A Case Study in the Applied Philosophy of Imaging: The Synaptic Vesicle Debate

Abstract

Thinkers from a variety of fields analyze the roles of imaging technologies in science and consider their implications for many issues, from our conception of selfhood to the authority of science. In what follows, I encourage scholars to develop an applied philosophy of imaging, that is, to collect these analyses of scientific imaging and to reflect on how they can be made useful for ongoing scientific work. As an example of this effort, I review concepts developed in Don Ihde's phenomenology of technology and refigure them for use in the analysis of scientific practice. These concepts are useful for drawing out the details of the interpretive frameworks scientists bring to laboratory images. Next, I apply these ideas to a contemporary debate in neurobiology over the interpretation of images of neurons which have been frozen at the moment of transmitter release. This reveals directions for further thought for the study of neurotransmission.

Photography in the boundaries of the visible. From Santiago Ramón y Cajal to Cecil Frank Powell

“…In any case, the fact is that our contemporary visual culture has become ubiquitous, and the visual representation of knowledge is based on the collective reliability of assigning meaning to a complex high-tech scientific environment (Allamel-Raffin, 2011;Greenberg, 2004;Rosenberger, 2009). Since the time of Galileo, and today more than ever, scientific activity should be understood as the production of knowledge that aims to make visible, and therefore familiar (Wise, 2006), all that remains unexplained in our perceptual environment, as well as everything beyond our limited sensory experience.…”

An experiential account of phantom vibration syndrome

“…To this list is sometimes added the notion of ''cyborg relations'' to refer to devices that are implanted into the human body (Verbeek, 2011). 9 In the postphenomenological school of thought, there is a bustling line of research examining the hermeneutic relations that scientists and medical professionals develop with laboratory imaging technologies (e.g., Ihde, 1998;Hasse, 2008;Rosenberger, 2011;Forss, 2012;Friis, 2012). 10 Ihde is careful to distinguish between the transparency that can occur in the flow of reading, as meaning is transparently apprehended from the words on the page, and the transparency that can occur as a technology is transparently embodied.…”

Artefacts that talk: Mediating technologies as multistable signs and tools

“…Even though structures limit the sets of variations, 'all technologies display ambiguous, multistable possibilities' (Ihde, 2002, p. 106). As noted by Robert Rosenberger (2011), the post-phenomenological concept of multistability has two interrelated meanings: technologies are stabilised and also have multiple existences when they cross time, space and bodily positions. Technological artefacts are not eternally flexible and negotiable, they attain stability (Ihde, 2012), at least for a time.…”