Abstract
Scientific theories are supposed to have empirical credentials as well as logical ones. The idea that observation and experiment provide an empirical base for theories is central to all theories of scientific method. Hypo-thetico deductivist methodology, and fallibilism in particular, hold that theory comes first: phenomena cannot raise problems of their own because no item of information in the so-called empirical base has significance apart from the theory that picks it out. When experimentation is readily identified with measuring (as we saw in chapter 7) it is easy to treat it as just the “continuation of theory by other means”, as van Fraasen does.1 In The Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper grudgingly recognized the empirical base, likening it to the muddy bottom of a swamp into which theoreticians drive piles down through a platform, until “they are satisfied that they are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being”.2
Theory dominates the experimental work from its initial planning up to the finishing touches in the laboratory.
Popper
Theorists have been so preoccupied with the task of investigating the nature, the source and the credentials of the theories that we adopt that they have for the most part ignored the question what it is for someone to know how to perform tasks.
Ryle
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Notes
See Hacking (1983), chapters 12 and 13.
On Cavendish physics see Falconer (1989), and on the metamorphosis of cloud-chamber physics into particle physics, Galison and Assmus (1989).
Helmholtz’ advice was never taken; see Swenson (1972).
See Latour and Woolgar (1979).
On gravity waves see Collins (1985), chapter 4, for memory-transfer in planaria see Travis (1987), and for electricity and life, Secord (1989).
See Collins (1974) and (1985), chapter 3.
Dicovery programs usually do not specify the world in the chaotic and complex form that natural scientists actually encounter it: like students taught from textbooks, programs such as BACON work with data in a refined form.
The idea of default assumptions is borrowed from computing: default values may be ignored until a change of goal or working conditions requires re-evaluation.
As science and technology impact upon the environment and as instrumentation becomes more sensitive, the temporal dimension becomes increasingly important. There are even attempts to get ‘outside’ it: consider, for example, the use of lead recovered from sunken pre-war submarine batteries in calibrating radiation detectors.
See Gooding (1985a).
Morpurgo’s account is analysed in detail in a manuscript by Andy Pickering, “Making Sense of Science”. A less detailed treatment is Pickering (1989).
For ‘golden events’ see Galison (1987).
For the context see Pickering (1981, 1984).
See Pinch (1985b) and Nickles (1989).
See Collins (1985), chapter 4, and below, section 8.4.
Millikan’s experiments and Ehrenhaft’s criticisms are discussed by Holton (1978). Millikan’s use of his data is analyzed further in Franklin (1986), chapter 5.
Joseph Henry, visiting London in 1837, described Faraday’s ability to use whatever came to hand as a “rapid and happy invention of expedients for the production of a result. Articles of the most common kind are used with success to produce the most wonderful results”, in Reingold et al., eds, (1979), vol. 3, pp. 318–19.
Quoted in Pickering (1989), p. 287.
Values of-1/3 e and + 2/3 e are phenomenologically equivalent.
The existence of quarks remains undecided. Work using supercooled niobium spheres began at Stanford in the late 1960s. W. Fairbanks claims to have captured quarks with them while Morpurgo concluded that quarks do not exist. Some theoreticians have modified their opinions — the late R. P. Feynman doubted their existence but remarked that because of Fairbank’s work he would raise the odds to 50:50.
Quine wrote that “we are so overwhelmingly impressed by the initial phase of our education that we continue to think of language generally as a secondary or superimposed apparatus for talking about real things” and we therefore “tend not to appreciate that most of the things, and most of the supposed traints of the so-called world, are learned through language and believed in by a projection of language”, Quine (1957), p. 5, cp. Quine (1960), p. 270 ff. and (1974), pp. 38–39.
Koyré (1968), p. 75 ff.
Koyré(1965), p. 43.
Koyré (1968), p. 88.
Brown (1986), p. 1, takes Koyré’s assertions at face value, as evidence for a priori science. The mystique about thought experimentation in science has encouraged uncritical use of it in other areas of philosophy: in Real People, Wilkes criticizes the use of thought-experiment in the philosophy of mind (Wilkes, 1988).
As Ryle saw, what is important is the manner or quality of the process, not the antecedents (1949), p. 32. For Boyle and virtual witnessing see Shapin (1984) and Shapin and Schaffer (1985).
See Bloor (1983), p. 122 ff.
For transparency in experiment see Gooding (1985a), pp. 131–32, Schaffer (1989), p. 91 ff., Bennett (1989), p. 113.
Scriven notes this problem in discussing non-deductive alternatives to the theory-observation interface, in Scriven (1961), p. 219.
Kuhn (1962a), reprinted in Kuhn (1977), at p. 240.
Ibid., p. 248 ff.
Ibid., pp. 254. Piaget claimed that operations on the material environment yield concrete operational thought which is a precondition for reflective operational thought. This in turn provides the material from which general principles such as superposition, causality and symmetry are derived. Formal, operational or logical thought involves a further asssimilation and transformation of this intermediate, operational stage.
On the creative use of uncertainty in science and science education, see Gooding (1989c), esp. pp. 134–36.
This drew on important modifications to Aristotle’s conception (such as a distinction between total velocity of motion and its intensity at each point of the path), already made during the 14th centyury (Kuhn (1962a), p. 246 ff.).
The requirement of similarity means that experimenters can continue to use concepts in familiar ways, ensuring a verbal context or framework in which actual impracticability is represented as paradox.
Kuhn (1962a), p. 253.
For other examples see Galison (1987) and Goodfield (1981).
For example, Rouse (1987), p. 23, makes just this assumption.
See Drake (1978), Shapin and Schaffer (1985), Gruber (1974) and the studies in Gooding, Pinch and Schaffer, eds. (1989).
In what follows I take issue with the anti-realism implied in works such as Latour and Woolgar (1979), Knorr-Cetina (1981), Collins (1984) and Pickering (1984).
See Pickering (1987), Barnes (1982), Bloor (1983).
Collins (1985), p. 2.
Ibid., p. 84.
See Pinch (1985a).
Franklin (1986), chapter 4.
Pinch (1981, 1985a, 1986) and Pera (1988), p. 274.
Thus Nickles argues that philosophies of science should be realizeable, that is, naturalistic, (1989), p. 313–25.
This is argued in Rouse (1987).
For science and technology see Latour (1987) and Mackenzie (1989).
Radder (1988), pp. 70–72.
Radder cites an ethnomethodological study by Lynch, Livingstone and Garfinkel in which the investigator becomes an ammanuensis for a handicapped student of quantitative chemical analysis: head and hands therefore interact only through what can be verbalizead or cast as declarative knolwedge.
See Polanyi (1958) and Kuhn (1962a).
Winch (1958), as quoted in section 3.4.
I thank Professor Peter Alexander for drawing my attention to the reactive role of the world in Johnson’s argument.
An example of causal realism that locates agency in the natural world is Harré and Madden (1975).
See Kuhn (1962a), discussed in section 8.3.
In Heelan’s terms, science and technology not only make new perception possible but also make it appear to be direct, (1988), p. 264 ff. As a skill, scientific observation is therefore like literacy.
Putnam (1978), pp. 18–20.
This is a metaphysical explanation rather than a scientific one, as Hesse points out (1980), pp. 153–54.
For a critique of novel prediction see Worrall (1989) and Cantor (1989).
For the differentiation of technological from scientific activity see Gooding (1985c).
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Gooding, D. (1990). The experimenter’s redress. In: Experiment and the Making of Meaning. Science and Philosophy, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0707-2_8
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