The ArgumentThis essay addresses the historiographical question of how to study scientific instruments and the connections between them without rigidly determining the boundaries of the object under historical scrutiny beforehand. To do this, I will explore an episode in the early history of the tachistoscope — defined, among other things, as an instrument for the brief exposure of visual stimuli in experimental psychology. After looking at the tachistoscope described by physiologist Volkmann in 1859, I will turn to the gravity chronometer, (...) constructed by Cattell at Wundt's Leipzig institute of psychology in the 1880s. Taking Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances as a methodological suggestion to travel from one member to another to find out just how members relate to one another, I will investigate part of the family to which both the tachistoscope and the gravity chronometer turn out to belong. A detailed analysis of these instruments, using both historical sources and historical accounts of psychological instruments, may demonstrate that the instrument is not a standard package that, if well applied, will simply secure good results. Each package needs to be assembled again and again; the particular package that is assembled may differ on different occasions. Thus an alternative is developed to an understanding of instruments as univocally functioning material means. (shrink)

In Éléments de l'art de la teinture, Claude-Louis Berthollet organized and described knowledge of a chemical craft in terms of contemporary chemical science. The resulting intellectual structure of his treatise established a programme and method for the subsequent improvement of dyeing. Berthollet's descriptive and hierarchical systematization of knowledge rendered problems intelligible and isolated them so that they could be attacked and solved by methodical experimentation. This double-edged processes of solving practical problems, first cognitively and then experimentally, provides a key to (...) understanding the way science has contributed to rapid and systematic technological change. (shrink)

The beginnings of photographic astronomy in Sweden are taken as a case study of the incorporation of a new scientific technology. The introduction of photography during the late nineteenth century profoundly changed the way astronomers worked. Observational material became more mobile; photographic plates could be examined at a later date or transported to another location. Photography was presented in a rhetorical language, making it a truly objective way of observing the sky. The new technology was developed at the leading observatories, (...) and was imported into countries such as Sweden through a network of scientific communication. (shrink)

The operational perspective here defended permits a reflexive-transcendental point of view that sharply distinguishes the two concepts, while, at the same time, maintaining the connection between them. On the one hand, simply imagining that the experimental apparatus, counterfactually anticipated in a thought experiment, has really been constructed is sufficient to erase any difference between thought and real experiments. On the other hand, this very ‘imagining’, this capacity of the mind to assume every real entity as a possible entity, underpins the (...) difference in principle – a properly transcendental difference – between thought and real experiments. This difference, however, implies the intimate association between experiment and thought experiment: All thought experiments must be thought of as translatable into real ones, and all real experiments as realisations of thought ones. What thought experiments have over and above real experiments is the mere fact that they exist in a purely hypothetical sphere; what real have over and above thought experiments is the mere fact that they overstep the sphere of the possible, in the experiment’s real execution. (shrink)

Resolving conflicts between different measurements ofa property of a physical system may be a key step in a discoveryprocess. With the emergence of large-scale databases and knowledgebases with property measurements, computer support for the task ofconflict resolution has become highly desirable. We will describe amethod for model-based conflict resolution and the accompanyingcomputer tool KIMA, which have been applied in a case-study inmaterials science. In order to be a useful aid to scientists, the toolneeds to be integrated with other tools in (...) a computer-supporteddiscovery environment. We will give an outline of such acomputer-supported discovery environment and argue that its use mightlead to new ways of doing science, so-called computer regimes. (shrink)

Since the practice turn, the role technologies play in the production of scientific knowledge has become a prominent topic in science studies. Much existing scholarship, however, either limits technology to merely mechanical instrumentation or uses the term for a wide variety of items. This article argues that technologies in scientific practice can be understood as a result of past scientific knowledge becoming sedimented in materials, like model organisms, synthetic reagents or mechanical instruments, through the routine use of these materials in (...) subsequent research practice. The proposed theoretical interpretation of technology is examined through a case where a model organism—Drosophila melanogaster—acted as a technology for investigating a contested biological effect of a mechanical instrument: Hermann J. Muller’s experiments on X-ray mutagenicity in the 1920s. The article reconstructs how Muller employed two synthetic Drosophila stocks as tests for measuring X-rays’ capacity to cause genetic aberration. It argues that past scientific knowledge sedimented in the Drosophila stocks influenced Muller’s perception of X-ray-induced mutation. It further describes how Muller’s concept of X-ray mutagenicity sedimented through the adoption of X-ray machines as a ready-made resource for producing mutants by other geneticists, for instance George Beadle and Edward Tatum in their experiments on Neurospora crassa, despite ongoing disputes surrounding Muller’s conclusions. Technological sedimentation is proposed as a potential explanation why sedimentation and disputation may often coexist in the history of science. (shrink)

Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening is often credited as being one of the first works to focus on the role of experimentation in philosophy of science, catalyzing a movement which is sometimes called the “philosophy of experiment” or “new experimentalism”. In the 1980s, a number of other movements and scholars also began focusing on the role of experimentation and instruments in science. Philosophical study of experimentation has thus seemed to be an invention of the 1980s whose central figure is Hacking. (...) This article aims to assess this historical claim, made by Hacking himself as well as others. It does so first by highlighting how a broader perspective on the history of philosophy reveals this invention narrative to be incorrect, since experimentation was a topic of interest for earlier philosophers. Secondly, the article evaluates a revision of this historical claim also made by some philosophers of experiment: the rediscovery narrative, which frames Hacking and others as having rediscovered the work of these earlier authors. This second narratives faces problems as well. Therefore we develop a third narrative which we call the contextualist narrative. Rather than considering experimentation in an essentialist manner as a fixed research object that is either present or not in the work of specific authors, experimentation should be addressed through a narrative that asks in what way it becomes a philosophical problem for certain authors and for what purpose. Such contextualization enables a repositioning of Hacking’s philosophy of experiment in relation to the specific debates in which he intervened, such as the realism-antirealism debate, the Science Wars and the debate on incommensurability. (shrink)

In a number of papers and in his recent book, Is Water H₂O? Evidence, Realism, Pluralism (2012), Hasok Chang has argued that the correct interpretation of the Chemical Revolution provides a strong case for the view that progress in science is served by maintaining several incommensurable “systems of practice” in the same discipline, and concerning the same region of nature. This paper is a critical discussion of Chang's reading of the Chemical Revolution. It seeks to establish, first, that Chang's assessment (...) of Lavoisier's and Priestley's work and character follows the phlogistonists' “actors' sociology”; second, that Chang simplifies late-eighteenth-century chemical debates by reducing them to an alleged conflict between two systems of practice; third, that Chang's evidence for a slow transition from phlogistonist theory to oxygen theory is not strong; and fourth, that he is wrong to assume that chemists at the time did not have overwhelming good reasons to favour Lavoisier's over the phlogistonists' views. (shrink)

This review essay critically discusses Andre Kukla's Methods of theoretical psychology. It is argued that Kukla mistakenly tries to build his case for theorizing in psychology as a separate discipline on a dubious distinction between theory and observation. He then argues that the demise of empiricism implies a return of some form of rationalism, which entails an autonomous role for theorizing in psychology. Having shown how this theory-observation dichotomy goes back to traditional and largely abandoned ideas in epistemology, an alternative (...) is presented in the guise of the pragmatist or functionalist tradition, where the interdependence of theory, observation and action is emphasized and the positivist dichotomy of pure observations and pure theory is rejected. Furthermore, we show how recent work on "active" perception supports the functionalist approach. Although the authors agree with Kukla that theory has a legitimate place in psychology, it is suggested that he needlessly limits its scope to autonomous domain-neutral theorizing, and that broadening its perspective to analyzing the presuppositions and implications of empirical work is a more fruitful approach. In fact, the attempt to find the epistemological and philosophical implications of empirical work in perception that is sketched in this review essay is, in the authors' view, a case of theorizing in psychology. (shrink)

: In 1856, Michael Faraday (1791–1867) conducted nearly a year's worth of research on the optical properties of gold, in the course of which he discovered the first metallic colloids. Following our own discovery of hundreds of the specimens prepared by Faraday for this research, the present paper describes the cognitive role of these "epistemic artifacts" in the dynamics of Faraday's research practices. Analysis of the specimens, Faraday's Diary records, and replications of selected procedures (partly to replace missing kinds of (...) specimens and partly to understand the "tacit knowledge" implicated in Faraday's research) are outlined, and a reconstruction of the events surrounding the initial discovery of metallic colloids is presented. (shrink)

Philosophers of science diverge on the question what drives the growth of scientific knowledge. Most of the twentieth century was dominated by the notion that theories propel that growth whereas experiments play secondary roles of operating within the theoretical framework or testing theoretical predictions. New experimentalism, a school of thought pioneered by Ian Hacking in the early 1980s, challenged this view by arguing that theory-free exploratory experimentation may in many cases effectively probe nature and potentially spawn higher evidence-based theories. Because (...) theories are often powerless to envisage workings of complex biological systems, theory-independent experimentation is common in the life sciences. Some such experiments are triggered by compelling observation, others are prompted by innovative techniques or instruments, whereas different investigations query big data to identify regularities and underlying organizing principles. A distinct fourth type of experiments is motivated by a major question. Here I describe two question-guided experimental discoveries in biochemistry: the cyclic adenosine monophosphate mediator of hormone action and the ubiquitin-mediated system of protein degradation. Lacking underlying theories, antecedent data bases, or new techniques, the sole guides of the two discoveries were respective substantial questions. Both research projects were similarly instigated by theory-free exploratory experimentation and continued in alternating phases of results-based interim working hypotheses, their examination by experiment, provisional hypotheses again, and so on. These two cases designate theory-free, question-guided, stepwise biochemical investigations as a distinct subtype of the new experimentalism mode of scientific enquiry. (shrink)

Farmers all over the world perform experiments, and have done so since long before modern experimental science and its recognized forerunners. There is a rich anthropological literature on these experiments, but the philosophical issues that they give rise to have not received much attention. Based on the anthropological literature, this study investigates methodological and philosophical issues pertaining to farmers’ experiments, including the choice of interventions to be tested, the planning of experiments, and the use of control fields and other means (...) to deal with confounding factors. Farmers’ experiments have some advantages over the field trials of agricultural scientists, but also some comparative disadvantages. The two experimental traditions are complementary, and neither of them can replace the other. Several aspects of farmers’ experiments are shown to have a direct bearing on central topics in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Farmers all over the world perform experiments, and have done so since long before modern experimental science and its recognized forerunners. There is a rich anthropological literature on these experiments, but the philosophical issues that they give rise to have not received much attention. Based on the anthropological literature, this study investigates methodological and philosophical issues pertaining to farmers’ experiments, including the choice of interventions to be tested, the planning of experiments, and the use of control fields and other means (...) to deal with confounding factors. Farmers’ experiments have some advantages over the field trials of agricultural scientists, but also some comparative disadvantages. The two experimental traditions are complementary, and neither of them can replace the other. Several aspects of farmers’ experiments are shown to have a direct bearing on central topics in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

The ArgumentScientific tools—measurement and calculation instruments, techniques of inference—straddle the line between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In discovery, new scientific tools suggest new theoretical metaphors and concepts; and in justification, these tool-derived theoretical metaphors and concepts are morelikely to be accepted by the scientific community if the tools are already entrenched in scientific practice.Techniques of statistical inference and hypothesis testing entered American psychology first as tools in the 1940s and 1950s and then as cognitive theories (...) in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did psychologists resists statistical metaphors of mind prior to the institutionalization of inference techniques in their own practice; the cognitive theories they ultimately developed about “the mind as intuitive statistician” still bear the telltale marks of the practical laboratory context in which the tool was used. (shrink)

Theoretical commentaries on AI often operate as a metadiscourse on the way in which science represents itself to a wider public. The sciences and humanities do the same kind of work but in different fields that encourage them to talk about their work differently: science refers to a natural world that does not talk back, and the humanities refer continually to a world with communicative people in it. This paper suggests that much AI commentary is misconceived because it models itself (...) on the way that science represents itself, rather than on the actual practice of science.AI theorists have become increasingly worried about the lack of evaluation in AI, the lack of reflexivity, and the lack of contact with society. Frequently these writers turn to concepts of tacit knowledge to work through these worries. In doing so they are recognising the problem of AI's second-order representation of science and trying to deal with it. However, this recognition of a problem with the representations of science simply turns back to the legitimation crisis of Western politics where many commentators use science precisely as a ‘model’ for western political institutions. They do so because science is one of the few areas of knowledge where it has been legitimate to use plausible methodology for representation that allows for arbitrary designations of authority as well as parallel systems of different authority. However, the plausible rejects any control on reflexivity, assumes an ethnocentric club culture and does not address social context.It is in this sense that the problems of legitimation in political liberalism are similar to those of legitimation in sciences, both are rooted in their uses of representation. AI's link with the representation of science places it in the heart of this debate about legitimacy. This paper suggests that AI does need to learn about reflexivity and that it might well do so by looking at the recent work on experimentation and representation by historians of science, and by looking to the debates about representation by historians of science, and by looking to the debates about representation within the humanities. However, reflexivity may not be enough. Devising rules of thumb for the appropriate halting of reflexivity, is also needed to address social context and take action. (shrink)

As an introduction to the case studies collected in the current special issue, this review article provides a brief, and by no means exhaustive, overview of research that proves to be relevant to the development of a concept of an aesthetics of knowledge in the academic study of religion and in science and technology studies. Finally, it briefly discusses recent work explicitly addressing the aesthetic entangle-ment of science and religion.

Understanding nature of science is widely considered an important educational objective and views of NOS are closely linked to science teaching and learning. Thus there is a lively discussion about what understanding NOS means and how it is reached. As a result of analyses in educational, philosophical, sociological and historical research, a worldwide consensus about the content of NOS teaching is said to be reached. This consensus content is listed as a general statement of science, which students are supposed to (...) understand during their education. Unfortunately, decades of research has demonstrated that teachers and students alike do not possess an appropriate understanding of NOS, at least as far as it is defined at the general level. One reason for such failure might be that formal statements about the NOS and scientific knowledge can really be understood after having been contextualized in the actual cases. Typically NOS is studied as contextualized in the reconstructed historical case stories. When the objective is to educate scientifically and technologically literate citizens, as well as scientists of the near future, studying NOS in the contexts of contemporary science is encouraged. Such contextualizations call for revision of the characterization of NOS and the goals of teaching about NOS. As a consequence, this article gives two examples for studying NOS in the contexts of scientific practices with practicing scientists: an interview study with nanomodellers considering NOS in the context of their actual practices and a course on nature of scientific modelling for science teachers employing the same interview method as a studying method. Such scrutinization opens rarely discussed areas and viewpoints to NOS as well as aspects that practising scientists consider as important. (shrink)

In this paper, I claim that since there is a cognitively impenetrable stage of visual perception, namely early vision, and cognitive penetrability and theory-ladenness are coextensive, the CI of early vision entails that early vision content is theory neutral. This theory-neutral part undermines relativism. In this paper, I consider two objections against the thesis. The one adduces evidence from cases of rapid perceptual learning to undermine my thesis that early vision is CI. The other emphasizes that the early perceptual system, (...) in order to solve various underdetermination problems, relies on certain principles, which may be taken to constitute a sort of a theory about the world that affect early vision, rendering it theory-laden. Both objections purport to show that early vision is CP and theory-laden. Against this thesis, I argue that the evidence on which the two objections are based does not show that early vision is CP and is fully compatible with the view that early vision is CI. (shrink)

The ArgumentIt is not easy to point to the place of knowledge in our culture. More precisely, it is difficult to locate the production of our most valued forms of knowledge, including those of religion, literature and science. A pervasive topos in Western culture, from the Greeks onward, stipulates that the most authentic intellectual agents are the most solitary. The place of knowledge is nowhere in particular and anywhere at all. I sketch some uses of the theme of the solitary (...) philosopher across a broad sweep of history, giving particular attention to its deployment in and around the scientific culture of seventeenth-century England. I argue that the rhetoric of solitude is strongly implicated in individualistic views of society and empiricist portrayals of scientific knowledge. Solitude is a state that symbolically expresses direct engagement with the sources of knowledge – divine and transcendent or natural and empirical. At the same time, solitude publicly expresses disengagement from society, identified as a set of conventions and concerns which act to corrupt knowledge. Hence, the study of the social uses of solitude adds further support to the notion that problems of knowledge and problems of social order are solved together. (shrink)

This article outlines a philosophy of science in practice that focuses on the engineering sciences. A methodological issue is that these practices seem to be divided by two different styles of scientific reasoning, namely, causal-mechanistic and mathematical reasoning. These styles are philosophically characterized by what Kuhn called ?disciplinary matrices?. Due to distinct metaphysical background pictures and/or distinct ideas of what counts as intelligible, they entail distinct ideas of the character of phenomena and what counts as a scientific explanation. It is (...) argued that the two styles cannot be reduced to each other. At the same time, although they are incompatible, they must not be regarded as competing. Instead, they produce different kinds of epistemic results, which serve different kinds of epistemic functions. Moreover, some scientific breakthroughs essentially result from relating them. This view of complementary styles of scientific reasoning is supported by pluralism about metaphysical background pictures. (shrink)

This essay discusses the ways in which Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has influenced my own work in science studies over the past twenty years or so. It offers a critical but constructive appraisal and development of some of Kuhn's key claims and insights.

Information technologies (IT) have become a politically important issue over the last ten years. Governmental reports promote the idea of a new information society, or network society, where ITs are a prerequisite for the economic and social development. The discourse and the rhetoric about technology and its relation to society are dominated by modern, rational and macrosocial understandings of technology. In this paper we challenge dominant rational discourses on technology and present alternative views to bring new perspectives to the subject (...) in order to complicate and enrich our understanding of technology and how it relates to society. Our aim is to develop a theoretical framework that can account for a dynamic and microsocial approach to studying the implementation of an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) at a Danish hospital. The key notions in the framework are 'trading zone', 'cooperation' and 'technological translations'. (shrink)

Laboratory experimentation was once considered impossible or irrelevant in economics. Recently, however, economic science has gone through a real ‘laboratory revolution’, and experimental economics is now a most lively subfield of the discipline. The methodological advantages and disadvantages of controlled experimentation constitute the main subject of this thesis. After a survey of the literature on experiments in philosophy and economics, the problem of testing normative theories of rationality is tackled. This philosophical issue was at the centre of a famous controversy (...) in decision theory, during which a methodology of normative falsification was first articulated and used to assess experimental results. In the third chapter, the methodological advantages of controlled experimentation are illustrated and discussed with examples taken from the experiments on the so-called ‘preference reversal’ phenomenon. Laboratory testing allows to establish with a high degree of certainty that certain phenomena lie behind the experimental data, by means of independent testing, elimination of alternative hypotheses, and the use of different instruments of observation. The fourth chapter is devoted to a conceptual analysis of the problem of ‘parallelism’. This is the problem of inferring from the occurrence of a phenomenon in the laboratory, to its instantiation also in non-laboratory environments. Experimental economists have discussed parallelism at length, and their views are presented and criticised. Eventually, it is argued that parallelism is a factual matter and as such can only be established on empirical grounds. The fifth chapter provides an example of how one can argue for parallelism, focusing on the case of experimentation on the ‘winner’s curse’ phenomenon. The role of experiments as ‘mediators’ between theoretical models and their target domain of application is illustrated, and the structure of parallelism arguments analysed in detail. Finally, in the last chapter, economic experiments are compared to simulations, in order to highlight their specific characteristics. (shrink)

ArgumentGlass vessels such as flasks and test tubes play an ambiguous role in the historiography of modern laboratory research. In spite of the strong focus on the role of materiality in the last decades, the scientific glass vessel – while being symbolically omnipresent – has remained curiously neglected in regard to its materiality. The popular image ortoposof the transparent, neutral, and quasi-immaterial glass container obstructs the view of the physico-chemical functionality of this constitutive inner boundary in modern laboratory environments and (...) its material historicity. In order to understand how glass vessels were able to provide a stable epistemic containment of spatially enclosed experimental phenomena in the new laboratory ecologies emerging in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, I will focus on the history of thematerialstandardization of laboratory glassware. I will follow the rise of a new awareness for measurement errors due to the chemical agency of experimental glass vessels, then I will sketch the emergence of a whole techno-scientific infrastructure for the improvement of glass container quality in late nineteenth-century Germany. In the last part of my argument, I will return to the laboratory by looking at the implementation of this glass reform that created a newoikosfor the inner experimental milieus of modern laboratory research. (shrink)