Abstract
It is inevitable that language has, as Ian Hacking put it, mattered to philosophy.1 It is not inevitable that practices — especially extra-linguistic practices — have mattered so little. Philosophy has not yet addressed an issue that is central to any theory of the language of observation and therefore, to any theory of science: how do observers ascend from the world to talk, thought and argument about that world? The importance of practice is sometimes noticed by philosophers and historians of science.2 The more historically minded have persued it into the experimental coal-face where new experience is mined.3 One reason for neglect of observational practice is that scientists’ own accounts of experimental work support the disembodied view that philosophers tacitly endorse. Human agency is written out of these accounts; at best it appears in an appropriately deliberative and methodical role. This would seem to justify the philosophical practice of rendering observation in the passive form ‘X was observed in order to …’, as if observers have eyes, minds and theories but never hands in the matter. A second reason is that concepts and theories are found in texts: they are easy to write and talk about. The literary view of scientific concepts suits the linguistic turn in philosophy and conforms to wider cultural assumptions about the priority of head over hands. Yet many scientists spend most of their time solving problems of a different order, in a manner that is procedural and involves manipulations in the material world as well as the world of concepts.
‘Now he’s seeing it like this’, ‘now like that’ would only be said of someone capable of making certain applications of the figure quite freely.
The substratum of this experience is the mastery of a technique.
Wittgenstein
Logic itself has now entered a stage where ‘anthropological’ considerations (finitism) play an important role. Altogether the scientific enterprise seems to be much closer to the arts than older logicians and philosophers of science (myself among them) once thought …
Feyerabend
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Giere (1988), pp. 109–10.
Sachs (1986), ch. 3.
Gregory (1986), pp. 28–30.
Arber (1985) describes thought processes as reticular, that is, convoluted and folded (like the brain).
Giere [1989] levels this criticism at the examples used by Thagard (1988).
See R. Tweney, “Five questions for computationalists”, forthcoming in Schrager, J. and Langley, P, Computational models of discovery and theory formation, [in press], and R. Fjelland, “Can computers make scientific discoveries: A critique of Langley, Simon, Bradshaw and Zytkow: Scientific Discovery”, read to the 14th Conference on the Philosophy of Science, Inter-University Centre for Postgraduate Studies, April 1989. For a critique of philosophies of discovery, see Nickles (1985, 1988).
Nickles (1988), p. 34.
Holmes (1987).
Franklin (1986), 140–162.
Medawar (1963) and (1969), p. 169.
Naylor (1989), p. 126.
Postscript to Kuhn (1970), p. 189. Fleck’s discussion of “vademecum” science addresses the function of exemplary practices, Fleck (1979).
For a discussion of verbalization in relation to protocol analysis see Tweney (1989a, 1989b) and Tweney and Hoffner (1987).
See Collins (1985), pp. 100–106 on calibration and Laverdière (1989) on carbon dating.
Perez-Ramos, A. (1989).
Hesse (1973).
Latour and Woolgar (1979) and Collins (1981b) favour idealist explanations. Knorr-Cetina argues that the ethologists’ emphasis on how objects are produced favours a materialist explanation (1983), p. 119.
One of the most thorough surveys of contemporary philosophy of science makes only a couple of references to experiment (other than to theory-testing). Neither is about experiment: the first deals with theories of data and experimental design (which form the base of Patrick Suppes’ hierarchy of theories); the second discusses Feyerabend’s pragmatic theory of observation sentences: Suppe (1974), pp. 106–8, 178–9. See also van Fraasen (1980), chapter 4.
For examples of learning how to see with bubble chambers see Galison (1985) and Galison and Asmuss (1989).
R. Tweney, On doing Science, MS in preparation.
Hacking (1983); on realizing see also Radder (1988).
Tweney has mapped Faraday’s experiments on electromagnetic induction: Tweney (1989b, c).
See Shapin (1988) and Shapin and Schaffer (1985).
See Latour (1983).
Gooding (1990a).
See Swenson (1972) on the aether-drift experiments and Worrall (1989) on Poisson’s white-spot prediction.
Lakatos (1980b), v. 2, p. 211.
Hacking (1983), p. 249–54.
See Hofmann (1987b) and Holmes (1987).
Exceptions are Hesse (1988) and Bloor (1983).
Rudwick (1985).
Porter (1977).
Knorr-Cetina (1981), Lynch (1985b), Latour and Woolgar (1979).
See Laudan, R. (1988).
See R. Tweney, “The use of external memory in science”, unpublished Ms.
Gruber (1985).
Ibid., p. 180.
On the sensorium as mirror see Hacking (1976) and Rorty (1979); on the craft basis of constructing representations that mirror the world see Shapin and Schaffer (1985), chapter 1, esp. p. 17 ff.
Goodman (1973), p. 94 and ff.
Influential discussions of introducing novices to descriptive language are Quine (1960), pp. 26–57, (1974), p. 33 ff., and Wittgenstein (1953), pp. 1e-21e.
See Feyerabend (1965) and Hacking (1983), ch. 5. The problem of incommensurability of meaning diverted attention from the procedural and extra-linguistic aspects of scientific practice which features in Kuhn’s earlier work (Kuhn, 1961, 1962a); see Schuster (1979).
Putnam (1973), p. 203. This view is an explicitly social one. In Putnam (1975), he argues that this establishes the stereotypical part of the meaning of terms; see also Putnam (1978), p. 115–6.
Quine (1969), p. 89.
Nersessian (1984).
Nickles (1989) and Hesse (1980) argue the compatibility of philosophical and naturalistic accounts of science; both maintain that philosophical and historical analyses are distinct practices (see Nickles, on realizability requirements (1989), p. 317 ff. and Hesse (1980), p. 163).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gooding, D. (1990). The procedural turn. In: Experiment and the Making of Meaning. Science and Philosophy, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0707-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0707-2_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-3253-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-0707-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive