Bibliographic record
Abstract
What we call “ descriptions ” are instruments for particular uses/applications. Think of a machine-drawing, a cross-section, an elevation with measures, that an engineer has before him. Thinking of a description as a word-picture of the facts has something misleading about it: One tends to think only of pictures, as they hang on our walls; they appear simply to portray how a thing looks like, what it is like. (Wittgenstein, 1953/1997, p. 99, my translation) Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to articulate a perspective on the nature of representation in engineering that has been developed on the basis of ethnographic and sociological studies across science and technology. It is a sociocultural and cultural-historical perspective that has some decided advantages over the “cognitive approach” for the teaching of engineering, an approach that has an exclusive focus on what goes on in the mind and hidden from view. Consistent with the social-psychological diction that all higher cognitive functions are societal relations that come to shape those who participate in them (Vygotsky, 1989), this chapter focuses on the social dimensions of representations because these are the origin of anything that we may attribute to the mind. But because these social dimensions are what we subsequently attribute to mind, the perspective developed here also is a cognitive one. However, rather than speculating about hidden mental processes, this approach allows us to study psychological functions in the very public arena where they originate. We may express this fundamental fact in the following aphorism: engineering representations are in the mind because they are integral to the societal relations engineers entertain . Among those who study representations-in-use, the term “inscription” tends to be employed. Inscriptions include diagrams, photographs, formulas, and tables, that is, anything other than language that features in scientific research and communication. In this chapter, I move from the term representation to inscription , because the latter allows us to eschew the frequent confusion between “internal” and “external” representations. I present some of the advantages for engineering education that come with this way of thinking about representational engineering knowledge.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".