Transforming Nature Ethics, Invention and Discovery

• Main Author: Gorman, Michael E
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: Springer US 1998
• Subjects: Industrial organization; Industrial management; Management; Entrepreneurship; Business; HD28; White whale
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2078/ebook:96556; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5657-2

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.