In this paper I argue, using two case studies of episodes from recent physics against the contingency view advocated by social constructionists. In this view, physics, or science in general, is, in Ian Hacking’s words, not determined by anything. Much of the previous discussion has centered on examples of scientific success. In this paper I argue that experimental evidence and reasoned and critical discussion played the crucial role in the refutation of a previously strongly believed hypothesis, and in the decision (...) that a proposed new elementary particle did not exist, leaving no reasonable doubt. I suggest that the argument against contingency does not require the absence of all possible doubt, but rather the absence of reasonable doubt.Keywords: Contingency; Refutation; 17-keV neutrino; Parity nonconservation. (shrink)

The role intellectual virtues play in scientific inquiry has raised significant discussions in the recent literature. A number of authors have recently explored the link between virtue epistemology and philosophy of science with the aim to show whether epistemic virtues can contribute to the resolution of the problem of theory choice. This paper analyses how intellectual virtues can be beneficial for successful resolution of theory choice. We explore the role of virtues as well as vices in scientific inquiry and their (...) beneficial effects in the context of theory choice. We argue that vices can play a role in widening the set of potential candidate theories and support our claim with historical examples and normative arguments from formal social epistemology. We argue that even though virtues appear to be neither necessary nor sufficient for scientific success, they have a positive effect because they accelerate successful convergence amongst scientists in theory choice situations. (shrink)

A lot of attention has been devoted to the study of discoveries in high energy physics, but less on measurements aiming at improving an existing theory like the standard model of particle physics, getting more precise values for the parameters of the theory or establishing relationships between them. This paper provides a detailed and critical study of how measurements are performed in recent HEP experiments, taking examples from differential cross section measurements with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. This study (...) will be used to provide an elucidation of the concept of event used in HEP, in order to determine what constitutes an observation and what does not. It will highlight the essential place taken by theory-ladenness in order to produce observational facts, and will show how uncertainty and sensitivity estimates constitute an operational approach to robustness, inside the practice of science, avoiding potential circularity problem traditionally implied by theory-ladenness. This is in contrast to robustness analyses typically considered in the literature. A careful analysis of systematic uncertainty estimates and of statistical tests used to set empirical conclusions from the observations will however demonstrate that quantitative statements obtained from these statistical tests cannot be more than simple guiding arguments for the production of knowledge, but do not determine it. This indicates that the frontier between theory and observation is blurry and that the dichotomy theory-experiment should be revised. (shrink)

I reconstruct the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS collaboration at CERN as the application of a series of inferences from effects to causes. I show to what extent such diagnostic causal inferences can be based on well established knowledge gained in previous experiments. To this extent, causal reasoning can be used to infer the existence of entities, rather than just causal relationships between them. The resulting account relies on the principle of causality, attributes only a heuristic role (...) to the theory’s predictions, and shows how, and to what extent, data selection can be used to exclude alternative causes, even “unconceived” ones. (shrink)

Many decades ago Patrick Suppes argued rather convincingly that theoretical hypotheses are not confronted with the direct, raw results of an experiment, rather, they are typically compared with models of data. What exactly is a data model however? And how do the interactions of particles at the subatomic scale give rise to the huge volumes of data that are then moulded into a polished data model? The aim of this paper is to answer these questions by presenting a detailed case (...) study of the construction of data models at the LHCb for testing Lepton Flavour Universality in rare decays of B-mesons. The close examination of the scientific practice at the LHCb leads to the following four main conclusions: raw data in their pure form are practically useless for the comparison of experimental results with theory, and processed data are in some cases epistemically more reliable, real and simulated data are involved in the co-production of the final data model and cannot be easily distinguished, theory-ladenness emerges at three different levels depending on the scope and the purpose for which background theory guides the overall experimental process and the overall process of acquiring and analysing data in high energy physics is too complicated to be fully captured by a generic methodological description of the experimental practice. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature concerning scientific experimentation, the notion of robustness has been solely discussed in relation to experimental results. In this paper, I propose a novel sense of experimental robustness that applies to experimental procedures. I call the foregoing sense of robustness procedure robustness and characterize it as the capacity of an experimental procedure to maintain its intended function invariant during the experimental process despite possible variations in its inputs. I argue that PR is a precondition for what I (...) call result robustness, which refers to the traditional sense of experimental robustness, namely the existence of convergent experimental results obtained through different and independent means of detection. Furthermore, I argue, PR and RR constitute useful experimental strategies in the context of high-energy physics experiments, but these strategies are not without limitations. (shrink)