Abstract
The twin perils of tedium and incomprehensibility to which Davy alludes are partly responsible for the neglect of phenomena-creating activity. If philosophers want to address meaning and representation in a realistic way, the details cannot be avoided. This is why I have described how observers construct representations, articulating interpretative possibilities I call construals. These develop against the background of the regularities that discoverers learn to produce. Construals enter discourse as the practical basis for realizing and communicating novel experience. Until the wider significance of novel information has been sketched out, construals of it retain the provisional and flexible character of possibility: they may be compatible with several theories or with none. They are practical facts, not theoretical facts. In the language of recent studies of contemporary scientific practice, they are highly modalized or context-dependent and have a low degree of externality.1
To describe more minutely all the precautions observed [in these experiments] would be tedious to those persons who are accustomed to experiments with the voltaic apparatus, and unintelligible to others, and, after all, in researches of this nature, it is impossible to gain more than approximations to true results…
Humphry Davy
One role of experiment is so neglected that we lack a name for it. I call it the creation of phenomena.
Hacking
For the relationship between confidence in the reality of phenomena and their context-dependence or modality see Latour and Woolgar (1979). For an analogous treatment of the dependence of phenomena on theory as well as practices, see Pinch’s discussion of the externality of observation reports in Pinch (1985b).
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Notes
See Ryle (1949), pp. 27–35.
Brande (1820), Faraday (1821–22).
Faraday (1821, 1822a, 1822b).
For Herschel’s 1845–46 reconstruction of his 1823 experiment see Gooding (1985b) and (1989c). For other examples of the retrospective clarification of experiment see Collins (1985), p. 155 and Schaffer (1989).
Martin (1932–36). Faraday’s early notebooks predate and are physically distinct from the laboratory diary he began (twice) in 1831 with numbered paragraphs and which he bound as folio volumes. As the September 1821 notes are included in the first volume of Martin’s transcription I shall refer to them as the Diary.
It will become clear below that my interpretation draws upon practical experience gained through repetition of these sequences of experimentation. Some details are described in Gooding (1989c) and in the project report cited earlier by Jane E. Leigh and Susan Perrett, “A reproduction of Michael Faraday’s experiments on electromagnetism”, Physics B. Sc. Stage 3 Project Reports, Bristol University, May 1985, unpublished.
Faraday (1821). As to his ‘more minute’ examination, we were able to reproduce effects resembling those he records, but only after manipulating the wire in ways he does not mention, determining that the needle’s poles are not at its extremities, and identifying an error in the diagrammes of para. 2 and then revising our first interpretation of it.
Verbal description emerged from a more concrete, practical fluency with objects and forces. For a general discussion of non-verbal articulation see Polanyi (1964), especially chapter 5 and Harrison (1978).
I thank Trevor Pinch for suggesting the term “context-bound actions” for this sort of activity. Bloor (following Wittgenstein) argues that even logical contradiction has a practical basis in the impracticability of doing certain things (1983, p. 122), but here the practice is no longer tied to a particular context of introduction.
Jim Secord pointed out to me that including such information about making observations is a feature that the Diary has in common with many geological field notebooks of the nineteenth century. Field geologists needed good representations of natural formations which they could treat as equivalent to nature itself; this equivalence was grounded in observational practices.
For examples of sociological studies of controversy see Collins, ed. (1981c) and Pinch (1981, 1986) and Pickering (1981b).
See Giere (1989).
See Latour (1987), on black boxing.
Realists use an analogous metaphor as an exemplary case of the correspondence of theories to things. This is the idea that terms in successful theories refer because they correspond to things in the world in just the way that sybols on a map correspond to the entities they represent. It seems obvious that the world was there, waiting to be mapped. Yet the terrain has to be explored, decisions made about what to record and map, and so on. I criticize this notion of correspondence below, in chapter 7.
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Gooding, D. (1990). Making circular motion. In: Experiment and the Making of Meaning. Science and Philosophy, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0707-2_5
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