Transforming Nature : Ethics, Invention and Discovery PDF

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.