In The Gutenberg Galaxy, a revisionist tour de force that gave us the axiom “the medium is the message”, Marshall McLuhan argued that moveable type was the prime culprit in shaping a culture enslaved by the tyranny of the visual. Marks on the printed page possessed a visual logic, he explained, in being not just indelible, but replicable, legible, homogeneous. Rising above the contingencies and subjectivities associated with perspective, that is, point of view, they insist that ocular information is paramount, or that seeing is believing.
It’s a powerful argument. And it appears, at first blush, to apply equally to the development of scientific knowledge, which, simply put, tests its claims to veracity against the inarguable evidence
