Search Results

Philosophies of science often compress the two-dimensional normativity of scientific understanding by subordinating conceptual articulation to the justification of articulated judgments. One manifestation of this compression is concern about “fictional” representations in the sciences. This chapter focuses attention on conceptual articulation in scientific practice by considering a different analogy between scientific understanding and literary fiction, exemplified by experimental systems rather than models, thought experiments, or simulations. Experimental systems are “microworlds” where conceptual relations can be clarified in simplified, “well-behaved” circumstances that guide their deployment in more complex settings. Kuhn’s classic discussion of thought experiments, for example, presumes “normal usage” of concepts, but a prior question is how usage is first normalized to allow reasoning about claims in those terms, as “true-or-false.” Chapter 8 identified conceptual domains in the sciences with holistically interrelated sets of laws and scientific skills for recognition and adjudication of lawful patterns. This chapter explores how constructing novel experimental systems as “fictional” microworlds opens such domains by establishing canonical patterns of reporting and inference that constitute such lawful interrelations in an experimental practice. This performative “fictional” opening of conceptual domains illustrates in the sciences the retrospective dimension of the temporality of conceptual normativity.

This chapter analyzes a second figure under which the deconstruction of the traditional way of thinking life is engaged. “Today, biologists no longer study life in laboratories,” François Jacob famously states. Following Rheinberger's historical epistemology, this chapter shows how the substantiality and regulative unity of the object “life” disappears as the horizon for the concrete empirical research in experimental systems. Research in life science does not presuppose the hermeneutical understanding or pre-understanding of the “being of life.”

Barwise and Seligman's account of information flow in distributed systems is presented in a way that suits it for discussion of experimental knowledge. Their notions of distributed system, classification scheme, infomorphism (basically a map between systems that allows information based inferences), and local logics are presented. Examples from experimental practice including general murine models as experimental systems are illustrated. Finally my account of experimental knowledge is framed in explicitly information theoretic terms: When observation of a proximal physical system, revealing it to be of a certain type, carries the information that some (generally other) distal physical system is of some (generally other) type, then inferring that conclusion on the basis of that information counts as experimental knowledge of the latter.

This chapter examines the nature of biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) research undertaken to date in marine systems and compares it with that done in terrestrial systems. It discusses gaps in current knowledge and considers the relative merits of different approaches to overcoming limitations of BEF studies. It also explores important ecological processes or patterns that may be lost in abstracting BEF experimental systems from natural ecosystems, asks whether the reduced temporal/spatial scale or compromised ecological realism of marine BEF studies affects the ability to extrapolate results to other systems, and offers some suggestions for future research.

This chapter revisits the themes from this part, Shannon's model of information, Dretske's theory of empirical knowledge, and Barwise and Seligman's account of the structure of information flow in distributed systems and how they are brought together to give my account of experimental knowledge. It also attempts to motivate in a general way the utility of thinking about experiment in these terms and how controlling information flow is really at the heart of our experimental practice. The claims in this part seem very broad and the chapter advertises the next part of the book as clarifying the utility of looking at things this way by considering the understanding and insight it affords into a variety of types of experimental knowledge producing activities.

Chapter 9 tells the story of how the laboratory of Harold Varmus and J. Michael Bishop at the University of California, San Francisco provided evidence of cellular genes—oncogenes—playing a role in carcinogenesis. These findings came about because of their study of retroviruses, especially Rous Sarcoma Virus, in order to test Robert Huebner’s oncogene theory. Whereas prior accounts have presented this as a matter of serendipity and scientific creativity, this chapter situates the practices of the laboratory’s experimental system within the material and social infrastructure for retrovirus research created by the War on Cancer, first discussed in chapter 6. It argues that these resources were an integral rather than incidental component of the laboratory’s ability to make this discovery.