1. From embodiment to cognitive extension
1.7 Visually constituted knowledge
When we investigate examples of visually constituted knowledge we discover that images have become indispensable to our own ability to understand the world and sciences we study. As a form of visualisation, drawing plays an important role in understanding processes, structures, climate models, artificial life and myriad other topics of
contemporary research. In his editorial comment and overview of some essays on the main
modes in which images of natural objects and processes were made in the course of the history of science, Wise (2006: 75) concludes that because of a tradition of thinking dichotomously, visualisation was never understood adequately: the dichotomies
misleadingly suggested that it was important for art, but not for science; for museums, but not for laboratories; for geometry, but not for algebra.
Latour (1990: 4) recognises and explores the significant role of the image and visualisation on paper in his attempt to illuminate “how many cognitive abilities may be, not only facilitated, but thoroughly explained by them”. Latour suggests that a better understanding of visualisation could help us better understand our modern scientific culture – where it came from, and what is distinctive about it.
One take on the impact of visual representation is that of the art historian William Ivins (1973; cited in Latour, 1990: 7), according to whom what was rationalised in ‘the scientific revolution’ was not the mind, not the eye, not philosophy even, but sight. Ivins regards perspective as an essential determinant of science and technology because it creates
“optical consistency” which allows the viewer “to move through space with, so to speak, a return ticket” (Latour, 1990: 8). As is the case with maps, such “optical consistency”
creates new possibilities of movement, where “you can go out of your way and come back with all the places you passed… written in the same homogenous language … that allows you to change scale, to make them presentable and to combine them at will” (Latour, 1990:
7). The contrivances of perspective, projection, map, logbook, etc. shift attention from the other senses to vision; absent things and disparate places are brought together into one dimension and one conversation.
Edgerton’s (cited in Latour, 1990: 7-8) analysis of the use of Italian perspective in printed pictures draws attention to how drawings bring together things of nature and things of fiction when the same perspective that is used to render nature, is used to depict religious or mythological themes or utopias. All these disparate things become subjected to the same
“optical consistency”. Impossible palaces can be drawn realistically and possible objects are drawn as if they were utopian ones, real things can be drawn in separated fragments, or in exploded views, and can be added to the same page at different scales, angles and
perspectives. For Latour this optical (1990: 8) consistency confirms (as was suggested by Ferguson, 1977) that the “mind” has at last “an eye”.
The optical consistency allows an assortment of things of possibly diverse provenance to be transformed into diagrams and numbers, to be measured and migrated through different scales (Latour, 1990: 15). These inscriptions can be reproduced and distributed cheaply to gather different times and places in another, single, time and place. All these qualities enable multiple images, diverse in origin and scale, to be reshuffled and recombined, superimposed and brought together in the same space. Only once this has been done, can connections be made in the mind, as with metaphor (Latour, 1990: 19).
An important benefit of the inscription is that it can be made part of a written text and brings with it all there is to see that it writes about. Because inscriptions are two dimensional, they can easily be combined with geometry, and allow their users to work on paper with rulers and numbers, in the process simultaneously manipulating three-dimensional objects “out there” (Latour, 1990: 19). Geology and economics can be brought into the same space through good documentation. “Most of what we call ‘structure’, ‘pattern’, ‘theory’ and
‘abstraction’ are consequences of these superimpositions” (Latour 1990: 19). Wise (2006:
76) similarly notes how maps pass from description and classification in the domain of natural history to causal analysis in the domain of natural philosophy5: “They
simultaneously constitute new things and invoke explanations of them”. The way in which the visual representations transform knowledge from the empirical to the theoretical demonstrates not only Heidegger’s view that handling precedes theoretical knowing, but also how drawing as technology brings about “revealing”.
Latour (1990: 21) observes that just as inscriptions manipulate other “things”, inscriptions are manipulated even further, with as upshot that a handful of elements can ultimately manipulate all the other things on an immense scale. An example of this relates to Galileo:
a simple modification in the geometry he used allowed him to link many different
problems, something that those working before him could not “visually accommodate”, as the diverse shapes they were working on did not suggest any interconnection between them (Latour 1990: 21). According to Drake (Latour, 1990: 21) Galileo’s connection was so effective because he created a geometrical medium which combined geometry and physics in a material form. Galileo’s diagram held synoptically three domains whereas that of his predecessors held only one (Latour 1990: 21). Cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon (Latour, 1990: 21) notes that experts use similar strategies in their use of diagrams so that they can establish quick links between many unrelated problems. Simon (1982: 168) notes
that although both experts and novices draw diagrams to help them in their thinking, a striking feature of the expert is his or her “ability to represent a problem (often graphically) in such a way that the relation between the initial and final conditions is immediately evident”.
While Latour considers the larger implications of these smaller operations and
manipulations, Simon’s (1982:166) insight regarding the nature of expert skills suggests that these inscriptions are important because they allow “problem solution by recognition … The expert looks at an equation, notices a familiar feature that immediately activates a production, obtains a new equation, notices a third feature, which fires a final production and the equation is solved. Three acts of recognition, are required, each of which is based on stored memories, and can be achieved almost without conscious attention” (Simon, 1982: 166). The expert is thus depicted as using the external inscription in a tightly bound cognitive process. The external inscription shapes and transforms cognitive capacities by providing a different kind of functionality to internal vehicles.
Such operations also support the cognitive integrationist view that the manipulation of external vehicles is a prerequisite for higher cognition and that embodied cognition is a precondition for these manipulative abilities (Menary, 2010b: 232). The cognitive
integrationist view is a branch of the extended mind thesis, which highlights the cognitive role that external vehicles can play. Menary (2010b: 229) suggests that one way to better understand the nature of the integration between elements of a process such as the one described above “is to think of hybrid cognitive processes as enacted skills or capacities for manipulating the environment”. However he warns that “we should not forget that the embodied cognizer is embedded in a physical and social environment, and that
environment contains norms which determine the content of environmental vehicles and how we manipulate them” (2010: 229).