Abstract
An adequate view of observation and experiment should show experience in the making. In this chapter I want to recover an exploratory process that implicates nature as well as culture. This brings us a step closer to a theory of the language of experiment. First, two obvious difficulties must be faced. One arises from my thesis that language is linked to the world by means of activity which, by its very nature, can be rendered only partially (if at all) in language. The other is the complex nature of action itself: observation involves many activities: looking, checking, inferring, comparing, choosing, imaging, imagining. These operations incorporate more primary operations whose structure and relationships it is not possible to analyze here.1 I referred to this complex of interactions as interdependence in chapter 3. Here I unpack the interactive character of experimentation through maps of cognitive activity. My purpose is to locate agency in the experimental process, not to analyse some of the more basic cognitive operations. Though familiar enough to psychologists the notion of the interdependence of thought and action challenges a distinction still taken for granted in philosophical discussions of observation and experiment. In philosophy, observing and theorizing still inhabit different, disconnected worlds.
When I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two. My performance has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents.
Ryle
Creation of a thing, and creation plus full understanding of a correct idea of a thing, are very often parts of one and the same indivisible process and cannot be separated without bringing the process to a stop. The process itself is not defined by a well-defined programme …
Feyerabend
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Notes
When philosophers do acknowledge observers’ agency they typically treat visual perception as the only sort that matters. See for example, Brown (1987), p. 186. Kuhn’s use of psychological studies of visual perception (1962b), pp. 62–63 implies a more passive and disembodied view of observers than that implied by his emphasis on other aspects of perceptual practice elsewhere in his work. For the importance of practice in Kuhn see Schuster (1976) and Rouse (1987), chapter 2.
Andrew Harrison has addressed the intentionality of such actions in (1978) and “The process of intention” (1988, unpublished), a review of Baxendall (1985).
Faraday (1827).
Faraday (1821, 1821–22).
P. N. Johnson-Laird (1986) argues for a theory of inference based on modelling rather than argument structured by formal inference-rules. Inference involves a mental modelling of premises which may be tried by thought-experiments, which he defines as searches for counterexamples to tentative conclusions. The logical properties of conditionals derive from the interpretation such models provide, not from rule-guided manipulation. This account provides for the recursive revision of antecedent models whose importance I discuss in section 6.8.
For the adaptation of protocol analysis see Tweney and Hoffner (1987).
Ericsson and Simon (1984). For a comparison to Tweney’s “behaviour graphs” see Tweney (1989c).
What counts as ‘new’ is of course a matter of interpretation. The orientation of agency-lines makes the historian’s interpretative judgements explicit; it is not meant to place them beyond criticism.
Knorr-Cetina (1981), pp. 11 and ff. discusses analogous examples of the contingency of decisions which she calls “selections”.
For the accumulation of schémas see Tweney (1985).
Carlson and Gorman show how Edison embarked on ‘drag-hunts’ for possibly-useful materials (1990). Scientists typically engage in searches for technological and other precedents for processes they want to produce — see section 8.2.
Barlow (1924c), p. 12.
Hacking (1983), p. 220 and ff.
On 14 March Barlow wrote that “I have repeated all your very interesting rotating experiments, and have added one very curious one, which although it throws no new light on the subject is very interesting in the exhibition”; Williams et al., eds. (1971), vol. 1, pp. 132–33.
For the importance of ‘accumulating’ small effects into more sensible ones see Gooding (1985c) and Tweney (1985).
When he discovered induction in 1831 Faraday knew that one of his main tasks was to explain phenomena exhibited by Arago’s wheel in terms of it: see Faraday to R. Phillips, 29 November 1831, in Williams et al, eds., (1971), pp. 209–12, esp. p. 211.
See, for example, his brief instructions in a letter to G. de la Rive, 16 November 1821, in Williams et al., eds., (1971), pp. 128–29, and Faraday (1822a, 1822b).
Faraday (1821).
Tweney (1985).
See Carlson and Gorman (1990).
See the letter cited in note 18.
See Barlow (1824a, 1824b).
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Gooding, D. (1990). Representing experimentation. In: Experiment and the Making of Meaning. Science and Philosophy, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0707-2_6
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