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Arguments for Experimentation in Biology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Jane Maienschein
Jane Maienschein*
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Extract

“An experiment,” the Oxford Dictionary of the History of Science records, “unlike an experience, is a designed practical intervention in Nature; its upshot is a socially contrived set of observations, carried out under artificially produced and deliberately controlled, reproducible conditions. At the experiment's core is the notion that the conditions for producing a given effect can be separated into independently variable factors, in such a way as to demonstrate how the factors behave in their natural (i.e. the non-experimental) state.” (Dictionary 1981, p. 136). Around 1900, some biologists would have acceded to such a definition, yet many would have offered alternatives. Some would have denied that the conditions in question must be “designed” or artificially produced; nature may also provide experiments. Others would have emphasized the use of experimentally-derived observations for hypothesis testing; experimentation goes beyond the mere experiment itself, that is. A variety of additional definitions would have been advanced as well, illustrating the lack of one such orthodox interpretation as the Dictionary now offers.

Type
Part V. Experimentation
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1986 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1986 , 1986 , pp. 180 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Thanks to Betsy Bang, Richard Burian, Laurence Cohen, Richard Creath, Joy Erickson, Lynn Nyhart, and Robert Wright for their help in various forms, and to Arizona State University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for a summer grant to support this research.

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