Transforming Nature, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1998 Ethics, Invention and Discovery

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.

1 Discovery.- 2 Understanding Discovery.- 3 Creating A New World.- 4 Ethics, Invention And Discovery.- 5 Teaching Ethics, Discovery and Invention.

This book treats discovery and invention as processes of knowledge transformation. This process of transformation also covers the way in which scientists persuade and inventors create markets. New discoveries and technologies are not simply the result of organizational agendas and market forces, they are created by human beings who transform both nature and society. One of the goals of this book is to take technological and scientific thinking out of the realm of mystery and give a wider audience the tools to begin to comprehend it. An additional goal is to show how ethics can be used to make certain inventions and discoveries transform the world in a beneficial way. New technologies must be environmentally sustainable and socially just. Chapter 1 begins with analysis of several cases of d