Hadden on the Mechanical-Mechanist World View--论文代写范文精选

海登认为社会关系涉及商业，为如何理解提供了一个类比，正如早期的现代欧洲经济，大宗商品的属性可以抽象为交换价值,所有物理对象的属性可以被忽略。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Abstract
Despite the antagonism that some sociologists display toward psychology, many sociological explanations of scientific developments can usefully be supplemented by cognitive explanations. As an illustration, consider the sociological account of some essential features of early modern mechanistic thought given by Richard Hadden. His abstract provides a summary (Hadden 1988, p. 255):
A sociological explanation is offered for certain features of the mathematical-mechanistic world view. Relations of commodity production and exchange are seen as providing an analogy of 'abstraction' for such a world view. The mediation between social relations and content of science is provided by commercial reckoners who contributed a new meaning to ancient mathematical concepts and thus paved the way for the notion that all sensually intuitable events are explicable in terms of the motion of qualitatively similar bodies.
The explanation target here is the emergence in the fifteenth and sixteenth century of the view that nature can be understood mechanically and mathematically.
Hadden argues that social relations involving commercial arithmetic provided an analogy for how nature could be understood. "The crux of my argument is that a view of the conditions of the period gets projected onto all of nature and eventually human society as well." (Hadden 1988, p. 257.) Just as in the early modern European economy the sensible properties of commodities such as bread and shoes could be abstracted into exchange values, so the sensible properties of all physical objects could be ignored in favor of their mechanical and mathematical properties. Hadden provides evidence that such developments as the replacement of ancient concepts of number were influenced by commercial concerns. For example, Simon Stevin, who was among the first to introduce the notion of decimal fractions, was very much concerned with practical mathematical problems.

Without evaluating the plausibility of Hadden's Marxian account, we can readily see that it presupposes cognitive processes. His explanation of the emergence of new mathematical ideas assumes that "social relations provided analogies and metaphors which were refined technically by thinkers whose concerns involved, at first, the reckoning up of calculable social relations." (Hadden 1988, p. 271). Thinkers such as Stevin, Hadden conjectures, used commercial social relations as analogs to develop ideas about mathematics and science. Although Hadden's documentation of Stevin's use of analogy is sparse, later uses of social analogies in science have been well established. Darwin, for example, came up with the idea for natural selection by reading Malthus on political economy (Darwin 1958). It has also been conjectured that Lavoisier's innovative concern with conservation of matter may have been influenced by his tax farmer's familiarity with the balance sheet.

Hadden says nothing about how analogical thinking actually works, but this is where cognitive science has much to offer, since the topic has been thoroughly investigated over the past decade using psychological experiments and computational models. The process most relevant to Hadden's account is analogical mapping, in which some of the content of a source analog is transferred to a target analog. In Hadden's case study, the target analog involves the mathematics and physics of objects, and the antecedently understood source analog involves commercial and social objects. According to the theory of mapping of Holyoak and Thagard (1989), people's cognitive processes in mapping from one domain to the other requires simultaneous satisfaction of semantic, structural, and pragmatic constraints. This is not the place to go into detail on cognitive theories of analogical thinking. The key point is that such theories exist, and in fact are presupposed by sociological explanations such as Hadden's that see analogy as the mediating factor between social relations and the development of science. Cognitive theories of analogy are not alternatives to Hadden's account: the social and economic relations he discusses are an important, ineliminable part of the story. Rather, cognitive explanations supplement the social ones by describing the mental processes of the thinkers who made the transition to new ideas.

Latour and Woolgar (1986) pursue their extreme anticognitive stance by speaking only of how scientists use "inscriptions" to produce other inscriptions, as if all that mattered to the process of scientific development were the social relations of scientists and the paper they shuffle around. They clearly miss an important part of what is going on when the cognitive representations and processes of scientists enable them to read what has been written, develop and test new hypotheses, and produce new writings. Like Hadden, Latour and Woolgar can only gain from cognitive models that provide a crucial supplement to their social accounts of what laboratory scientists are doing. As Bloor (1991, p. 168) pointed out in the second edition of one of the books that spawned the sociology of scientific knowledge, sociologists would be "foolish" to deny the need for a background theory about individual cognitive processes.（essay代写)

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