Table Of ContentEXPERIMENT AND THE MAKING OF MEANING
Science and Philosophy
VOLUME 5
Series Editor
Nancy 1. Nersessian, Program in History of Science. Princeton University
Editorial Advisory Board
Joseph Agassi, Department of Philosophy. York University and Tel Aviv University
Geoffrey Cantor, Department of Philosophy. University ofL eeds.
Nancy Cartwright, Department of Philosophy. Stanford University
James T. Cushing, Department of Physics. Notre Dame University
Lindley Darden, Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science.
University of Maryland
Max Dresden, Institute for Theoretical Physics. SUNY Stony Brook
Allan Franklin, Department of Physics. University of Colorado. Boulder
Marjorie Grene, Department ofP hilosophy. University of California. Davis
Adolph GrUnbaum, Department of Philosophy. University of Pittsburgh
Richard Lewontin, Museum of Comparative Zoology. Harvard University
Thomas Nickles, Department of Philosophy. University ofN evada. Reno
Dudley Shapere, Department ofP hilosophy. Wake Forest University
This series has been established as a forum for contemporary analysis of philosophical
problems which arise in connection with the construction of theories in the physical
and the biological sciences. Contributions will not place particular emphasis on any
one school of philosophical thought. However, they will reflect the belief that the
philosophy of science must be firmly rooted in an examination of actual scientific
practice. Thus, the volumes in this series will include or depend significantly upon an
analysis of the history of science. recent or past. The Editors welcome contributions
from scientists as well as from philosophers and historians of science.
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
DAVID GOODING
University of Bath, Eng/and
EXPERIMENT AND
THE MAKING OF MEANING
Human Agency in Scientific Observation
and Experiment
Kluwer Academic Publishers
Dordrecht / Boston / London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goodtng, David, 1947-
Experiment and the maktng of meaning: human agency tn scientiftc
observation and expertment I Davtd Gooding.
p. cm. -- <Science and phtlosophy ; 5)
Inc 1u des bib 1 i ograph t ca 1 references.
1. Sctence--Expertments--Phi losophy. 2. SCience--Experiments-
-Technique. 3. Sctence--Philosophy. I. Tttle. II. Series.
0182.3.G69 1990
507.2--dc20 90-32543
CIP
ISBN-13: 978-0-7923-3253-4 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-0707-2
DOl: 10.1007/ 978-94-009-0707-2
Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers,
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For Kate and Joanna
Table of Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xvii
Part 1: Agency in Observation and Experiment
Chapter 1: The Procedural Turn
1.1 Agency in observation and experiment 3
1.2 Discovery, reconstruction and justification 4
1.3 The procedural turn 8
1.4 Representing agency 14
1.5 Epistemological individualism 19
1.6 The making of meaning 24
Chapter 2: Action and Interpretation
2.1 Making sense of new experience 29
2.2 The significance of observational anomaly 33
2.3 Making phenomena visible: Biot and Davy 36
2.4 Constructing self-evidence: Biot, Davy, Ampere 41
2.5 Observation and controversy 46
2.6 Davy's electromagnetic practice 47
2.7 How experiments make hypotheses meaningful 52
2.8 Action and interpretation 59
2.9 Spatio-temporal order: construals and frameworks 62
2.10 Disseminating order 66
Chapter 3: Making Perception Possible
3.1 Intentionality and observation 71
3.2 Privacy, intention and meaning 76
3.3 The diarist's dilemma 78
3.4 A social model of observation 80
3.5 The language of observation 85
3.6 Modelling phenomena 88
vii
viii
3.7 Realism about language 89
3.8 Are there introducing events? 91
Chapter 4: Making Curves
4.1 Introduction 95
4.2 Contexts of construction 98
4.3 Magnetic curves 102
4.4 Curves as a procedural framework 107
4.5 Experimenter's space, action and a field concept 111
Chapter 5: Making Circular Motion
5.1 Construals: the construction of new phenomena 115
5.2 Making circles 116
5.3 Articulating possibilities 122
5.4 Making circular motion: the rotation motor 127
5.5 Patterns of discovery 130
Chapter 6: Representing Experimentation
6.1 Agency, propositions and the world 135
6.2 Representing procedures 137
6.3 Putting the phenomena in context: interdependence 141
6.4 Mapping Faraday's manipulations 143
6.5 Eliciting a natural phenomenon 149
6.6 Discovery paths 153
6.7 Choosing and deciding 155
6.8 Observability and skill 158
6.9 Packaging skill 161
Part 2: Making Natural Phenomena 163
Chapter 7: A Realistic Role for Experiment
7.1 Convergence, skill, and correspondence 165
7.2 Packaging phenomena: experiment as argument 169
7.3 Correspondence 177
7.4 The metaphor of approximation 180
7.5 The myth of approximation 182
7.6 Realism without correspondence 186
Chapter 8: The Experimenter's Redress
8.1 Corrigibility in theory and in practice 189
8.2 Morpurgo's search for quarks 193
8.3 Why do thought-experiments work? 203
8.4 The experimenter's regress 209
ix
8.5 The experimenter's redress 214
8.6 Theory, truth and technology 217
Chapter 9: Empiricism in Practice
9.1 Changing meanings: the implications of induction 221
9.2 Discovering a first principle 223
9.3 How experiment articulates analogy 226
9.4 Remaking meaning 229
9.5 Changing the meaning of experimental practice 231
9.6 Questioning quantitative practice 237
9.7 Making a crucial experiment 243
9.8 Epistemology in practice 245
Chapter 10 Experiment and Meaning
10.1 Which comes first, theory or experiment? 249
10.2 Changing meanings: the nature of force 251
10.3 Extending the reach of magnetic curves 252
10.4 Locally convergent practice 255
10.5 Making divergent practices converge 256
10.6 Changing the sensory core of experience 258
10.7 Refining experimental practice 263
10.8 Refining theoretical practice 266
10.9 Experiment and meaning 270
Notes 273
Bibliography 291
Subject Index 303
Name Index 309
Preface
... the topic of 'meaning' is the one topic discussed in
philosophy in which there is literally nothing but
'theory' - literally nothing that can be labelled or
even ridiculed as the 'common sense view'.
Putnam, 'The Meaning of Meaning'
This book explores some truths behind the truism that experimentation is a
hallmark of scientific activity. Scientists' descriptions of nature result from two
sorts of encounter: they interact with each other and with nature. Philosophy of
science has, by and large, failed to give an account of either sort of interaction.
Philosophers typically imagine that scientists observe, theorize and experiment
in order to produce general knowledge of natural laws, knowledge which can be
applied to generate new theories and technologies. This view bifurcates the
scientist's world into an empirical world of pre-articulate experience and know
how and another world of talk, thought and argument. Most received
philosophies of science focus so exclusively on the literary world of
representations that they cannot begin to address the philosophical problems
arising from the interaction of these worlds: empirical access as a source of
knowledge, meaning and reference, and of course, realism. This has placed the
epistemological burden entirely on the predictive role of experiment because, it
is argued, testing predictions is all that could show that scientists' theorizing is
constrained by nature. Here a purely literary approach contributes to its own
demise. The epistemological significance of experiment turns out to be a
theoretical matter: cruciality depends on argument, not experiment.
Meanwhile, empirical access to nature and the predictive success of science
remain mysterious.
Philosophers of science like mysteries less than scientists do. Some affirm
instead the social and cultural basis of the reality referred to in scientists' talk.
From this they infer the constructedness of that reality. This pursues the
linguistic turn to its methodological conclusion. Philosophy of science becomes
a form of literary criticism. Others assert the reality of the natural world to
explain the fact that scientists' talk often refers to things and processes in the
world, and to preserve the idea that scientific theories approach closer to the
truth about nature. Both responses caricature science by their neglect of its
practical, procedural, inventive, and informal aspects. The literary residue of
science is of course where concepts, arguments and demonstrations are found.
It seems self-evident that the radical thrust of a thought-experiment by Einstein
xi
xii
or the elegance and generality of Schrodinger's wave mechanics are purely
intellectual achievements. This does not make science a purely verbal activity.
To treat its most elegant theoretical achievements as if these epitomize the
whole of science demeans the intellectual dimension as well as the others,
because it fails to address the problem of how embodied intellects grapple with
a real world. Besides its philosophical interest, that problem is important to
science education as well.
Bacon and Galileo wanted a new science which was practical - by contrast to
the old sciences which they characterized as literary because their sole
authorities were texts. It is ironical that while many philosophers admire science
because it is empirical as well as rational, philosophical practice confines it to
the literary view that Galileo rejected. Scientists' own accounts of their work do
of course emphasize the creativity of intellect and the rigour of argument, and
they usually subordinate material practices to intellectual ones. These
narratives are accessible to philosophy whereas the tacit and pre-verbal context
in which observers get to grips with the phenomenal world, is not. To be sure,
we can understand the meaning of arguments in research reports without
delving into the practical context from which some anomalous new possibility
has emerged. Nonetheless, an explanation of the persuasiveness of these literary
forms and what their success has to do with experiment, will remain elusive as
long as the enabling role of experiment is ignored. Every scientist since Galileo
has known that experiment is a demonstrative resource. Is experiment no more
than a means of invoking a constructed reality as a rhetorical ally? An
affirmative answer makes sense only if, assuming that the only world that
matters is a world of words, we consider only what scientists say and write.
Many creative activities in our culture influence imagination and shape
experience, so it is hardly surprising that science should do so. I find it
implausible that an activity construed as literary and cerebral should have
power over nature as well. The importance and elegance of reasoning and
argument in science is not in question. The problem is that the traditional
divorce of mind from body and thought from the world leaves the influence of
intellect - even within science - mysterious and surprising. The dualism and
epistemic individualism that have dominated modern philosophy since
Descartes and Berkeley render it incapable of addressing the problem of
empirical access. Modern philosophy cannot understand how what scientists do
gives them power over nature as well as our imaginations. It lacks a plausible
theory of observation.
This book proposes an alternative view based on aspects of scientific work
largely neglected by modern, especially analytical, philosophy. These are the
agency of observers and the way their observation of nature is mediated by their
interactions with each other, with their instrumentation and with the material
world. Empirical access is a cognitive and a social process. By cognitive I mean
that it has to do with apprehending and articulating experience in a general way.
This must include, for example, an observer's proprioception, because that
Description:. . . the topic of 'meaning' is the one topic discussed in philosophy in which there is literally nothing but 'theory' - literally nothing that can be labelled or even ridiculed as the 'common sense view'. Putnam, 'The Meaning of Meaning' This book explores some truths behind the truism that experim
