Joseph Rouse
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226293677
- eISBN:
- 9780226293707
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226293707.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
This chapter takes up the role of experimental practice in the articulation of conceptual understanding in the sciences, as a passage between the Scylla of merely “Given” experiential or causal ...
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This chapter takes up the role of experimental practice in the articulation of conceptual understanding in the sciences, as a passage between the Scylla of merely “Given” experiential or causal impacts, and the Charybdis of merely intra-linguistic coherence. Experiment does not just provide occasions for conceptual development, whose requisite work would be linguistic or mathematical. Conceptual articulation in scientific practice involves interplay between theoretical models and experimentally configured patterns: the chapter therefore extends conceptions of theoretical models as mediators between theory and world to recognize a double mediation by models and experimental phenomena. The latter’s material complexity, incorporating apparatus, shielding, and skilled performance, is integral to conceptual significance. Hacking and Cartwright limit the scope of concepts to where they are empirically accurate, in their efforts to acknowledge experimental articulation of concepts, but that renders them empty by collapsing their two-dimensional normativity. The conceptual significance of salient experimental patterns can extend further, through the mutual normative accountability between “outer recognition” of a pattern’s presence, and “inner recognition” of its appropriate elements, Scientific understanding is thereby always open to further intensive and extensive conceptual articulation, guided by contestable, future-directed issues and stakes in experimental systems and scientific practice.Less
This chapter takes up the role of experimental practice in the articulation of conceptual understanding in the sciences, as a passage between the Scylla of merely “Given” experiential or causal impacts, and the Charybdis of merely intra-linguistic coherence. Experiment does not just provide occasions for conceptual development, whose requisite work would be linguistic or mathematical. Conceptual articulation in scientific practice involves interplay between theoretical models and experimentally configured patterns: the chapter therefore extends conceptions of theoretical models as mediators between theory and world to recognize a double mediation by models and experimental phenomena. The latter’s material complexity, incorporating apparatus, shielding, and skilled performance, is integral to conceptual significance. Hacking and Cartwright limit the scope of concepts to where they are empirically accurate, in their efforts to acknowledge experimental articulation of concepts, but that renders them empty by collapsing their two-dimensional normativity. The conceptual significance of salient experimental patterns can extend further, through the mutual normative accountability between “outer recognition” of a pattern’s presence, and “inner recognition” of its appropriate elements, Scientific understanding is thereby always open to further intensive and extensive conceptual articulation, guided by contestable, future-directed issues and stakes in experimental systems and scientific practice.
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226450094
- eISBN:
- 9780226450117
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226450117.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Adapting laboratory instruments and experimental practices for use in the field is not the only way to create border practice. A more promising strategy was to give traditional field practices the ...
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Adapting laboratory instruments and experimental practices for use in the field is not the only way to create border practice. A more promising strategy was to give traditional field practices the force of laboratory practices but without importing the paraphernalia or protocols of laboratory culture. Field practices of observing and comparing were refashioned into instruments of causal analysis, some of which proved to be as effective as any experiment and as well suited to nature's particular places as experiment and precision measurement are to laboratories. Recognizing the places where observation and comparison can reveal how nature works, and learning to read the spatial evidence of these processes, are the crucial skills of modern field practice, just as inventing the right experimental tools is the crucial skill of laboratory work. Practitioners of place were on the right track in thinking that traditional methods of natural history could be redirected to more analytic, lablike ends.Less
Adapting laboratory instruments and experimental practices for use in the field is not the only way to create border practice. A more promising strategy was to give traditional field practices the force of laboratory practices but without importing the paraphernalia or protocols of laboratory culture. Field practices of observing and comparing were refashioned into instruments of causal analysis, some of which proved to be as effective as any experiment and as well suited to nature's particular places as experiment and precision measurement are to laboratories. Recognizing the places where observation and comparison can reveal how nature works, and learning to read the spatial evidence of these processes, are the crucial skills of modern field practice, just as inventing the right experimental tools is the crucial skill of laboratory work. Practitioners of place were on the right track in thinking that traditional methods of natural history could be redirected to more analytic, lablike ends.
Matthias Gross
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- August 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780262013482
- eISBN:
- 9780262265911
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262013482.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Technology and Society
Ignorance and surprise belong together: Surprises can make people aware of their own ignorance. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, a surprising event in scientific research—one that defies prediction or ...
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Ignorance and surprise belong together: Surprises can make people aware of their own ignorance. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, a surprising event in scientific research—one that defies prediction or risk assessment—is often a window into new and unexpected knowledge. This book examines the relationship between ignorance and surprise, proposing a conceptual framework for handling the unexpected and offering case studies of ecological design that demonstrate the advantages of allowing for surprises and including ignorance in the design and negotiation processes. It draws on classical and contemporary sociological accounts of ignorance and surprise in science and ecology, and integrates them with the idea of experiment in society. The author develops a notion of how unexpected occurrences can be incorporated into a model of scientific and technological development, which includes the experimental handling of surprises. He discusses different projects in ecological design, including Chicago’s restoration of the shoreline of Lake Michigan and Germany’s revitalization of the brownfields near Leipzig. These cases show how ignorance and surprise can successfully play out in ecological design projects and how the acknowledgment of the unknown can become a part of the decision-making process. The appropriation of surprises can lead to robust design strategies. Ecological design, the book argues, is neither a linear process of master planning nor a process of trial and error, but a carefully coordinated process of dealing with unexpected turns by means of experimental practice.Less
Ignorance and surprise belong together: Surprises can make people aware of their own ignorance. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, a surprising event in scientific research—one that defies prediction or risk assessment—is often a window into new and unexpected knowledge. This book examines the relationship between ignorance and surprise, proposing a conceptual framework for handling the unexpected and offering case studies of ecological design that demonstrate the advantages of allowing for surprises and including ignorance in the design and negotiation processes. It draws on classical and contemporary sociological accounts of ignorance and surprise in science and ecology, and integrates them with the idea of experiment in society. The author develops a notion of how unexpected occurrences can be incorporated into a model of scientific and technological development, which includes the experimental handling of surprises. He discusses different projects in ecological design, including Chicago’s restoration of the shoreline of Lake Michigan and Germany’s revitalization of the brownfields near Leipzig. These cases show how ignorance and surprise can successfully play out in ecological design projects and how the acknowledgment of the unknown can become a part of the decision-making process. The appropriation of surprises can lead to robust design strategies. Ecological design, the book argues, is neither a linear process of master planning nor a process of trial and error, but a carefully coordinated process of dealing with unexpected turns by means of experimental practice.
Philipp Erchinger
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474438957
- eISBN:
- 9781474453790
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438957.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much ...
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What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds.
Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.Less
What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds.
Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.
Tom R. Tyler and David M. Amodio
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780195328325
- eISBN:
- 9780190202187
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195328325.003.0012
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Behavioural Economics
This chapter highlights three differences in psychology and economic research: the focus of study, what is appropriate research design, and issues involved in the study of economics in the context of ...
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This chapter highlights three differences in psychology and economic research: the focus of study, what is appropriate research design, and issues involved in the study of economics in the context of the brain. At its core, the clash of methods appears to concern issues of experimental validity that arise when attempting to infer underlying (i.e. “latent”) psychological variables from observable (i.e. “manifest”) responses, such as behavior or physiology. While economists interests have moved toward a greater focus on underlying psychological constructs that are not directly observable, their experimental practices require updating to deal with the new challenges of psychological investigation.Less
This chapter highlights three differences in psychology and economic research: the focus of study, what is appropriate research design, and issues involved in the study of economics in the context of the brain. At its core, the clash of methods appears to concern issues of experimental validity that arise when attempting to infer underlying (i.e. “latent”) psychological variables from observable (i.e. “manifest”) responses, such as behavior or physiology. While economists interests have moved toward a greater focus on underlying psychological constructs that are not directly observable, their experimental practices require updating to deal with the new challenges of psychological investigation.
