to follow the spirit as well as the letter of the EPEA's protocols.

The first dilemma involved the twisting of the yarn. After the wool and ramie had been harvested, combed, blended and spun into a single yarn onto cones, the two or more single yarns needed to be twisted about one another in order to make the yarns strong enough to be fed through the loom. If the yarns were not strong enough or nonuniform, they would break, forcing the weaver at Rohner Textil to stop and repair them. This process kept the loom down for a while, obviously reducing productivity and quality of the product.

101 See the teaching note that accompanies the DesignTex case, available from Darden web site.

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The problem that Kaelin faced was eliminating a coating chemical from the twisting process. It was a normal procedure to apply a chemical to the yarns as they were twisted. This process greatly improved the strength of the twisted yarn. The EPEA rejected the chemical, since it did not meet the design criteria.

The EPEA had approved a procedure that could be implemented at the same company that spun the yarn in Germany. Instead of the original chemical used for twisting, this company could use potato starch. First, potato starch was dissolved in ordinary water, and it was sprayed on the yarns as they were twisted. The twisted yarns were then dried, making the bond stronger. Finally, the excess starch was removed in another water bath. The yarns were again dried and wound on cones.

The technological capability of this company was such that these operations could be completed at a rapid pace. They had already agreed to submit to the EPEA all information on the spinning of the yarns, and they were willing to cooperate for the twisting as well. This company was medium-sized, consisting of about 270 full-time employees. Having both the spinning and twisting done at the same place was an attractive situation, since this agreed with Albin Kaelin's philosophy of "keeping the number of players in the pool as small as possible."

Another option was to give the twisting business to a small, four-person operation in Switzerland, located halfway between Rohner Textil and the spinning factory. This factory had also worked previously with Albin Kaelin and Rohner. Its entire business consisted of twisting yarn. This mill used older machinery that operated at lower speeds from newer machines, such as those located at the spinning mill. Because the machinery was slower, the price of twisting here was higher than at the spinning mill; however, this slower speed afforded two advantages. First, the yarn could be twisted in such a way that they were strong enough for the loom without adding large amounts of chemicals and washing them out after weaving. Second, the slower winding on the cones made the yarn rest more uniformly on the cones. The small company worked exclusively with all­natural yarns and used no chemicals in any of its twisting operations, except for lubricants for the machinery. The EPEA also approved the twisting procedure of this company.

Students are asked which company and procedure Kaelin should choose. They tend to favor the first, or larger company because it is more likely to stay in business and also because it combines operations, limiting the number of players. In fact, Kaelin decided to work with the smaller company, because he wanted to fulfill the spirit, not just the letter, of the EPEA's protocol. No chemical was better than one that used potato starch. Also, Kaelin liked the fact that the smaller company would be more dependent on Rohner Textil's business, and therefore more likely to make future modifications in order to continue to make Climatex Lifecycle even more environmentally intelligent.

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Even though you have the product, the project is not finished. (Albin Kaelin)

In 1994, Steelcase consisted of a $2.3 billion company, employing 17,700 worldwide.102 Between 1986 and 1990, Steelcase averaged a dominant 21 percent of the United States office furniture industry, and in 1989, it purchased a series of design-oriented companies to bolster their dominance, which they feared was threatened by innovations being made by smaller, nimbler companies. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone was this sort of innovation; the fledgling Bell Telephone Company took on the corporate giant Western Union, and eventually outstripped it.

To avoid being surprised in this way, Steelcase bought small, innovative firms like DesignTex and formed them into the Steelcase Design Partnership. The goal of this effort was to add creative products to Steelcase's overall market proftle. The William McDonough Collection, based on Climatex Lifecycle, could deliver what Steelcase wanted.

Therefore, Steelcase wanted to leave DesignTex the maximum room for creativity, and so did not interfere with its daily operations. One downside of this is that DesignTex had to sell to Steelcase like it would to any other company. There is no guarantee Steelcase will use fabrics like Climatex Lifecycle on its furniture.

The McDonough design protocol was paying off for Albin Kaelin. In March of 1994, Lyons, McDonough, and Kaelin signed an agreement giving Rohner Textil the patent rights for the manufacturing of Climatex Lifecycle. In exchange, Kaelin agreed to pay the cost of the EPEA and granted Lyons and DesignTex exclusive use of the fabric in the United States until the end of 1996 after its planned release in July of 1995 under the trade name, "The William McDonough Collection." The product was not set for release in Europe until December 1995, so this arrangement gave DesignTex and McDonough a big head start in the market. Possessing the patent and trademark, however, gave Rohner Textil a great deal of flexibility over the projected long term product life of Climatex Lifecycle.

In the fall of 1994 Susan Lyons made arrangements to use the McDonough Collection fabric on Steelcase's Sensor chair, which won an award from the Industrial Designers Society of America. Steelcase sold over one million chairs from 1986 to 1990. The Sensor chair had become a benchmark for the industry by 1994, and it presented an opportunity for the McDonough Collection to reach a large customer base quickly.

102 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations and information in this section aer taken from Rohner Textil AG (8) by Matthew M. Mehalik, Michael E. Gorman and Patricia Werhane, Case UVA-E-OI08 in the Darden Case Library (http://www2.darden.edulcaselbibl).

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Before Climatex Lifecycle could be used on this chair, it needed to undergo rigorous testing to meet a number of different performance standards, including International Standards Organization (ISO), Swiss textile standards and the standards set by the Association of Contract Textiles (ACT), of which DesignTex was a member.

By the middle of November, it appeared that the testing goals were in reach. At that time, however, Steelcase introduced a new test required of all fabrics to be used on its furniture, because the company intended to automate its manufacturing processes. As Albin Kaelin later reflected, "as this test was new at the time, we were not able to get sophisticated details. The only parameters we did know was that it was a test to ensure that the newly introduced robots could upholster the chairs easily, so that the fabric does not slip out ofthe grips of the robot."

The result of the introduction of this test at the end of November 1994 was a disaster. As Lyons wrote to Kaelin, "Well, this is an adventure--everything failed on Steelcase ... The reason for failure was cited as a lack of stretch in the filling direction. I am thinking that the ramie may be too rigid ... We have found that fabrics with higher wool content perform better on molded seating. I know that dropping the ramie content may compromise the Climatex features, but frankly, I think it is more urgent to get the molded seating pass."

At Rohner, Kaelin and his team worked out changes to the finishing procedures to make the fabric less rigid. They came up with four different finishing chemicals that made the fabric pass the Steelcase robot test. The EPEA approved only one of the four chemicals, and this chemical could pass the EPEA protocols only if Rohner committed to eliminating it. Plus, the fabric would now have to be re-tested according to all of the ISO and ACT standards.

McDonough, Braungart, Lyons and Kaelin had fought an uphill battle to make the product as environmentally intelligent as possible, and they had overcome overwhelming odds. Should they compromise the "waste equals food" standards in order to please one major customer?

I use this dilemma to talk about satisficing versus optimizing. According to Herbert Simon, most managers are satisficers (Simon, 1981); they would look for an option that satisfies the constraints, but not worry about optimizing. In the previous dilemma, Kaelin refused to add chemicals in order to accommodate a larger twisting mill, even though the EPEA had approved the chemical. In that case, Kaelin was acting like an optimizer, not a satisficer, trying to exceed requirements.

Again, we continue to use role-playing in this case. Because Kaelin acted like an optimizer on the last case, those students who play his role typically argue that he would optimize again on this case. Lyons, of course, wanted to compromise. McDonough and Braungart are generally portrayed as resisting compromise, like Kaelin. Some students in these groups argue that Steelcase ought to bend its rules,

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given that the company does have a strong environmental record. Their model is the earlier case of the dye companies, where persistence paid off. We let the group that role-plays Steelcase decide on this issue, then tell them that the actual company would not have considered compromise. This dilemma provides an interesting lesson in how manufacturing standards affect environmental design.

In the end, Kaelin and Lyons compromised and added the chemical for Steelcase. But it was only a temporary satisficing strategy. He and the other members of the network retained a commitment to continuous improvement. Optimization is a moving target.

The case of Paul Fliickiger, the dye-master at Rohner Textil, was discussed in Chapter 3. Recall that Fliickiger substituted a dye that fulfilled the EPEA's requirements and was cheaper than the alternative supplied by Ciba-Geigy. However, he failed to follow the ISO 900 1 standards and to consult the EPEA.

The dilemma for the students is what to do with Paul--reprimand him? fire him? compliment him on taking initiative and not being bound by procedures? We typically do not use role-playing on this case; we want the students to tell us what Kaelin would do, and what they would do. Some end up on the side of disciplining or reprimanding Paul. After all, he did not follow procedures. Others counter that the codes and procedures should not be taken too literally. After all, Paul was right--the new dye was cheaper, and just as environmentally benign.

We then explain that Kaelin blamed himself for not making sure all of his employees thoroughly understood why one had to follow this process. When building a sustainable network, one has to make certain that all of the members buy into the core values, because at some point, they are going to have to make independent decisions.

This process never ends. (Albin Kaelin)

Albin Kaelin was not surprised when the Ramie spinning mill closed its doors in early 1996. The textile industry worldwide was changing with the opening of markets in Eastern Europe and the continued expansion of production in Asia. The Swiss textile industry, with its tradition of stability and high standards for wages, was suffering from these structural changes. Overall, Swiss textile industry sales were down 9.5% between 1994 and 1995, and the trend was continuing.

The close of the spinning mill could not have occurred at a worse time for Kaelin and his team of thirty at Rohner. They could not afford to be cut off from their supply of ramie yarn when Climate x Lifecycle was new to the marketplace. Rohner Textil was weathering the recession rather well, because Climatex Lifecycle had been well-received in the United States through Rohner's large, important customer, DesignTex, Inc.

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Initial sales reports from DesignTex and Rohner were very positive. Swiss TV dedicated seven minutes of the business news to highlight the operations of the Rohner mill. The product was introduced to the European Market in January of 1996, and because of all of the good publicity about the product, Kaelin had little trouble attracting customers.

Kaelin needed to act quickly, since his team of thirty did not have a significant stockpile of ramie yarn. Unfortunately, the mill that was spinning the wool fibers for Climatex Lifecycle did not have the machinery for preparing the ramie for spinning. Not every spinning mill was capable of processing ramie fibers because very few firms processed ramie fibers and not one manufacturer made machines suitable for stretching ramie. 103 Kaelin explained "For most cases manufacturers can use linen and cotton as substitute materials for ramie, so ramie is not a popular fiber." This was not an option for Kaelin, since ramie and wool were the materials the EPEA approved for Climatex Lifecycle.

The spinning mill that had just closed overcame this problem when one of its machine operators was able to modify a wool worsting machine so that it could handle ramie fibers. The operator moved the rollers farther apart and knew how to modify the speed of the machinery so that the ramie fibers would not break. The process was· highly dependent on his skill at operating and maintaining the modified machinery, in contrast with wool spinning, which was highly automated.

Kaelin and Designer Lothar Pfister, also responsible for product development, canvassed Europe to see if there were other mills which may have modified its equipment accordingly. They found none, but they did find four spinning mills that were willing to purchase the equipment from the recently-closed spinning mill and transfer the equipment to their locations. Each mill said it would be willing to finance the cost of purchasing and transporting the machinery.

Knowing the state of the industry, Kaelin and Pfister were not sure if the mills could afford to finance the machinery. They wanted to avoid repeating this process

103 The fragile fibers were harvested from the ramie plant. When the raw ramie arrived at the spinning mill, the fibers were bunched together with an inconsistent texture. The raw ramie was then combed and stretched in a process called "worsting." Worsting and spinning of ramie was identical to the way wool was processed, except that wool fibers were only 10 - 15 cm (3 - 6 inches) long whereas ramie fibers were up to 60 cm (24 inches) long. The length of the fibers was the source of the difficulty.

The stretching part of the worsting process used a series of rollers that pulled on the ramie in order to create the desired consistency of the ramie before spinning. On typical stretching machinery wool fibers were much shorter than the distance between the stretching rollers. As the material passed through the rollers which rotated in opposite directions, the wool fibers were pulled apart from one another and the material was stretched. Ramie fibers, however, were longer than the distance between rollers. If ramie fibers were fed through the series of rollers, the fibers would be snapped or broken as the rollers pulled on them. Instead of stretching the ramie raw material, the process would break and shred it.

What was needed was machinery that had the stretching rollers set farther apart than the length of ramie fibers. Kalin was aware of manufacturers worldwide that made all types of textile machines, such as looms, twisting machines, spinning machines and stretching machines.

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by choosing a spinning mill in danger of bankruptcy. They were not even sure if the machinery, once transported, could be reassembled to deliver high quality ramie fibers. They gathered as much information about each alternative as they could.

The students are given all the information Kaelin had on each of these choices, and asked to guess what he would do, and what they would do in the same situation. In order to evaluate Kaelin's decisions, they had to be able to exercise enough moral imagination to put themselves in his shoes and really understand his perspective. Then they would be free to disagree with it in a thoughtful way.

The first mill was located less than 100 km (about 60 miles) from Rohner. It was a large company and possessed several other spinning mills in Europe. It had the technological know-how and financing available to acquire the ramie equipment from the closed spinning mill. The management of this company seemed very committed and ethical, although it was difficult for Kaelin and Pfister to judge because the company was large. The financial condition of the company seemed stable and the risk of failure unlikely. At the time, they had little experience with producing ecological projects, but the company met all environmental legal limits and indicated that it would be willing to cooperate with the EPEA. Since the company was large, it was unlikely that they would modify their processes to adopt Rohner's quality standards; however, Rohner had worked with them in the past without notable problems.

The second fmn owned its yarn dyeing and spinning mills in Northern Europe, about 1000 km (600 miles) from Rohner. This was a medium-sized company that was willing to purchase the equipment from the bankrupt spinning mill. Rohner had used a few samples of their work in Rohner's products. The company had proven to be highly flexible at meeting Rohner's demands for producing these sample lots, showing that they valued Rohner's business. Because this company was located in Northern Europe, Kaelin and Pfister were not sure if this company was meeting all environmental legal limits; however, the company indicated that it would likely cooperate with the EPEA inspections.

The third alternative possessed yarn dying and spinning facilities about 100 km (60 miles) from Rohner, which had ten years of experience working with this small company. The owners were the managers. The company was putting out one ecological line of products at the time and was in compliance with local environmental legal limits. It was likely that they would cooperate with the EPEA inspections and would be flexible to Rohner's quality demands. The firm had the technological expertise to handle operating the ramie spinning equipment, and the company was willing to purchase the equipment, but Kaelin and Pfister were unsure if this investment was too great for this struggling mill.

The last mill they considered existed 300 km (190 miles) from Rohner. It was a medium-sized company with experience in spinning for the fashion industry. This was a very old, family-owned company with highly committed family members

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managing the operations. Since the company worked in the fashion industry it was very flexible and adaptable to rapid changes in customer demands. They were also willing to take risks in developing new products, a necessary condition for survival in the fashion industry. Rohner had worked with this company in the past, producing successfully a few sample trials. The mill did not have an ecological line of products; but, it indicated that they would try to cooperate with the EPEA inspections. The company was willing to purchase the ramie spinning equipment from the closed mill, but because this was a family-owned company, Kaelin and Pfister could not glean information about the financial condition of this company.

This dilemma is difficult to present to students unless they do homework and come in with a list of pros & cons for each company, derived from the paragraphs above and additional information in the published version of the case. Another strategy is to divide the students into four groups, each one representing one of the companies, and have them come to class prepared to argue for their alternative.

For Kaelin, as always, the choice was obvious. He had anticipated the problem, and was already making the transition to the third, or smallest mill. Rohner's business would be more important to them: therefore they would be more willing to modify their procedures to adapt to the EPEA's requirements. This decision flies in the face of the assumption by many of the students that a larger mill closer by would be better, because its size would make it less likely to go out of business and its proximity would save transportation costs in terms of both money and environmental damage. But for Kaelin, the network was the key: he could most easily integrate this mill into his existing network. He hired experts from the spinning mill that had gone out of business to teach everyone at the new mill how to fulfill the spirit as well as the letter of the design protocols.

5.6.3 American Solar Network 104

Al Rich is an ethical entrepreneur whose company fails; therefore, his case fills a dual gap for students: it is a case where an inventor took environmental ethics seriously, right from the beginning, but failed as an entrepreneur. Was he any less creative and committed than individuals in Csiksenmihalyi's studies? Students are plunged into a series of dilemmas that raise these questions before they know the outcome and can judge him from 20:20 hindsight.

Currently, the first dilemma focuses on whether Rich's design would fit the McDonoughlBraungart protocols or The Natural Step. Rich's design is not motivated by either of these frameworks, but using one or both of them provokes deep discussion of what is meant by environmental sustainability. Clearly, his design follows the principle of running on current solar income, but is it really

104 For a complete version of this case and dilemmas, see Michael E. Gorman's American Solar Network (A), UV A-E-0097 and American Solar Network (B), UVA-E-0098, Darden Case Bibliography (http:www.darden.edu/case/bibl).

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cradle-to-cradle? How long will its components last, and what will happen to them after they wear out? Students can try to figure out how the EPEA would classify Rich's technology. It might be considered a product of service, and therefore would have to be owned by ASN, which would lease it to homeowners and recycle all components. Would this kind of strategy have improved or hurt ASN's shaky bottom line?

One of my colleagues, Edmund Russell, used the ASN case in his class. Student groups did research on alternatives to Rich's technology, then each student had to decide whether she or he would invest venture capital in Rich's company, given these alternatives. I did something similar in one of my classes. The alternatives the students came up with included:

1) Installing on-demand heaters that heat water only as it is needed. Typically, these use natural gas, which is a fairly clean source of fuel. Students have to consider how much it violates the 'run off current solar income' principle. One solution is to combine gas heat and solar. Then students have to look at the payback period for this steep initial investment, which depends on a variety of factors, location being the most obvious--in the southwest, where there is plenty of sun and one is not far from natural gas, the pay-off is shorter than in the northeast.

2) Adding a timing mechanism to the water heater. This option is similar to the on-demand heat, but substitutes regular times at which the hot water would be turned on, say at 6 AM so it would be warm enough for morning showers, then off during the middle of the day, perhaps on in the evening and off at night. A simple timer could result in significant savings, depending on patterns of household use.

3) Adding insulation the water heater. This is a relatively inexpensive option which can reduce the water heating bill by as much as 20%. Students concluded that a solar water heater would save more over a long period of time, but there were significant savings from insulation alone. Again, these two technologies could be combined to shorten the payback period.

Eight of the eighteen students in my colleague Ed Russell's fourth-year engineering class decided that Rich's system would be worth investing in. These students were generally impressed with Rich's character and determination. They added a number of caveats to their decision. Several pointed-out that Rich's system would produce about a five-year payback when used with electric water heat, but a much longer payback if used with cheaper natural gas--again, depending on location. Others suggested design modifications in Rich's system, including using the existing hot water tank instead of installing an additional one and combining his system with other technologies: on-demand gas heating of the water, insulation for the tank and using excess energy from a heat pump to pre­warm the water.

Those students who favored investing in Rich's system were also clearly motivated by environmental concerns. As one said, "Eventually we may reach a

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point where everyone will be forced to recognize that we cannot keep taking from the earth and only return waste." Those who opposed it based their arguments primarily on economic grounds, but were clearly less impressed by the ethical underpinnings of Rich's technology. For example, one student wondered why those in the U.S. should worry about saving energy, since we seemed to have enough to supply our population? This sparked a debate on the global nature of energy and environmental concerns.

Almost all the students complained about insufficient data. Engineering students are used to having data given to them as part of a problem; they were not comfortable having to look it up themselves, and were clearly nervous about drawing conclusions from less-than-perfect information. In other words, they expected that knowledge would dictate the decision; no wisdom in the form of engineering judgment was necessary.

This is a common response to our cases--if only I had more information, the answer would be obvious. We deliberately try to supply more information than a student should need, in cases like DesignTex, Rohner Textil and Dow Corning. In the ASN case, we like them to find out a bit more for themselves.

Another dilemma that focuses on the marketing aspect of ASN concerns what should happen after sales do not pick up in Virginia. Should Rich move, and if so, where? Students are given a table of tax credits and subsidies available across the United States, and asked to choose among them. This dilemma can be used to raise the issue of whether ethical inventors like Rich ought to be encouraged by subsidies or tax breaks, or whether they ought to be left to survive or fail in the marketplace.

Once Rich moved to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, we give students another dilemma, focused on the salesman who gets Rich into trouble by recommending replacement of functioning systems. This dilemma can be connected to the Fliickiger case, where Kaelin failed to get every member of his network to understand the rationale for a procedure that ensured environmental intelligence. Similarly, Rich did not make certain the salesman understood the procedures involved with assessing, documenting and selling solar designs.

This dilemma can be used to discuss the difference between adversarial and partnership models for environmental enforcement. The EPA is a regulatory agency; the EPEA is an agency contracted by a company to help them improve their environmental intelligence. The former typically operates in adversarial mode, whereas the latter had to depend on partnership with a company. SMUD was theoretically a partner with companies like ASN, but it treated Rich like an adversary, penalizing him before discussing the problem with him.

The partnership model assumes that both parties are virtuous--they really want to improve the environment. The adversarial model does not want to depend on

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virtue. Rich saw himself as a virtuous practitioner; for whatever reason, SMUD did not.

5.6.4 Solar Power in the Developing World

Students are given three dilemma points in this case. The first concerns what technology SELF should promote: hydro, clean coal, or solar. Like many of the first dilemmas in other cases, this one raises the whole issue of what counts as sustainable. One can ask the students to guess what Williams would prefer and also what they would prefer. The case provides relatively good information on these options, but again, if one wants to take more time with this case, one can ask the students to look up more information about each.

For Williams, solar represented the only real choice. Students typically agree with this. One or two want to add nuclear as an option, and that can lead to an interesting discussion.

One can also raise the issue of whether people in the developing world have a right to electrical power, in the same sense that they have other rights. One of my student discussion leaders 105 did a clever exercise to bring the problem home to his peers. He had about two-thirds of the class put on blindfolds, to simulate their role as a rural community without electricity at night, and the other third sit opposite them in their role as members of developed nations. He asked the two­thirds who were blindfolded whether they felt they had a right to take the blindfolds off, and what it would be worth to them.

This was a good way to segue to our second dilemma, in which we asked students how SELF should finance the purchase of solar units by the village of Magiacha in China. Should SELF compromise its reliance on the individual and allow either the Chinese government or NGOs to partially fund the purchase? If so, which of these options should it choose? One of our students even proposed yet another alternative--having the U.S. government foot part of the bill.

This dilemma forces students to revisit the issue of subsidies and their consequences, this time on a global rather than just a domestic scale, and this time from the standpoint of what they do for consumers rather than inventors. Will the villagers maintain the technology if they do not own it? Will local entrepreneurs be less interested in servicing and selling units? Williams thinks the answer is yes.

105 I am paraphrasing an exercise created by Raphael Martorello, one of the students in the fourth-year engineering class in which we first piloted this case. I am grateful to him for sharing his creativity, and also to Scott Sorenshein, who did much of the research and writing, and to Pat Werhane, who provided invaluable guidance. A more complete version of this case can be found in the Darden Case Bibliography: SELF (A), UVA-E-OI12 and SELF (B), UVA-E-Ol13 (http://www.darden.edulcase/bib/)

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Students can also debate the relative merits of government versus NOO funding. The former implies the village will be beholden to the government of China, which is friendly to capitalism but repressive regarding any sign of political freedom. NOOs are independent of any government, by definition, and therefore pose less political threat, though some may have their own agendas.

Our engineering students do typically agree with SELF's philosophy, once they better understand its system of financing. Basically, if villager A fails to pay off his loan from SELF, villager B cannot get a loan to put a system on his house. Williams' notion of individual responsibility is intimately tied up with local, communal responsibility.

The third dilemma concerns Maphephethe, in South Africa, where solar technology apparently has to be introduced in a way that reinforces the social stratification within a village. Engineering students like to refer back to Star Trek's 'Prime Directive' when talking about culture and technology. The idea is that one culture should not ~nterfere with the practices of another. Is SELF operating in a way that is consistent with this directive? If so, is that right? As of this writing, we have not tried this part of the case on engineering students, but we expect some lively debate when we do.

We are currently working on a series of cases involving ESKOM, the major utility in South Africa, which is extending the grid to some villages ~nd even providing solar technology to others. This large corporate model stands in contrast to Williams' model of small, local entrepreneurs taking up the solar challenge. We expect some interesting future discussions on this topic.

Perhaps Eugene Hargrove best articulates what we can learn from cases like this:

... our environmental ethic, when we really have one, will be a collection of independent ethical generalizations, only loosely related, not a rationally: ordered system of ethical prescriptions. People who want to understand and follow this environmental ethic will have to study the application of these generalizations to specific situations, as if they are learning to apply rules, but in fact they will be internalizing these rules or generalizations and in this way learning to see the world aright from the standpoint of environmental ethics (Hargrove, 1989, p. 8).

5.7 Using Active Learning Modules to Teach Environmental Invention

In this chapter so far, we have discussed using active learning modules to teach invention and cases to teach the role of ethics in invention. An obvious next step is to create active learning modules that put ethics at the center of design. Had I been proceeding in logical, hypothetico-deductive fashion, that is exactly what I

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would have done. Instead, I tried to develop environmental invention modules before I had a set of cases that would show students how different practitioners decided what was meant by sustainability.

5.7.1 The environmental challenge: An active learning module for secondary students

Right after students in the secondary course for gifted students completed their telephone module, we gave them a second module that we hoped would allow them to apply what they had learned about the invention process to an invention of their own choosing. But we wanted to constrain their choice to technologies that might help make the world a better place.

We told them their task was to invent an energy-saving system that employed alternate technologies like solar, wind, waves, and/or bio-mass. We reminded them that they were not expected to solve the world's energy problems, but that any use, however small, of a renewable, non-polluting resource would help in the overall scheme of aiding our global environment. We told them that the technology or system they designed should potentially be marketable, i.e., not rely solely on regulations--ideally, people or corporations should be motivated to buy it both because it made both economic and environmental sense.

We gave them the kind of 'no emissions' zone created by Chattanooga as an example. According to William McDonough,

In 1968, Chattanooga's air was declared the worst in America. A councilman back then said the city had a "civic heart attack." So, city government went to local businesses and said, "Don't pollute." Period. Not pollute less, but don't pollute at all. Businesses said okay. Now Chattanooga has a 120 block area planned for zero emissions (Calmenson, 1997).

The hope of cities like Chatanooga is that companies will elect to move into these kinds of areas, intending to make a profit when the rules, to use Milton Friedman's phrase, favor sustainability. We told the students this example was borrowed from William McDonough and referred them to other materials that explained his philosophy. But we left them a lot of room to come up with their own interpretations of what it meant to create a 'renewable, non-polluting resource' --in part because we hoped building would lead to debates about what technologies were really helpful to the environment. Is more energy used in manufacturing solar cells than they save over their lifetime? We wanted students to consider questions like this.

At this time, the only one of our cases that was even partly done was ASN, so we used Al Rich as an example of an ethical inventor and told the students that one of their options was to consider how to reduce the pollution produced by

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power plants in the developed world. What about the possibility of energy­independent homes that use utilities only as a back-up? Here Rich's technology would be part of the kind of overall design suggested by Amory Lovins and others (Lovins, et al., 1986). Could one develop solar power plants, or ones based on wind, or bio-mass? We also gave them the sort of option that led us to develop the SELF case. We told them they could imagine a remote village in the third world, where there was plenty of sun and steady wind but little fuel for cooking or heating, no refrigeration for vaccines or food and water had to be pumped from a deep well. Propane could be trucked into the village over a long distance on roads that were periodically interrupted by guerrillas. The villagers were considering migrating to a forested area they could clear-cut to build a new village; such a move, multiplied by hundreds of such villages, would increase the danger of the greenhouse effect and destroy an important natural habitat--where villagers have left, there is now a virtual desert. The students were challenged to develop technologies that would help the village survive and prosper.

We encouraged them to create scenarios of their own to illustrate the advantages of their technological innovations. We did not yet realize the importance of providing a larger set of such scenarios to illustrate the possibilities.

We tried to scaffold their learning process by providing suggested steps to follow, building off what they had learned on the previous module:

1) Discuss within your group potential project ideas. Any work on this topic done as a group should be recorded in a group invention notebook, following the other guidelines for group entries given in the telephone case.

2) Library research is an essential component of this module. Random searches are inefficient; you need a search plan, a careful division of labor, and it is important to stay in touch with each other as you explore.

3) Decide as a group on the path you wish to explore, what kinds of tests you may want to do, and what materials you will need.

4) Design a model or prototype that will illustrate the feasibility of your idea, as well as its potential benefits. You will not be able to prototype an entire system, but you could construct a working model or an aspect of it, or provide an experimental demonstration of the feasibility of a key component. The point of such a demonstration is to convince skeptical backers that this is not a 'pie-in-the­sky' solution which could never be implemented.

5) Submit a proposal, including a list of materials you plan on purchasing. Your proposal should be similar to the caveat you prepared for the telephone module and must include:

How might your system benefit the local or global environment? A description of what you plan to build, including preliminary sketches.

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A brief description of how you arrived at your idea, including what alternatives you considered.

6) Test your ideas. Build as much of your model or prototype as you can. Test aspects of its functioning. Record numerical data in your group

notebooks, what conclusions you can derive from each experiment, and what the next experiment ought to be.

7) Use experimental results to illustrate the potential and the limitations of the total system you would like to design. Data from the tests of the prototype should suggest how the system could actually be built or implemented.

8) Marketability: Determine the approximate cost of the total system. Show how you arrived at these costs. Who will use the system? Will likely users be able to afford it?

9) Environmental benefits: Include an analysis of the environmental benefits of your system. For example, if you are building a solar water heater, discuss the anticipated reduction in power demand and acid rain from utilities. Don't forget to include the environmental costs of the technology you are designing! What, for example, is the environmental cost of manufacturing solar cells?

10) Present your system to the rest of the class. Your presentation should include:

(a) The rationale for your system--who will use it? How will it benefit the local or global environment?

(b) A description of your system, with visuals that illustrate it. (c) A demonstration of a prototype or model that illustrates the potential for

your system and its feasibility. The prototype should get the audience excited about the idea--you're looking for that 'wow' effect that Bell got with his early telephone demonstrations. Regarding feasibility, include marketing considerations.

(d) A brief description of how you arrived at your system--what your initial goals were, what steps you went through.

11) A written report that includes: (a) The rationale for your system (b) The detailed description, with visuals--similar to what you would put in a

patent, focusing on its unique features (c) Experimental data obtained from your prototype (d) A narrative of the process you went through, including sketches of

intermediate stages and alternatives you considered but decided not to pursue.

12) A brief individual paper in which you analyze and compare your group's processes to those of other groups and to A.C. Rich's processes. Your entry should include:

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(a) The goals and steps your group followed, and your sense of how well this process worked. In hindsight, are there times the group should have done something differently?

(b) The goals steps other groups followed, and how they differed from yours. (c) The goals and steps Al Rich followed, and how they differed from yours. (d) What lessons did you learn from considering 1-3 above? (e) What will you do differently next time, when you work with a group on a

new invention task?

This was a ridiculously ambitious schedule, considering we only had about ten days to do this module. But it was the only class the students had to focus on, unlike those at the university, and we wanted to see how far they could get. If they made progress, I could try the same module in my university course.

Participants focused almost exclusively on solar. One group came up with a solar speedboat, designed for recreational use; still another came up with a solar hairdryer; another designed a solar airplane. Each included interesting prototypes. For example, the solar speedboat had to make innovative use of a combination of series and parallel circuits. The solar plane could actually fly for a short distance. But these students gave little thought to the global problem of sustainability; instead, what they created were electronic toys. They learned a lot about design, but little about environmental intelligence.

Two groups took the developing world mission seriously. One designed a solar oven, adapting a design we provided them with. Another had a very creative design: a "Solar Tent" which could be floated on a balloon to allow villagers in a rain forest to get power without cutting down trees. This design was probably not practical, but the students put some thought into it, figuring out how to mount the panels at an angle where they would get sunlight even though suspended under a balloon.

5.7.2 Evaluation of the Course for Gifted Secondary Students

Of the 31 participants in this course, which was offered in two three-week segments to half of the students each time, 25 felt that the course exceeded their expectations in almost every area, one believed that the course did not meet her expectations ("I expected to have more instructional time and guidance"), and one did not express an opinion. Representative quotes from students who felt the course met or exceeded their expectations included:

I have gained a greater knowledge and understanding of the process of invention.

This sure met my expectations because we strained to work hard and work together toward one goal.

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Yes, [the course] was more than I had expected. It was fun and challenging.

[The course] went beyond my expectations. I did not think I would get nearly this much out of three weeks. I learned more in these three weeks then I learned all year in science class.

The course passed my expectations. It was inspiring -- I plan on doing more in this field.

I found [the course] to be challenging and very interesting. The hands-on learning gave you a personal experience with inventing and learning in general.

I enjoyed this very much. [It was] challenging, which means more exciting. Thanks for doing this.

It's a lot better than filing papers like they make me do when I'm finished or bored at my school.

One student wrote us about six months after the course and indicated that he is still working on the solar airplane. He is now focusing on a solar-powered launch system that will power the plane's battery. At the end of his (unsolicited) letter, he said, "I thoroughly enjoyed the class last summer. It was challenging, yet fun, and I got a lot out of it that has already been applied to school."

At the outset, we hoped this course might help students during the school year. We conducted a one-year follow-up evaluation with a little less than half of the students.106 The selection process favored those who returned for a different enrichment course in the next season, so we most likely interviewed the students who were most eager and enthusiastic. Only two students reported no effect on their school performance; the other eleven cited improved ability to work in groups and/or increased creativity in problem-solving. Several even mentioned improved building skills.

We also hoped the course might influence students' future majors and potential career decisions. When asked about this, only four of the students felt the course had any effect on these choices. Three said they were more likely to choose engineering, including one woman who was looking at early entrance college programs for women in engineering. The fourth student said, "During the course I learned that science is not something only super geniuses can do. But I also realized that I don't want to go into those areas--they just aren't for me." We count this as a positive result--this student learned that invention and discovery are

106 This evaluation was supported by a generous grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. For a more complete account, see Jon Plucker and Michael E. Gorman .. "Invention is in the mind of the adolescent: Effects of a summer course one year later," Crieativity Research JOUl7IlIl, In Press.

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not mysterious, and that she could make a contribution in this area, but didn't want to.

One of the other ideas we had really hoped to get across was that invention includes a combination of reflection and experimentation. One student put it best when she said, "You have to reflect on your tinkering and tinker with your reflections. This way, you can see what works, what doesn't, and how to use experiences to improve your invention." This sounds very like Bell, who would follow up his experiments with hypotheses and ideas for future experiments. He often seemed to tinker more with reflections than devices, perhaps because of his limited resources and expertise.

Students generally saw reflection more as a tool for evaluating results than as a way of evaluating and improving their thinking processes. But one student noted that, "A conscious effort was made to take into account the mistakes made in the telephone project when working on the solar project."

Students certainly reflected on their group processes, and worked together to improve them. For almost half of the students, the most valuable experiences in the course had to do with learning how to work with others. One student said she learned to "COMPROMISE!! You have to let some ideas go for the good of the group." Another student remarked that, "Unless a very specific goal is agreed upon, everyone will work toward their (sic) own specific goals. Splitting up the workload was one of the most difficult things in getting my group to work well."

Students also liked the active component of the modules. One student said that the most valuable experience was "the actual inventing--the chance that we had to actually spend time to create something from our own imagination."

5.7.3 Turning students into ethical entrepreneurs

My colleague Larry Richards and I had been playing with environmental ideas in our university Invention and Design course as well. One year, for example, we had the students design an environmentally-friendly house. They learned a lot, but we found we had to give a primer on architecture as well as environmental design­-too much! Another year we tried a more open-ended environmental module similar to what I used with the gifted secondary students. Only one group produced what I thought was a viable technology: a system to keep the tires in a car inflated at just the right pressure, which could potentially produce major energy savings if installed in thousands of cars.

About this time, I became involved with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NClIA), created by the Lemelson Foundation at Hampshire College. The inventor Jerry Lemelson wanted to invest money he had earned from patents in a program that would encourage students to become both inventors and

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innovators. The term innovator is often used to refer to entrepreneurs who take an invention and transform it into a marketable product. Jerry Lemelson not only wanted to student inventions; he also wanted students to create start-up companies that would contribute to the U.S. economy.

The initials 'NClIA' are deliberately similar to NCAA (National College Athletic Association); Greg Prince, the President of Hampshire College, wanted to suggest that this invention alliance was as important for the future of universities and colleges as athletics--radical thought!

From my standpoint, the great thing about this program was that it provided money to purchase equipment for student use. I had been trying to get an equipment budget for my Invention and Design course The NCIIA also emphasized team invention and design, which fit in well with my courses. I attended a conference sponsored by the NClIA in Washington, D.C. and came away with an idea for modifying the environmental module.

What if I made the end-product a draft of a real patent, something the very best student teams could go forward with? The NCIIA would also fund student teams that intended to continue work beyond a course, provided their goal was a marketable innovation. Therefore, conceivably a student team from my course could get most of the way towards a patent for a new environmentally sustainable technology, then apply for funding to finish the job and take it to market.

At this time, I had only the ASN and an early version of the DesignTex to illustrate the kind of thinking that goes into environmental design--and Al Rich's design had significant market problems. But I hoped the students would at least make use of McDonough's framework.

I applied to the NCIIA for a small grant that included equipment costs for both the telephone and environmental modules. I received the funding, and used part of it to take the students to the patent office. Rodger Flagg, President of Express Search, Inc., donated his time and that of his expert staff of patent search specialists; they taught each team how to look for patents similar to their invention idea. Before the trip to the patent office, with help from Rodger's son Cris, we had students prepare by writing patent abstracts and identifying search categories. We faxed the abstracts and categories to Rodger's group, who were ready when the students arrived.

Final projects included:

(1) A system that stored the energy from braking a car in flywheels. (2) A system that would generate and store energy from the motion of waves. (3) A method that would substitute recycled tires for carbon in certain kinds of filters.

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All of these were potentially patentable, because the student groups had crafted them so as to avoid any conflicts with existing patents. But I wasn't sure any of these would be marketable; the group designs showed little concern with cost and manufacturing. They also showed too little concern with sustainability. For example, the regenerative braking design would add 400 pounds to the car, reducing fuel efficiency and adding considerably to the cost.

Still, I asked if any students wanted to pursue further funding for their designs. One stepped forward--Jeff Wang, an environmental science major who spearheaded the regenerative braking group. He had done great research and come up with a patentable design, but not a practical one. The course was valuable for him because it enabled him to stop before he went too far down a blind alley.

He had a new idea. He wanted to create a windmill-based system that could be used to regenerate anaerobic soil in places like the Everglades, where the normal organisms in the soil can die from lack of oxygen. This kind of technology is especially appropriate form the standpoint of The Natural Step, which emphasizes that photosynthesis is the main method by which the sun's energy is stored on Earth. Jeffs use of portable windmills could also save energy over conventional sources of power, and allow his system to be operated in remote locations.

Jeff recruited another student from the Invention and Design class and they wrote a proposal to the NelIA. They ended-up receiving one of the first Level III grants, designed for entrepreneurial teams like Jeff s. He built a prototype of his system, demonstrated it at an NelIA conference held at the Smithsonian, and as of this writing, is obtaining patent protection and planning to make his first sales. (For a complete description of Jeffs system, see http://wsrv.clas.virginia.edul -jyw3y/windlwindmill.htm).

I liked the NelIA goal of having students do projects that had a real impact-­not just assignments for school. Students were expert at being students--doing whatever was necessary to get a good grade, and not going above and beyond. I wanted to turn them into creative professionals. It seemed to me my goals and the NelIA's coincided, though I thought more about educational benefits and they about commercial.

My new idea was to focus the environmental module on a proposal to the NelIA. Instead of thinking solely about potential patent conflicts, I wanted the students to being to think like ethical entrepreneurs. I now had the Rohner Textil and SELF cases I could use. I decided to begin with the telephone module, then introduce a series of ethics cases while the students worked on an environmentally-intelligent technology of their own choosing. I even gave them the option of bringing another inventor's technology to market. There were usually three modules in the course, but I convinced my colleagues to let me cut back to two for this experiment. Maybe we just hadn't been giving students enough time to really think about new technologies that might transform the world.

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You'd think an experienced teacher like me would have known better. In the end, the students put no more work into this module when it was only one of two than when it was one of three. There were some clever ideas, including:

(1) Treating the oil in a tanker with bacteria the moment it begins to spill. This group adapted an existing, patented technology used for fire-fighting on the tankers and proposed mixing bacteria with the water in the event of a spill. Then this bacteria-water mixture could be sprayed onto the oil to promote rapid bioremediation.

(2) Creating an environmentally-friendly doll whose composition and manufacture embodied the principles it was designed to teach.

(3) A complete system for accelerating decomposition in landfills by aerating the soil with oxygenated water and periodically mixing the waste. Their system included a vented grid through which the water seeped, a way of trapping and recycling the water and genetically-engineered bacteria that would accelerate the process.

The last two resulted in proposals I thought were especially worth sending on to the NCIIA. The 'Enviro-Doll' had real promise as an educational tool. The group's research revealed one bio-degradable doll made of tobacco leaves, which they felt provided no clear environmental message. The group's doll would have a story attached to it, explaining its environmental theme. The Captain Planet action figures have such an ecological story, but they were made of the same plastic as any other action figure, and therefore they did not embody environmental intelligence.

This group researched a number of potential materials for a doll, including Climatex Lifecycle and Foxfiber, and decided on a PET cloth, made from 100% recycled plastic bottles. McDonough would not approve of this decision, but the group was able to locate a PET fabric manufacturer they felt they could work with, and this consideration outweighed others for them.

I was initially a bit skeptical of the landfill proposal. It sounded far too complicated for practical use in landfills with limited budgets. But this was a hard-working group. I had already nixed one of their earlier ideas having to do with streamlining and fins on automobiles, on the grounds that automotive engineers had thoroughly researched this kind of technology, with far greater resources than this group could bring to bear.

So they decided to focus on the problem of landfills. Most suffered from the NIMBY syndrome--no one wanted them in their neighborhood! The students decided their goal was "to turn solid waste into marketable compose, using a cyclic landfill system that increases the decomposition speed." In other words,

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. they wanted to accelerate the process of turning waste into food. So I encouraged the students to continue working with this problem.

We took the usual trip to the patent office and this group identified and ordered a series of patents, which came within a week. Two of the group members approached me in alarm several days later. It turns out that another inventor had patented virtually the same invention about a month earlier.

The group was discouraged. I was elated. This case of re-invention confirmed my notion that a group of undergraduates could create a new, environmentally­friendly technological system. I told the group to get in touch with the inventor and help him market his idea. They did so, and the inventor was enthusiastic about cooperating.

As noted in the beginning of this chapter, one of the best ways of transmitting wisdom is through mentoring and apprenticeship. I thought the students could teach the inventor as well as the inventor teaching the student. But this potential collaboration emerged late in the course, barely in time to submit the proposal.

In the end, neither of these proposals were funded, in part, I think, because despite all the extra time allotted in the course, the two groups still had to rush to complete their proposals by the deadline. A proposal of this sort is not just a document describing an invention--it is itself an intimate part of the invention process, where a group describes its technology in provocative detail and establishes that they know who might need it. I say 'provocative detail' because a good proposal leaves the reader convinced the group has a good idea and is qualified to carry it out, but also that there is a great deal to be done--or else why write a proposal? I tried to teach this to !itudents, but they had trouble imagining how an audience that included entrepreneurs and academics would respond. This is not just a question of coming up with the right rhetoric; it is honing and refining the idea and anticipating potential questions. Bell was a successful inventor in part because he wrote a great patent and he provided a powerful narrative of his invention process. Writing is part of invention.

In my next invention and design class, I intend to create more opportunities for students to work with actual inventors, right from the beginning of a module. What I need to determine is whether I can assemble a stable of willing inventors and entrepreneurs--this may take several years, but I think the potential benefits are enormous. So are the pitfalls--many students are not yet ready for this kind of professional relationship. I know I wasn't at their age. I have to offer this kind of collaboration as an option, only, and find a graceful way for either the inventor or the students to terminate a relationship that is not working.

What can the students provide? They will have all done the telephone module, which means they will know how to keep an invention notebook, write a patent and work as a team. They will still have a great deal to learn about entrepreneurship, but the cases would help with this. Hopefully, the students will

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supply energy , enthusiasm and a willingness to learn and I can find inventors who will take joy in mentoring. Stay tuned.

5.7.4 An intelligent notebook

I am also trying to develop new tools that will make it easier for students--and inventors--to keep detailed notes on their invention processes. A team of systems engineering students and I are developing a kind of electronic inventor's notebook. The goal is to distribute at least some of the knowledge and wisdom involved in reflection into a set of tools. Reflection is the hardest skill to teach; it must be learned by doing, and the doing needs to be facilitated and prompted.

As a student or inventor or discoverer writes in her notebook, she can highlight text and tag it. For example, if a piece of text were relevant to a patent, she could use a series of patent tags; if it were relevant to a grant proposal, she could use a series of proposal tags; if relevant to a scientific article, an article tag. 107 Each of these types of tags would have sub-tags associated with it. For example, one might have introduction, methods, results and conclusion tags for a scientific article that would sort text and images into the right section; similarly, for a patent, one might have preferred embodiment and claims tags. This kind of system would allow an inventor or scientist or student (these categories are not mutually exclusive) to record ideas in a continuous stream and have them sorted into a variety of reports. All sketches and ideas would also be categorized in a format that made it easy to search.

The tags would also serve as prompts, or reminders, for the kinds of material the students ought to be recording. For example, we have a set of tags that remind students and practitioners how to document an experiment, including a starting hypothesis, sketch of any apparatus used, brief note on procedures, results and implications. Much of this may be obvious to experienced practitioners, but it is not to students. We are also exploring tags for aspects of the invention process that would not be obvious to practitioners, like reflecting on what they are doing-­what kinds of strategies they are following, whether and what sorts of mental models they are using and what kind of impact their invention might have on society and nature.

To make such a system creative, it should be customizable--a scientist or inventor should be able to create his or her own tags and organizational system. But the initial defaults should be useful enough so customizing could come later.

l07This project was funded by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance. The students used Standard Generalized markup Language (SGML) to create an ITML or a kind of HTML for inventors. Team members included Hamid Moinamin. Curtis Ransom. Kim Brandenburg. Christina Rispoli. Leonor Bantay. Arbi Sookazian and Salman Ahmad. Hamid and I will be working with another team next year to complete this project.

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The default system should also embody a lot of the best knowledge gained from studying the processes of practitioners.

5.8 Implications for Educational Reform

My hope is that these cases and modules can be used in a wide variety of pedagogical settings, including corporate ones. They should not be limited to special courses like Invention and Design or Engineering Ethics. But these cases and modules do not fit easily into the current structure of university education. As Barry Commoner noted:

The prevailing philosophy in academic life is reductionism, which is exactly the reverse of my approach to things. I use the word holism in connection with biology and environmental issues. But the academic world has changed a great deal since I was a graduate student. It has become progressively self-involved and reductionistic. And I find that's dull and I'm not interested in doing it. (Interviewed in Csiksenmihalyi, 1996, p. 295)

I had a recent conversation with one of the brightest students I had ever taught. In her first year, she did a brilliant paper for me on the Indian mathematician Ramanujan (Kanigel, 1991) and Hindu philosophy, showing that there was a connection between his mathematical style and his religious beliefs and practices. By her fourth year, her primary educational concern was publishing a paper so she could go to graduate school in computer science--a noble ambition, but it seemed to close off any interests or projects that would deviate in the slightest from that path. She explained the heuristic a successful computer science student should follow--attach yourself to a lab in your second year, and focus on a set of publications in that domain.

This kind of heuristic is not limited to computer science. I have seen it in psychology graduate students, who identify closely with the dominant paradigm in their laboratory and learn to publish in that area. Working as an apprentice in a lab is one of the best ways to learn the exemplars characteristic of a scientific domain. I think we ought to be producing students who are capable of publishing in fields like computer science and psychology. But I hope this can be done in a way that encourages students to use their expertise in novel ways. Consider Alan Turing (Hodges, 1983) and Herbert Simon (Simon, 1991): the former had the idea of using what we would now call a computer as a model for human problem-solving, and the latter working with teams to create a range of programs that simulated aspects of thought--including discovery. I hope the modules outlined in this chapter show how one can introduce materials that encourage students to work in multi-disciplinary teams on problems that do not fit into current disciplinary pigeon-holes. This sort of work at the boundaries is what leads to new discoveries and the creation of new disciplines like computer science.

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There is one sense in which the careers of all creative individuals are similar: They are not careers in the ordinary sense of the term. Most of us join an organization at an entry level, perform a prescribed role for a number of years, and leave at a higfier level...fn contrast, creative individuals usually are forced to invent the jobs they will be doing all through their lives. One could not have been a psychoanalyst before Freud, an aeronautical engineer before the Wright brothers, an electrician before Galvani, Volta and Edison, or a radiologist before Roentgen. These individuals not only discovered new ways of thinking and of doing things but also became the first practitioners in the domains they discovered- and made it possible for others to have jobs and careers in them. So creative individuals don't have careers, they create them. In addition, these pioneers must create a field that will follow their ideas, or their discovery will soon vanish from the culture. Freud had to attract physicians and neurologists to his camp; the Wright brothers had to convincer mechanics that aeronautics was going to be a feasible career. Because careers can take place only within fields, if a person wants to have a career in a field that does not exist, he or she must invent it (Csiksenmihalyi, 1996, p. 193).

I hope the ethics cases encourage students to see themselves as independent moral agents who can create a better future-- or a worse one. Computer scientists have to face issues of enormous ethical complexity. In the heyday of the Strategic Defense Initiative, there were serious proposals for software that would determine, based on satellite information, whether the Soviets had launched missiles and respond immediately, with either limited or no human intervention (Assessment, 1986). Students and practitioners need to be able to think through the implications of this kind of a Frankenstein.

Organizations like the American Society for Engineering Education (A SEE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are calling for radical reforms that sound much like the pedagogy embodied in these cases. For example, in a 1994 report, the ASEE called for changes in the curriculum that would include more emphasis on:

(1) collaborative active learning (2) multidisciplinary perspective (3) ethics (4) communication skills

According to the report, "Course work should feature multidisciplinary, collaborative, active learning and take into account students' varied learning styles" (Report, December, 1994, p. 24). I read this report after I was well along in designing active learning modules, but I found it very encouraging.

Similarly, John Prados, editor of the Journal of Engineering Education called, among other things, for placing environmental, health, and safety concerns at the

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'front end of design', including issues like zero discharge and life-cycle costs. lOS

Again, I heard Dr. Prados after my student team and I had designed our environmental ethics cases, but I was gratified to find that others were thinking along the same lines.

5.9 Implications for managing innovation

A thorough discussion of the management of innovation lies far beyond the scope of this book--it would take us into more detailed studies of R&D labs, corporations, government agencies, foundations, and would involve many different types of managers. The innovation process cannot be described by the sorts of flowchart models so frequently pandered by consultants (Bucciarelli, 1994), nor can the task of managing innovators be reduced to a list of dos and don'ts that will cover the wide range of management situations. But we should be able to discuss a few myths, recalling that myths always embody truths:

1) Innovation depends primarily on selecting creative people. There is an obvious element of truth to this--if you can select someone who is creative from the start, it makes your job as a manager much easier. That is why I spend so much time thinking about ways of producing students who could become discoverers, inventors--and creative managers of discovery and invention. A remark like "waste equals food" will be enough of a spark for someone who is prepared to understand and act on it.

But Terese Amabile's research on R&D firms suggests that the scientists in these labs view the environment as having more effect on creativity than personal characteristics (Amabile, 1994; Amabile, 1996). This was probably a relatively homogeneous sample of intelligent people; still, Amabile's points out the essential role of the environment. Even if a manager selects creative people, he or she can turn them off quickly--witness cases like William Schockley's first corporation: he hired the best minds in the burgeoning transistor business, but couldn't manage them (Reid, 1984).

Participants in Amabile's study mentioned characteristics that stimulated and inhibited creativity. Here they are in order of importance, with those high on the list having the highest priority

lOS John Prados presented these ideas with a group of us from the Division of Technology, Culture & Communications who visited him in May of 1997 at the National Science Foundation, where he was serving as Senior Education Associate, Engineering Education and Centers Division. For more information, contact him at prados@utk.edu.

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Stimulate creativity:

Autonomy in terms of how one does one's work

Good project management in determining work assignments Sufficient resources Encouragement

Organizational structures that facilitate open communication, cooperation and collaboration Feedback and recognition Enough time Challenging work

Urgent need for a solution

Inhibit creativity:

Infighting, red tape, organizational structures that got in the way of communication Constraints on what sort of work one could do Apathy towards projects Unclear project goals and/or too much control over work assignments Evaluation pressure

Insufficient resources Insufficient time Emphasis on standard operating procedures Competition, especially within the organization

The inhibit and stimulate lists are in agreement on several categories:

(a) Autonomy was preferred by these scientists over constraints on what they could do. The case of TrueVoice is instructive. Duane Bowker and Jim James chose the project, but they were operating within a larger constraint: that projects be of commercial value to AT&T. The kind of freedom that produced the discovery of the background radiation of the Big Bang no longer existed at Bell Labs after the break-up. So in their case, there was a mixture of freedom and constraint that is typical in entrepreneurial situations.

(b) Sufficient resources & time: This is kind of a 'motherhood and apple pie' issue. What constitutes sufficiency? Students working on my active learning modules never thought they had enough time--but I found that giving them more time produced no better results. Similarly, the entrepreneur Steve Wallach (see Kidder, 1981), when interviewed by a group of my students, said tight deadlines and scant resources can even stimulate creativity.

(c) Open communication vs. red tape and infighting: The Manhattan project is a classic example. Military officers at Los Alamos wanted to organize decision­making along military lines; civilian scientists preferred more flexible organization that facilitated open communications. The group that eventually developed the implosion method was initially hampered by bureaucratic infighting between a scientist and a military officer. George Kistiakowsky, an outsider brought in to advise this project, worked with Oppenheimer and others to completely reorganize this effort, sidelining the two original project leaders. This kind of bureaucratic flexibility bruised egos, but made possible a successful, all-

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out crash program to develop a successful implosion method (Rhodes, 1986). Scientists still had to deal with a fair amount of red tape and barbed-wire regarding their relations to those outside of Los Alamos. These security precautions completely failed to protect against the successful espionage of Klaus Fuchs and others (Rhodes, 1995).

Standard operating procedures are another inhibitor of creativity. These procedures exist to automate decision-making, which is fine in some situations, but not in cases like the dropping of a bomb on Nagasaki, a decision that should have been reviewed at a higher level. But once the first bomb was dropped, the decision to make further drops was handed-off to subordinates. The date of the second drop was picked because of weather, only three days after the first--too little time for the Japanese to process what happened at Hiroshima.

(d) Encouragement versus apathy: This is another 'motherhood and apple pie': it seems obvious that encouragement would be better than apathy. But how does one show encouragement? For the most part, inventors and discoverers are motivated to the point of obsession, but they can be seized by doubts and also by a feeling that their vision is not appreciated by others. Like all generalizations, this one holds for only some inventors or discoverers. Edison never had any doubts, at least in public; the only kind of encouragement he seemed to need in the early part of his career was money. In later years, he delighted in the adulation of Henry Ford and others, but these were not managers. Edison himself managed his own career. After all, he was director of the first R&D lab.

Similarly, Einstein seems to have had no real manager, and therefore needed no encouragement of this sort. His 'annu mirabilis' was 1905, when he wrote three papers that shook the foundations of modern physics while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. He had a small group of colleagues with whom he exchanged ideas, but he was not part of a major university or R&D facility until after 1905 (Holton, 1973).

Gardiner Hubbard was Alexander Graham Bell's principal backer, future father-in-law and the closest thing he had to a manager. Hubbard's way of 'encouraging' Bell was to remind him that Elisha Gray and others would be getting ahead if he didn't move quickly to patent a system of multiple telegraphy.

On March 1st of 1875, Bell went to visit one of the truly great men of American science, Joseph Henry, the Director of the Smithsonian Institution. Bell described his telegraph researchers to date. What most intrigued Henry was Bell's description of an unusual musical sound he had obtained from a coil of wire. Henry wanted to see a demonstration immediately. Bell saved the elderly gentleman a carriage ride by promising to bring the experiment to him the next day.

Overall, Henry thought Bell had the 'germ of a great idea' and when Bell complained about his lack of electrical knowledge, Henry told him to "Get it!" A

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few days later, in a letter to his parents, Bell said, "I cannot tell you how much those two words have encouraged me" (Bruce, 1973, p.140).

Joseph Henry's firm advice was a kind of back-handed encouragement: to say "get it" implies "you can do it". Similarly, the Eagle team at Data General would give its new employees daunting open-ended tasks because they didn't know enough to see them as impossible (Kidder, 1981).

Amabile's list of inhibiting factors includes both unclear goals and too much control over projects by management. Perhaps this gets at the kind of balance Kaelin had to strike in the Fliickiger case, between adherence to a set of goals reflected in a protocol and allowing employee autonomy. A related factor on the good side is project management in determining work assignments. This item is hard to square with the fact that too much control is an inhibiting factor and also with employee autonomy.

Finally there is an emphasis on challenging work and an urgent need for a solution, both low on the list of factors that stimulate creativity. They get us into our next point, about motivation.

(2) Creative people are primarily motivated by intrinsic rewards. Terese Amabile's research suggests that, "People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and personal challenge of the work itself--and not by extrinsic motivators such as tangible reward, evaluation concern, deadlines, and external dictates" (Amabile, 1994, pp. 317-8). Amabile's emphasis on intrinsic motivation is a mythic oversimplification that contains an important element of truth. I hinted at this under the previous point when I talked about how inventors are motivated to the point of obsession but still need to be encouraged.

Einstein is perhaps the archetype of the intrinsically-motivated discoverer, working without any visible external rewards in the Swiss patent office when he made three of his greatest discoveries. Edison, in contrast, is considered the archetype of the shrewd inventor who thought always about tangible, monetary rewards. But even Edison pursued projects in part because of the pure joy and delight. His attempt to develop a profitable system that would use magnetism to separate iron from rock was certainly motivated by profit, but it was animated by delight; he referred to the mine he build as his 'baby' and virtually lived at it for

ten years (Baldwin, 1995). He was so wrapped up in this exciting work that he missed the improvements in mining technology made in places like the Great Lakes; his techniques for recovering iron from low-grade ore could not compete, efficient though they were.

For most inventors and discoverers, there is a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motives. Indeed, a sociologist might ask how one can distinguish between the two, since intrinsic motives frequently reflect the internalized values of others.

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The students in my summer course for gifted students had not grades or prizes to motivate them, and yet they worked with more energy and enthusiasm than most of the University students! However, they did have extrinsic motivation in the form of peer pressure. They had also internalized a perception of what it meant to be gifted, and wanted to fulfill that role.

Consider Bell. He was intrinsically motivated to solve the problem of transmitting speech, but this intrinsic motivation certainly reflected, in part, his father's emphasis on teaching elocution and developing new methods for teaching the deaf. In other words, he had internalized his father's values. He also wanted fame and fortune and knew those would come to anyone who developed a system of telegraphy. These two motivations fueled his research into a speaking telegraph.

There is a similar mix in the case of ethical inventors like Al Rich and entrepreneurs like William McDonough. They want to do well by doing good. One might refer to the 'doing. good' part as an intrinsic motive, but the doing well part shows their concern with external rewards as well.

One of the most important rewards for scientists and inventors is priority. The team that designed the Eagle computer for Data General is an example (Kidder, 1981). The Eagle team was doing a kind of 'skunkworks', or underground operation, not officially sanctioned by the company. A competitor team in North Carolina was the one officially charged with creating the next generation of Data General computers, and the company had sent its 'best' engineers down there. So the team that remained behind in Massachusetts worked underground and overtime, spurred in part by the desire to show that they could do more with less. They were too young and inexperienced to know when they were given an impossible task, so they forged ahead. Their reward was the promise that they would get to 'play pinball' again and work on a project of similar scope and autonomy. In this case, challenging work was a stimulus to creativity. It was also a problem that needed an urgent solution. Competing companies were coming out with newer, faster machines; if Data General didn't, the company would probably fail.

The Massachusetts team succeeded in getting their product out first. Similarly, the skunkworks that produced the Sidewinder missile was working against an official team, and had the satisfaction of beating them in open competition (Westrum, 1989).

A concern with priority inevitably involves deadlines. Bell's primary backer Gardiner Hubbard continually confronted his future son-in-law with deadlines, forcing Bell to submit the patent that made him famous and also to demonstrate a prototype of his speaking telegraph at the Centennial in 1876. Both the Eagle and Sidewinder teams were racing competitors, and so had to set Draconian deadlines.

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This kind of competition is just as prevalent in science. The story of the discovery of the double helix reads like a race, with Watson and Crick constantly looking over their shoulders at the competition and using their results whenever possible (Watson, 1968). The great Devonian controversy was bitterly competitive. De la Beche had a strong economic incentive--his job was on the line--but for Murchison, the reward was credit for making a major discovery.

Is the desire for priority an intrinsic or extrinsic reward? It is extrinsic in the sense that it is awarded by one's fellows. Herbert Simon gives an entertaining account of the politics that go into receiving a Nobel Prize (Simon, 1991). Edwin Armstrong battled Lee de Forest for many years because the former wanted to be named the sole inventor of radio (Lewis, 1991). Armstrong initially won in court, but kept the case alive because de Forest was not obligated to pay his legal fees. Was this greed, or a desire to make it clear to everyone that de Forest had no real claim to the invention?

As Freud said, human motives are overdetermined. Does a scientist seek a grant for the money or the prestige or out of scientific curiosity? Obviously, all of the above. The scientist needs the money to keep the lab alive. Considerable prestige and salary typically accrue to the top grant-getters at most institutions, who can move their labs to a competitor institution in a manner analogous to a ball team moving to a new city if the stadium and resources aren't right. Last but not least, the problem has to be interesting to the point of obsession.

My colleague W. Bernard Carlson likes to tell about how Willis R. Whitney used to walk around one of the first research and design laboratories at General Electric, asking whether the research scientists were having fun (for more background, see Carlson, 1991; Carlson, In Press). This is the same kind of 'fun' Joseph Campbell refers to as 'following your bliss'. Bliss is the state of ecstasy that Csiksenmihalyi refers to as 'flow' (Csiksenmihalyi, 1996). I enjoy reading articles about entrepreneurs in the Wall Street Journal. Many of the best are in their sixties or even seventies: they are starting companies because it is the most fun they've ever had, not because they need the money any more. This last sense of 'fun' comes closest to Amabile's 'interest, enjoyment and satisfaction'. But a behaviorist would remind us that fun can be learned, to--we tend to like the activities we are rewarded for. With the right kind of encouragement, managers can create the conditions for bliss. As Amabile says, "under certain circumstances, certain types of extrinsic motivation can add to rather than detract from creativity. We believe that investigations of such synergistic combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation will yield some of the most exciting new insights--and new questions--about creativity in the coming decades" (Amabile, 1996, p. 274).

3) Innovation means freedom from intellectual constraints, as well as extrinsic ones. The truly creative person thinks 'out of the box', blowing up the constraints imposed by others. Kepler is a classic example: he discarded the perfect circle

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constraint. But in fact Kepler still kept a broader constraint: that the planetary orbits observed some harmonic relationship centered on the sun.

Einstein is another classic 'out of the box' thinker. But like Kepler, he did not remove all constraints. In coming up with his theory of special relativity, he began with a new constraint: that the laws of physics should be invariant for all observers. He took into account the constraint that the speed of light was constant for all observers, regardless of their motion relative to one another. The result was an extraordinary set of conclusions, including the famous E=MC2• Einstein was more concerned with the constraints posed by his hypothesis-space than with results in the experiment space: witness his famous "Then I would feel sorry for the dear Lord" quote. This is not to suggest that he ignored data, but the one time he allowed an empirical result to change his theory was his infamous 'cosmological constant' he created to correct for the fact that General Relativity predicted an expanding universe. Subsequent research revealed the spectral red­shifts that pointed to an expanding universe (Brush, 1993). (For more on Einstein's cognitive style, see Holton, 1986).

The point is that both Kepler and Einstein worked within constraints that they created. Going back to our second generalization in Chapter 2, they transformed the problem by transforming the constraints.

Similarly, inventors and designers create constraints when there are too few in the environment (Bucciarelli, 1994), to make the problem space they are working in manageable (Perkins, 1992).

When confronting the problem of transmitting speech, Bell, imposed a whole set of constraints on himself, including focusing his search in the hypothesis space, in part because of his limited electrical knowledge and resources. Susan Lyons needed an environmental framework to constrain her possible choices. De Castro, the President of Data General, constrained the Eagle team by insisting that the new machine have 'no mode bit', meaning that it would have to run software from the older generation Data General machine without having to be switched into a special mode.

5.9.1 Generalizations about Managing Innovation

There is no algorithm for managing innovation, just as there is no algorithm for doing it. The first step is to realize that management can be helpful: rewards, deadlines and constraints are part of the creative process. To return to our earlier generalizations, managers can :

1) Help establish the importance of a problem. For example, the story of Climatex Lifecycle is more than that of a compostable fabric. William McDonough touts it as an example of a second industrial revolution. In this way, he serves the role of

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a manager or facilitator who makes a problem even more significant by the way she or he frames it.

2) Assist in finding and transforming data and devices. Here a manager can supply a combination of resources and contacts. The two are intimately linked. The director of a successful research laboratory usually writes the largest and most important grant proposals, and has the connections to know what questions the referees will ask. The director typically will also be in the closest touch with what competing laboratories are doing.109

Similarly, the manager of a small start-up has to have the connections to know where to raise cash and also know what the competition is doing. For example, Gardiner Hubbard found the funding to hire Watson and also kept a close eye on Elisha Gray. Recall that it was Hubbard who managed to file Bell's patent application just before Gray arrived at the patent office.

3) Create the necessary balance between flexibility and stubbornness through the use of teams. Most individuals cannot manage the perfect balance between the stubbornness necessary to promote a theory or invention and the flexibility to recognize when it is no longer feasible. A manager can create this balance by encouraging skeptics as well as promoters of a new idea within the organization. The trick is to keep this kind of criticism constructive. An evolutionary epistemologist might argue that the best idea would emerge from a Darwinian struggle in which the proponents and the skeptics were engaged in a life-or-death struggle over limited resources. Certainly, some managers think this is how their organizations ought to operate. Unfortunately, the skills it takes to win this kind of battle are frequently only tangentially related to the quality of the ideas. In other words, organizations like this tend to select for social skills, not intellectual ones. Admittedly, this is a fuzzy boundary; network-building is part of invention and discovery.

But organizational survival is a different goal than trying to create a market for a new technology. To survive, you don't want to become wedded to a project until it has clearly succeeded; then grab all the credit you can. To create a market, you need the wholehearted commitment to a vision which is creatively modified as new allies are recruited. Aramis, the system that would have combined the efficiency of mass transit with the freedom of the automobile, attracted allies for all the usual reasons. For patriots, a chance to show France could develop and implement the most advanced public transportation in the world, for engineers and scientists, a chance to get research funds, for politicians on the left, a chance to embrace a 'high-technology' project that would benefit workers (Latour, 1996). What seems to have been missing is an inventor or entrepreneur who was wholeheartedly obsessed with implementing the technology--the kind of hero or champion that loved the idea, that had to see it realized.

109 For a good example of the ins and outs of this process, and how a leader can stay focused on the scientific goal while struggling to keep the lab going, see (Goodfield, 1982).

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4) Recognize that writing, visualizing and building are integral parts of discovery or invention. Therefore, instead of assigning technical writers to do the writing for the scientists and patent attorneys to do it for the inventors, create opportunities for them to collaborate closely. These other specialists are valuable additions to a project that can complement a scientist or inventor's style. For example, an inventor who is most comfortable with building prototypes needs the right sort of specialist to help her translate her prototype into a set of claims. But the technical writer needs to work intimately with the inventor or discoverer because the hypothesis or invention will often be transformed in the course of preparing it for dissemination.

I think this is especially true for proposal writing, whether the proposal is for a research grant or funding for an entrepreneurial start-up. Proposal-writing is a license to dream, to think as boldly as possible about what one is doing. Professional proposal writers who know the format required by an agency or the rhetorical expectations of investors can be useful collaborators, provided they keep the invention or discover team focused on articulating their vision as well as the specifics of what they intend to do. The proposal stage is also a good time to think about long-term impacts, about whether the world will be a better or worse place if this potential discovery or invention is made.

5) Provide the vision that connects various enterprises within a laboratory or a start-up company into a network, each part of which can potentially facilitate the others. The right kind of network also spreads wide enough so that at any given time, at least one project or technology will be 'hot': fundable or marketable. Managers can help establish creative networks, based on complementary cognitive styles and disciplinary backgrounds.

The ethical dilemmas presented in the last chapter suggest another generalization:

6) Adopt an ethical framework and a process for communicating this framework throughout one's organization. Like other aspects of management, there is no algorithm for ethical decision-making, but one can establish principles and heuristics. Examples in the environmental area include the McDonough' Braungart protocols and The Natural Step.

I suspect the prevailing model in business is that ethics interfere with competitiveness. In contrast, I hope products like Climate x Lifecycle illustrate how ethical concerns can give one a competitive advantage, can even become the 'secret weapon' that allows a small company to create a new market.

Another standard myth is that regulations invariably interfere with creative entrpreneurship. Certainly, some kinds of regulations do. Ethical managers can and should fight for is the right kind of regulations, ones that level the playing field so that all companies have to meet the same standards, but each is free to

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exercise maximum creativity in reaching the goal. An example is the no-emission zones pioneered by cities like Chatanooga. This kind of regulation does not say how the goal is to be achieved, it merely gives companies an incentive to compete creatively for the opportunity to put their businesses in the zone. A company can get ahead of its competitors by anticipating the direction regulations will have to take, over the long term, and getting there early, exceeding all current regulations. One of our current research projects involves looking carefully at how one can show the impact of this kind of long-term ecological perspective on a company's bottom line.

5.9.2 Leadership style and innovation

Studies on leadership styles have focused on three alternatives: autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939), where the former is dictatorial, the latter hands-off, and the democratic either consults with everyone before reaching a decision or leads a discussion that produces a consensus. No one style is superior to the others in all situations. But on unstructured problems a

consultative or fully democratic style is best (Forsyth, 1990). Unstructured problems are ones that do not fall nicely into existing categories, and therefore call for maximum creativity. Indeed, creative people often turn problems everyone else thinks of as routine into unstructured problems. That is the nature of a paradigm shift. So democratic leadership is most likely to encourage creativity.

This style of leadership is even more important, when the team must share an ethical framework that cannot be reduced to an algorithm. The leader may the prime mover behind the vision, but it has to be endorsed by everyone, and everyone can contribute suggestions on how to translate ideals into practice.

A complementary essential characteristic for a leader of innovators is to be willing to take joy in the accomplishments of others and give credit wherever possible. Gary Tabor, a leading environmentalist, refers to this as the servant­leader, the one who leads from behind} 10 Being a servant leader requires humility, a sense of humor and an ability to step into the shoes of others. It also implies keeping one's eyes on the prize, putting goals like environmental sustainability ahead of one's ego. It means keep the administrative scutwork out of the way of the creative team as much as possible--the memos, reports and other documents that justify the team's existence, the parts of the grant proposal that are not creative, the daily details of budgets and trivial correspondence. It does not mean becoming a martyr and sacrificing one's career for the benefits of others, nor

110 Gary is an old friend and colleague who has worked on environmental issues with the African Wildlife Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the World Bank and others. Conversations with him were particularly helpful in framing parts of this conclusion, though I take full responsibility for what is said here.

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does it imply tolerating prima donnas who want to hog all of the credit, but it does mean letting others think they are the real leaders from time-to-time.

5.10 Why do we not act to save the world?

This question was the title of a speech B.F. Skinner gave at the University of New Hampshire when I was a graduate student there. Skinner, of course, was the most famous of the behavioristic of psychologists, who thought a science of psychology could only be founded on the study of behavior, because thoughts are unobservable. Skinner's particular emphasis was on the contingency or relationship between response and consequences. If a response was rewarded, we would be more likely to make it again in the same situation; if it were punished, less likely. The theory becomes far more complicated and mathematical, but that simple idea is at the root.

Skinner was really an inventor. What he wanted to create was a technology for controlling human behavior. This led him into all kinds of ethical arguments with those who thought that controlling behavior was immoral. He countered by arguing that we are always controlling and influencing each others' behavior anyway. There is no free will (Skinner, 1971). So why not try to do it self­consciously and deliberately? Of course, Skinner thought the people who ought to apply this technology were the behavioral psychologists, sort of a modem version of Plato's philosopher kings.

Skinner, in his speech, said saving the world was all about contingencies. He did not spell out how these contingencies might be altered, but perhaps he had these behavior-controllers in mind. A detailed consideration of the problems with this view lie beyond the scope of this book. Suffice to say that if there is no possibility of real human decision-making, if everything we do is the result of contingencies, then the behavior-controllers will not be any wiser or better than those they control.

William McDonough might agree with Skinner on the importance of contingencies. He wants to become a multi-millionaire by developing new environmentally intelligent designs. So does Al Rich. If entrepreneurs saw that they could make millions by making the world a better place, they too might act to save the world.

The whole system of regulations and tax incentives is designed to provide contingencies for acting in ways that are helpful or harmful to social goals. Hawken and McDonough and others want to alter these contingencies in ways that will encourage sustainable design.

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But contingencies alone are not sufficient. For every multi-millionaire, there has to be someone--or some large group of people--who have less than what they need, or else affluence will cause negative environmental impacts. Also, much of what is needed is cooperative thinking--people have to be willing to share resources and rewards across a network, not fight over who gets the biggest bonus.

Recognition is another important contingency. It is the coin of science. Imagine an equivalent of the Nobel Prize for scientific discoveries and technological inventions that promote sustainability, poverty-reduction and peace. Imagine tenure and promotion policies that rewarded such activities. Would this hinder scientific progress and technological innovation? Perhaps, if progress is defined as the pursuit of knowledge, regardless of the consequences. But perhaps that is a poor definition of progress.

Recognition also suffers from the same potential problem as wealth--is there enough to go around? Does the recognition system only work if some people are willing to accept less than their share? One of the characteristics of good leadership is taking joy in the accomplishments of others. Could a system that rewards this kind of leadership, and provides stable employment for hard workers willing to stay out of the limelight, also accommodate competitive prima donnas? It would be interesting to experiment with these contingencies in a SIMSCI, to see what kind of system emerged.

What about priority in invention and discovery? The bliss of solving a problem can come with a re-discovery or a re-invention, but that is typically the only reward for coming in second. Does the reward system need to favor the first in order to provide enough urgency and incentive to take the risk involved in going where no one has gone before? As one scientist lamented,

Out there we have "competitors," who might see in our published names the great vile chance for self-aggrandizement. And the introduction of these new values--"competition" "me" "fame" "public image "--into Western science is to a large extent th~ respon'sibility of this c~untry. Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot: things that are so completely alien to my belief in the way of being human in a world threatened by natural and man-made disasters that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on the way to extinction, of little use in these new dimensions of human achievement--as no doubt some great television commentator would put it (Goodfield, 1982,pp.212-13).

But she went on to point out that those who 'run their own race' can still win. Barbara McClintock is an example. She followed her own research direction, immersing herself totally in a problem of her own choosing, until the rewards finally came.

There can be multiple simultaneous inventors and discoverers, but these are rare and often represent subtle but important differences, as in the cases of the

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telephone and the microchip. These two cases, and that of radio and many others, resulted in long fights over patent priority. Are these really necessary? Bell spent much of his time in the decade after his one great invention defending it in court. Edison complained bitterly about patent battles (Hanson, 1982). Would both have been more productive if they had spent less time defending their inventions? Did the battles over credit for the discovery of the calculus, and insulin and the invention of radio significantly advance human knowledge? They did leave us better records of the processes that lay behind these transformations. The eventual amicable settlement between Kilby and Noyce may be a better model for the resolution of patent disputes, as are the kinds of licensing and pooling arrangements practiced by companies in areas like microelectronics (Hanson, 1982).

Of course, even such cooperative arrangements are often aimed at least partly at rivals. Apple and Microsoft recently agreed to abandon their legal struggle over whether Microsoft stole the look and feel of its Windows operating system

from the Macintosh (Carlton & Gomes, 1997). Now the two former competitors have become partners. This partnership gives Microsoft an edge over its rival, Netscape, because Microsoft's Web browser will be carried on every Macintosh.

Much of this book has been devoted to showing that it is possible to develop environmentally sustainable technologies. The Climatex Lifecycle network involves partnerships between former members of Greenpeace and CEOs of companies like Ciba-Geigy. The SELF network involves partnerships between non-government organizations, villagers and local and regional governments. These networks will have to change as they grow. For example, environmental regulators will have to become partners in promoting these positive models and freeing companies that adopt them from certain of the costs associated with regulation.

Success itself could be a threat to networks. Individual recognition is still a powerful motive for scientists and inventors, individual financial reward for entrepreneurs. Paradoxically, success can create tensions as each member of a network looks to make certain she or he is getting enough of the recognition and rewards. When you have nothing, everyone is struggling together; when the first rewards come in, haves and have nots appear, and the network threatens to disintegrate.

A servant-leader can be the savior in situations like this, someone who is willing to lead from behind, to put others forward and give them credit. But we may also need changes in contingencies. Why are there not more rewards for collaboration across an extended network, where it is no longer clear who the inventor or discover is--when the new technology emerges from the network, not from the individual?

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Cooperation is essential to creating a better future. Moral imagination is an essential part of cooperation. True collaboration involves the ability to take another's view and see it as one's own, even if one eventually transcends it and replaces it with another.

This does not imply relativism--it does not say that all views are equally valid, or moral. It is worth trying to imagine how Pol Pot saw the world in order to understand how to prevent future Pol Pots. He went through a sophisticated Western educational system which failed to reinforce the most elementary sense of human rights.

The 'information revolution' put the Vietnam War, Tianamen Square, the bombardment of Sarajevo and famine in Ethiopia in American living rooms. It is easier to engage in moral imagination when one sees how others live and die, 'up close and personal' .

The spread of information is helping the growth of democracy. Dictators can no longer hide the fact that people can prosper in free and open societies. Communism promised to eliminate the difference between the haves and have­nots; it was to have been the greatest experiment in cooperation and partnership the world had seen. Instead, in the Soviet Union, one group of haves--the Tsar and his nobles--were simply replaced by another--the Party. Ordinary people were still treated like dirt--or worse, starved and imprisoned in Gulags. The Soviet Union collapsed relatively peacefully, considering the potential for global war. Democracy's rise is uncertain and unsteady--witness Tianamen Square--but capitalism has flooded into the Communist world, especially China.

The information arteries are clogged with movie stars and product advertisements, and even these played a role in the spread of democracy. It is hard to pretend that a totalitarian system is a success when people can see evidence of a better life in other societies. This image is partly a mirage, of course; citizens of former Communist states are discovering the painful truth that with freedom comes responsibility, and it is possible to end up poorer than one was under a dictatorship.

I have put all of our ethics cases on the Web, to make them accessible globally--to whoever has the technology. As the SELF cases illustrate, much of the world still does not have electricity, let alone laptops with internet connections. The risk is that the Web will simply exaggerate the differences between the haves and have-nots globally. My responsibility is to make certain my students--the haves--see this problem clearly, and are motivated to think of solutions. I also provide the cases in print form, and hope this book will be available in libraries.

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5.11 Of Loons, and a Lake

I am writing this section near a lake where I went to camp for many years. There used to be as many sailboats as motorboats; loons lived at one end, and one could drink the water. Now the whine of jet-skis cuts through the ancient Adirondack silence and I am careful about swimming 'too far from shore--the jet­skis race at such high speeds that I am sure the operators would have trouble seeing a swimmer. One can no longer drink the water. I frequently smell oil on it. lll I haven't heard the loons call at night in several years.

Technology greatly enhances my awareness of nature. I have a Kevlar canoe that glides easily over the water, and am beholden to the inventor Stephanie Kwolek for it. I have deep-sky binoculars that reveal the great spiral nebula in Andromeda. These tools help me gain a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, nature. I think it would be hard for someone on a jet-ski to experience this while ripping across the water with a whine like a buzz-saw. The place the jet­skis put-in is a scar visible from peaks that overlook the lake--an area where the forest has been stripped to make room for trailers and campers.

In defense of the jet-ski owners, there is no other way they can get access to the lake--even though the State of New York owns almost half of the shoreline, there is no public access. The man who owns the private entry has property taxes to pay, needs to feed a family and has no financial incentive to preserve nature. Moral persuasion is not enough; as Hawken, McDonough and others have shown, the system of contingencies must make ethics the natural course. Suppose the land-owner at the end of the lake could have his taxes reduced for preserving or restoring at least some of the land he owned.

But tax incentives are not enough, as we saw in the American Solar Network case: for every Al Rich, there will be half-a-dozen people who are in it only for the tax break, and look on it as a loophole they can take advantage of. Education is an essential complement to legal or regulatory contingencies. I experience this lake as a sacred place because I was taught to appreciate it by a group, in this case members of a summer camp.lI2 I started out hating it--cold water, unpredictable shifts in wind and weather. Gradually, like students in an active learning module, I had to learn to take advantage of the wind when canoeing and sailing, to experience the cold as 'refreshing'. The key was converting nature from an enemy to an ally. Education was critical--an active education, full of challenges and mentors.

111 The lake I am referring to is Silver Lake in the Adirondack mountains of New York state. The problem is more complicated than I make it, here. Many natural waterways are infested with giardia and other parasites and bacteria, and not all these micro-organisms are by-products of human technology. Furthermore, the camp I went to for years had a boat that leaked oil and dozens of campers who dumped suds into the water whenever they washed up.

112 The Hawkeye Trail Camps, which closed in 1978, due to the death of its director, Mrs. Helen Post Hartz. I thank her for all she did to teach me to love the wilderness.

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Another one of my favorite examples of sacred places are the American Civil War battlefield parks that dot Northern Virginia, where so much of the war was fought. In places like Manassas and Spotsylvania, there could be housing developments instead of these parks, which preserve the character of the landscape as it existed one hundred or more years ago. The Wilderness battlefield park is just that--acres of thickets and brambles and scrub growth. Where once blood ran in rivers, one can now experience nature. But this is a nature that includes lines of trenches, remains of trees mowed down by bullets, silent cannon--all reminders of the horror and glory of war.

Education is an important part of appreciating these battlefields. As Santayana said, "Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it." We must make certain that those on both sides who gave "the last full measure of devotion" did not die in vain, that "government by the people, of the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth." In the ballot-box, not the bullet, lies the best hope for a better tomorrow.

The problem with sacred places is that each group respects its own place, but not necessarily those of other people. Furthermore, groups have difficulty sharing sacred places--witness the centuries-old struggles over Jerusalem. To protect the environment and prevent war, the whole planet and all things living on it must be seen as sacred.

Once again, moral imagination is the key--in this case, the ability to see nature as part of oneself. Here homocentric and ecocentric come together. For me, the lake is a spiritual place, where I can experience that feeling the poet Robinson Jeffers described as "Not man apart" (in the politically incorrect language of his day). The ritual of return to the lake creates the opportunity for this feeling, but does not guarantee it, any more than the ritual of going to a battlefield can guarantee one will experience the horror and the glory.

At the lake, I become nature looking at itself; every senseless act of pollution, every waste of a precious resource, is damage to my own body. I can then take this wisdom elsewhere, and experience it in other places.

Here we come back to the role of moral imagination in invention and discovery. Could a team of inventors that experiences this kind of wonder and sacredness in the presence of nature create vessels that would fly down the lake without sounding like a dozen chain-saws and leaving a petroleum film on the water? Would they even want to? Perhaps--because such craft would create a positive alternative for those who wished to experience nature between exhilarating bursts of speed.

There would still be a need to integrate such craft into a network that included swimmers, canoeists and sailors who could still be hit by small, high-speed craft and would still have problems with the wake. Operators would need to be

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regulated by rights-of-way and speed limits, but they would also need that sense of courtesy, of looking out for the other, that is impossible to legislate.

The ability to see the other as oneself, where the other can be a person or the wilderness is the most basic kind of moral imagination and an essential first step in transforming nature. What would happen if each of us regarded all the children in the world as if they were our own, regardless of their race or ethnic background? 113 Then war and poverty would become unthinkable. What would happen if we took an ecocentric perspective and saw Nature as having inherent worth? Then we would do all we could to restore the environment. What would happen if we really understood that we are part of nature? Then the distinction between ecocentric and homocentric would disappear and we would understand that one of the best ways to help a child now is to insure that her great­grandchildren will inherit a habitable planet. As William McDonough said,

When I was in Jordan in the early 1970s, I worked for King Hussein on his master plan for the Jordan Valley. I was walking through a village that had been flattened by tanks and I saw a child's skeleton squashed into the adobe block and was horrified. A sheik looked at me and said, "Don't you know what war is?" And I said, "I guess I don't." And he said, "War IS when they kill y'0ur children." So I believe we're at war. We are at war with our own children. And we must stop. To do this, we have to stop designing everyday things for killing, and we have to stop designing killing machines (McDonough, 1995).

A change in thinking is the necessary prerequisite to the development of new technologies that spread opportunity around the globe while restoring the environment. As Barbara McClintock said, pondering the acid rain that is an additional threat to Adirondack lakes, "Technology is fine, but the scientists and engineers only partially think through their problems. They solve certain aspects, but not the total, and as a consequence it is slapping us back in the face very hard" (Keller, 1983). These technologies will have to be part of networks whose members are willing to share credit. These networks, in tum, would be helped by contingencies that provide incentives for the restoration of nature. The Natural Step is a good metaphor, here. Take a series of natural steps, keeping continuous improvement as a goal. Another good metaphor is Second Nature, a foundation whose "sole purpose is to increase the capacity of higher education to make justice and sustain ability 'second nature' in its learning, research, operations and community outreach". 11 4

113 I am aware of the philosophical 'what ifs' one can use to criticize this kind of • golden rule' argument. What if the person doing the imagining is a child molester? For these purposes, I am assuming someone who is capable of love at least for her or his own children. My version of this golden rule argument owes a great deal to J. Krishnamurti (Krishnamurti, 1970).

114 This quotation is from a speech entitled "Engineering Education for a Sustainable Future", given by Anthony D. Cortese, President of Second Nature to the joint conference on Engineering Education and Trainingfor Sustainable Development: Towards Improved Performance, Paris, September 24-26, 1997. For more information on Second Nature, check their web-site at http:www.2nature.orgor e-mail info@2nature.org.

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My mission in this chapter has been to show that it is possible to tum students into ethical discoverers and inventors. My method has been a series of small, natural steps--begin with one or two case studies and expand, adding more and more detailed stories of attempts to understand the world we live in and transform it. Analytic frameworks and simulations can help us unpack the lessons in these stories. Students can become inventors, designers, discoverers and dreamers who help create a better world. They can plug into existing networks, or create their own. In the words of Walt Kelly, "We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities." 115

115 The recent Public Broadcasting show, "Planet Neighborhood," hosted by William McDonough, contains dozens of examples of these insunnountable opportunities (see http://www.pbs.orglwetalplanetl).

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382

2

2-4-6 task, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84,85,96,279,281,284

A

Adirondacks, 353 Adler, Mortimer, 276 affluence, 197, 198, 199,200,349 Alvarez, Walter, 79 analogy, 4,54,70, 100, 101, 102, 103,

104,105,106,107,110,123,124, 166,175,202,203,205,208,243, 244,248,249,272,277

Anderson, Ray, 204, 215, 216, 217, 225, 235,277

Angell, Marcia, 221, 224, 225, 227, 228 Anzai, Yuichiro, 91, 92, 96 Ashley, J.N., 134

B

Baars, B., 65 BACON

and confirmation;and discovery; and ECHO, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17,18,30,41,54,66,67,68,71, 91,175,176,277

Baldwin, Neil, 112, 113, 174 Bank, The World, 201 Banville, John, 1,2 Barker, P., 63 Bast, Joseph L., 198,201,210,211 Bazerman, Charles, 14, 15 Bechtel, William, 277 Bell, Alexander Graham, 9,12,103,

119,120,124,125,126,127,130,

Index 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151,153,154,155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168,169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 202,244,253,260,272,276,277, 283,284,290,291,292,293,294, 295,296,297,298,299,300,301, 302,303,304,305,306,307,308, 309,311,316,328,331,335,340, 341,343,345,346,350

Berkenkotter, Carol, 108 Bishop, Jerry E., 220 black-boxing, 24 Blake, c., 144 Bliss, Michael, 31, 344 Boden, M., 105 Bradshaw, G.L., 169 Brannigan, Augustine, 40, 41, 69 breast implants, 89, 215, 217, 218, 219,

221,224,227,228,229,230,232, 233,236

Bredo, Eric, 106, 151,294 Brewer, William F., 87, 88, 90 Bringuier, Jean-Claude, 87 Bruce, Robert V., 131, 154, 164, 166 Bruner, J., 53,154,171 Bucciarelli, Louis 1.,93,94,95,96,255,

339,345 Burnham, John, 219, 224 Burton, Thomas M., 59 Butler,George Lee, 196 Byrne, John A., 221

c Calmenson, Diane Wintroub, 242 Campbell, Donald, 61 Campbell, Joseph, 7, 8, 344 Cantor, Geoffrey, 28

Carlson, Bernard, 24, 121, 123, 138, 153,162,166,174,234,260,294, 295,344

Carson, Rachel, 200, 201, 210, 217 case-based reasoning, 69, 113,219 Chapman, Gary, 59 Cheng, Peter C., 66, 68, 69, 77 Chi, M.T.H., 130, 131 Chou, Dao-Lain, 290 Clancy, Michael, 292 Clement, John, 87, 104, 106 Close, Frank, 113, 114, 115 cognitive science, 175,295 cognitive style, 19,27,42, 85, 108, 125,

168,170,293,347 Colangelo, Nicholas, 112, 113, 172 Collins, H.M., 9, 58, 65, 81, 115, 124,

184 Commoner, Barry, 200, 201, 203, 337 computer simulations, 69, 288 confidence, 37, 60,235,304 Confirmation, 260 confirmation bias, 59, 78, 99, 123, 193,

225,227,228,260 conformity, 35,36 Cortese, Anthony D., 355 Covey, Steven R., 310 Crane, D., 110, 181 creativity, 45, 68, 69, 273, 286, 289,

316,324,330,339,340,342,343, 347,348

Crouch, Tom, 112, 169, 170 Csiksenmihaly, Mihaly, 250, 310, 321,

344

D

Darden School of Graduate Business Administration, 206, 218, 249, 262, 312

DAX-MED, 77,85 Dee-Lucas, Diana, 92 Desmond, Adrian, 107 Dessauer, John H., 174 Devonian controversy, 12,42,100,343 Diamond, Jared, 274

Index

384

disconfirmation, 74, 76, 79,81,83,84, 85,90,96,108,226,279,289

discovery, 1,5,7,8,9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,18,19,20,21,24,25,26,27,28, 29,30,31,36,38,39,40,42,43,44, 45,46,47,48,49,52,56,62,63,66, 67,68,69,71,72,73,74,78,79,82, 83,84,90,97,98,99,103,105,106, 108,110,113,114,115,116,117, 127, 166, 172, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180,181,184,190,194,197,221, 227,235,250,272,277,279,280, 285,286,289,290,292,305,310, 330,337,338,339,340,343,346, 347,350,351,354

Doherty, M.E., 79, 83, 280 Donovan, Arthur, 73 Dow Corning, 89, 211, 212, 213, 214,

215,216,217,218,219,220,221, 222,223,224,225,228,230,231, 234,235,246,273,309,311,323

Dunbar, Kevin, 70,83,84,85,86,89, 90,96,98,99,100,105,109,110, 163,168,169,171,287

Dyer, F.L., 245

E

Eddington, A.S., 73 Edge, D., 101 Ehrlich, Paul, 197, 200, 201 Einstein, Albert, 13, 14,26,45,49,53,

57,59,73,78,179,180,181,182, 189,341,342,344,345

environmental intelligence, 197, 198, 199,200,201,

203,204,206,207,208,210,211, 232,234,236,237,238,239,240, 241,242,243,245,247,248,250, 251,252,253,255,261,262,263, 264,265,266,267,268,272,273, 274,275,277,312,313,314,315, 317,318,320,321,322,323,325, 326,328,329,331,332,333,334, 335,337,338,339,345,347,348, 349,351

Ericsson, K. Anders, 43, 72,150

TRANSFORMING NATURE

~or, 78, 79,284,285 Etheric Force Controversy, 113 ethics

respect for persons, 178, 276 Eureka problem, 32 expert problem solving, 91 explanatory coherence, 66, 90, 97

F

frusification,58, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 99,100,279

Faust, D., 69, 91 Feigenbaum, 69 Feist, Gregory, 153 Ferguson, E., 277 Feynman,FUchard,11,20,58,59,60,

63,293 Finke, R.A., 172, 173 Flower, Linda, 108 frame, 15, 18,45,52,53,55,57,64,65,

66,87,88,101,103,109,121,122, 123,170,191,197,202,208,221, 231,233,234,236,247,251,255, 272,273,274,276,277,284,313, 314,321,332,345,347,348,355

Frameworks, 121 Freeman, R. Edward, 293 Friedel, Robert, 139, 148 Friedman, Milton, 207, 208, 326

G

Galison, Peter, 45 Gamson, William, 280 Gardner, M., 250, 293 Gell-Mann, Murray, 201 Generru Relativity, 73,345 Giere, Ron, 62, 247 Gilligan, Carol, 312 Gingerich, Owen, 45 Gioia, Dennis, 192, 193, 194,222,230,

312 Gleick, James, 11, 20 Goodfield, June, 346

385

Gooding, David, 21, 22, 24, 26, 29, 30, 39,66,109,150,290

Gorman, Michael, 6, 23, 30, 39,65,71, 73,74,78,81,98,99,107,108,116, 121,126,153,249,262,290,295

Gray, Elisha, 119, 120, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 149, 154, 157, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169,170,171,172,173,174,291, 292,293,298,303,311,341,346

Green, Alison, 74, 83, 96, 207, 242, 244, 245,265,351

Gross, Paul, 56, 57,60,61 Gruber, H., 25, 39, 45, 107, 109, 110 Guilford, 204, 248

H

Hanson, N.R, 235, 351 Haraway, Donna, 60 hard cores, 171, 261 Hardin, Garrett, 198 Hargrove, Eugene, 325 Harr, Jonathan, 9, 124, 184 Hawken, Paul, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208,

211,242,250,262,272,349,353 Henderson, Hazel, 250 heuristics, 5, 7, 9,17,18,25,66,67,68,

69,75,77,82,86,90,91,92,97, 106,109,110,123,124,125,171, 197,202,249,277,347

Hicks, Diana, 55 Hofstadter, Douglas R, 101 Holmes, Larry, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 108,

124, 143 Holton, G., 2, 4, 14,45,49,73,79, 104,

194 Holyoak, Keith J., 101, 102, 103, 104 Hounshell, David, 126 Hoyt, W.G., 45, 46, 48, 78 Hughes, Thomas, 117, 173 Hutchins, Edwin, 64, 65,175,176 hypothesis, 9, 12, 16, 17,24,25,27,32,

33,35,36,37,38,47,53,59,65,71, 72,73,74,75,76,77,79,80,81,82, 83,84,85,86,88,89,98,99,107,

I

108, 109, 110, 117, 163, 168, 169, 180,226,231,279,285,286,299, 336,345,347

incommensurability, 57 induction, 14,24,25,26,27, 161, 165,

225,302,311 Interface, Inc., 204, 206, 207, 208 Ippolito, Maria, 103 ~in,AJan,220,221

J

Jasanoff, Sheila, 235 Jenkins, Reese, 24, 121 Johnson-Laird, P., 65, 77, 82 Josephson, M., 116, 121 Judson, H.F., 260 justification, 15,52,72,106,172,173,

227,288

K

Kagiwada, Julia, 290, 294 Keith, William, 10,56,221,222 KEKADA, 16, 17, 18,30,66,67,68,

175 Keller, E.F., 56, 57, 220, 355 Kessler, David, 219, 225, 226 Kevles, Daniel J., 112 Kidder, Tracie, 343 Kingsbury, IE., 142 Klahr, D., 84, 85, 87, 89,90,96,97,

163, 168, 169, 171 Klayman, J., 75, 76, 77, 80 knowledge, 15, 17,21,24,26,49,51,

52,54,55,56,57,61,62,64,65,67, 69,86,88,90,91,96,97,101,104, 105, 107, 123, 125, 126, 127, 168, 174,175,179,183,185,192,194, 197,220,229,232,270,276,277,

Index

386

278,279,289,290,291,309,323, 329,336,337,341,345,350,351

Koestler, Arthur, 2, 3,4, 5, 7,13,54 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 312 Kolodner, Janet L., 113, 154, 289 Kossovsky, Nir, 89, 226, 227, 228 Kozhamthadam, Job, 2, 3,4, 5, 9 Krishnamurti, J., 355 Kuhn, T.S., 11, 26, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56,

57,58,62,63,87,88,89,90,96,97, 105,117,193,225,235

Kulkarni, D., 16, 17, 18, 67

L

Labinger, Jay A., 60, 61 Lakatos, I., 12,47, 171,261 Langley, P., 5, 67, 69, 169 Larkin, J.H., 91, 92, 96 Latour, B., 24, 55, 59, 62, 64, 97, 98,

178,179,261 Law, John, 2, 3,4,5,7,9,79, 112, 167,

197,242,249 Leach, Chuck, 231 Leary, David, 101 Leopold, Aldo, 202 Lewan, Todd, 210 Lewis, Tom, 119,235 Lovins, Amory, 208, 209, 327 Lovins, L. Hunter, 208, 209 Lynch, Michael, 44, 64

M

Mahoney,M., 77, 78 Mahowald, Misha, 148 Mangareva, 274 Martin, M.W., 68, 113 Matthewsm Michael R., 9, 92 Maxwell, James Clerk, 26, 65 McClintock, Barbara, 56, 57, 220, 350

355 ' McCloskey, M., 87 McDonough, William, 202, 203, 204,

205,206,208,211,232,234,236, 242,243,244,245,246,247,248,

TRANSFORMING NATURE

249,250,251,255,261,262,272, 273,277,312,313,314,316,317, 321,326,332,334,343,345,347, 349,353,355

~cKJbben,Bill,209 ~ehalik,~atthevv,237,249 mental model, 2, 4,5,8, 11, 12,21,25,

26,44,48,51,64,77,79,82,85,86, 87,88,89,90,92,96,97,98,101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 110, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 162, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 179,180,190,192,193,197,203, 209,242,243,244,248,249,261, 272,277,298,336

~erchant, Carolyn, 202, 234, 240 ~erton, Robert K., 54, 310 metaphor, 39, 101, 102, 103, 110, 123,

124,180,184,197,355 Meyer, Ralph 0., 102 ~ilgram, S., 191, 192,286 ~iller, A.L., 11 ~troff, 1.1., 47, 100 modules, active learning, 97,289,290,

294,295,325,326,331,332,333, 337,338,340

~oscovici, S., 116 ~yers, G., 61,108,117 ~ynatt,C.R.,83,84,280,284

N

Natural Step, The, 204, 205, 206, 207, 232,233,236,250,251,262,263, 277,321,333,347,355

Nersessian, Nancy J., 21, 26 normal science, 52, 87, 96,105 Norman, D.A., 56, 82,122,175 291 novice problem solving, 70, 71:81, 87,

o

88,89,91,92,96,97,98,101,106 107,124 '

operators, 68, 319, 353

387

p

Pacey, Arnold, 178 paradigms, 53, 295 Perkins, David N., 122, 123 Perrovv, Charles, 194 Peters, D.P., 214 Petroski, Henry, 277 phonautograph, 166, 170, 174 Piaget, Jean, 87, 88, 109 Pickering, Andrevv, 58 Pinch, Trevor 1.,55,57,73, 115, 184

235 ' Plucker, Jonathan, 304 Polynesian, 274 Popper, K.R., 3, 51, 52, 58, 72,73 106

225 ' ,

population, 107, 109, 187, 197, 198, 199,200,201,202,210,263,269 302,323 '

Portugal, Franklin H., 31 Potter, J., 55 publication, 20, 27, 72,108, 112, 115,

181,262,280 pursuit, 116, 186, 299, 350

Q

Qin, Simon, 7, 8, 67 Quinn, Daniel, 49, 201, 202

R

reflexivity, 65, 106 Reid, T.R., 117, 118, 119, 167 Reif, Frederick, 96 Relativity theories, 73, 345 replication, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82,

86,97,103,115,282 representations, 24, 27, 52, 68, 82, 92,

96,97,98,100,103,122,123,125, 127, 160, 161, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170,171,174,176

Rhodes, F.L., 105, 182, 194 Richards, Larry G., 290, 294, 331 Rohner Textil, 234, 238, 239, 240, 245,

248,249,272,314,315,316,318, 323,333

Root-Bernstein, Robert Scott, 49 Rosch, Eleanor, 122 Rosenhan, D.L., 60 Rosenwein, Robert, 107, 108, 116, 117,

280 Roth, Wolf-Michael, 278, 289 Rudwick, MJ.S., 31, 32,34,35,36,37,

99, 100 Ryle, Gilbert, 276, 277

s Sagoff, Mark, 199,274 Schaffer, Simon, 28, 45, 72 Schank, Roger c., 69, 193, 248, 249 Schauble, Leona, 113 Searle, John, 175, 176 second nature, 355 Seifert, Colleen M., 102 Sen, Amatya, 339 Sen, Arnratya, 198,246,316,339 sequences, 16,30,59,89, 178, 179, 183,

184,186,189,194,204,210,236, 274,275,277,278,281,324,349, 350

Sherif, Muzafer, 195 Shrager, J., 66, 67, 68, 69,84 Shrivastava, Paul, 236 silicone, 89, 211, 212, 213, 216, 217,

219,221,223,224,225,226,227, 228,229,230,232,233,234,236

Simon, Herbert A., 7, 8, 9,17,43,66, 68,72,87,102,108,203,247,317, 337,344

Simon, Julian, 203 simulation, 30, 38, 39, 40, 45, 65, 66,

67,68,69,70,74,81,84,90,96, 103,107,109,110,123,175,279, 280,282,283,284,285,286,287, 288,289,355

Index

388

skills, 64, 89, 90, 96, 163, 197,211,277, 278,292,303,305,309,330,338, 346

Skinner, B.F., 62, 108,349 Slezak, P., 67, 69 Snow, C.P., 28, 60, 61 Stephenson, Bruce, 2, 9, 12 Stokes, Donald E., 288 stubbornness, 12, 19,20,25,27,42,47,

108,170,346 sustainability, 203, 208, 211, 234, 237,

242,243,247,274,275,313,321, 326,329,333,350

T

Taubes, 89, 116 Taubes, Gary, 10, 89, 116, 226 Taylor, Lloyd, 119, 120, 126 technology

in developing countries, 12, 24, 64, 69,162,166,178,179,186,188, 194,197,198,199,200,201,212, 243,244,250,253,258,261,262, 265,266,267,268,270,271,272, 278,282,285,289,306,307,309, 322,323,324,325,326,327,328, 331,332,333,334,335,342,346, 347,349,351,352,353

techno science, 24 telegraph, 116, 119, 120, 125, 126, 127,

161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168,171,172,174,253,277,293, 298,306,311,341,343

Telephone, 119,290,316 Thagard, Paul, 38, 39, 41, 66, 90, 101,

102, 103, 104 Tweney, Ryan D., 21, 25, 27, 28, 76, 77,

79,83,87,103,109,123,280,290

v validity, 54,161,220 Vanderford, Martha L., 223 Vaughan, Diana, 190, 194, 231

TRANSFORMING NATURE

w Waltz, D.L., 30 Wason, Peter, 71, 73, 74,80,81 Weber, Robert, 122 Werhane, Patricia, 190, 191,218,249,

262 Westrum, R., 343 Wharton, Charles M., 77 Wiener, Norbert, 184,277,278

389

Williams, 164,262,263,265,266,267, 268,324,325

wisdom, 61,277,278,289,303,309, 313,323,335,336,354

Wise, Tad, 112 Woo\gar, Steve, 97, 98

z Zimbardo, Philip, 192, 286