Observation and Experiment in the Natural and Social Sciences (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science Book 232)

This volume is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the distinction between a ‘context of justification’ and a ‘context of discovery’. It is meant for researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science, and for natural and social scientists interested in foundational topics. Spanning a wide range of disciplines, it combines the viewpoint of philosophers and scientists and casts a new interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of observation and experimentation. According to a long tradition in philosophy of science, a clear cut distinction can be traced between a context of discovery and a context of justification. This tradition dates back to the birth of the discipline in connection with the Circles of Vienna and Berlin, in the twenties and thirties of last century. Convicted that only the context of justification is pertinent to philosophy of science, logical empiricists identified its goal with the “rational reconstruction” of scientific knowledge, taken as the clarification of the logical structure of science, through an analysis of its language and methods. Stressing justification as the proper field of application of philosophy of science, logical empiricists intended to leave discovery out of its remit. The context of discovery was then discarded from philosophy of science and left to sociology, psychology and history. The distinction between context of discovery and context of justification goes hand in hand with the tenet that the theoretical side of science can – and should – be kept separate from its observational and experimental components. Further, the final, abstract formulation of theories should be analysed apart from the process behind it, resulting from a tangle of context-dependent factors. This conviction is reflected by the distinction between theoretical and observational sentences underpinning the Hempelian view of theories as nets, whose knots represent theoretical terms, floating on the plane of observation, to which it is anchored by rules of interpretation. Traditionally, philosophers of science have distinguished between a "context of justification" and a "context of discovery". Only the first was conceived as the proper field of application of philosophy of science, while the second was regarded as concerning scientists, not philosophers. Recently it was admitted that the context of justification forms a continuum with the context of discovery, and as a result observation and experimentation have become an important field of inquiry. The present volume is meant as a contribution to the ongoing debate on this topic. This volume is meant for researchers and advanced students in Philosophy of Science, and for natural and social scientists interested in foundational topics. It combines the viewpoint of philosophers and scientists and casts a new interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of observation and experimentation. It spans a wide range of disciplines, including physics, economics and psychology

European researchers and philosophers of science address a range of problems relating to experimentation in seven papers from a September- October 201 workshop in Bologna, Italy and two or three comments on each by colleagues. Most of them ground their epistemological considerations on historical events or case studies, in the common European style, in order to combine ideas from the history and the philosophy of science into a unique perspective. The topics include from theory to experiment and back again, the emergence and future of experimental economics, a heuristics of discovery in the cognitive sciences, and styles of experimentation. There is no subject index. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR