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Philosophers of Experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

The Neglect of Experiment: that is the title of Alan Franklin's (1986). He did not mean to imply that scientists were neglecting experiments, spinning well financed cobwebs of theories while laboratories decayed for lack of funds. He meant that historians and philosophers neglected the experimental side of science. That was true, and is no longer so. Although his title was fine when he was writing, the times have passed it by.

A decade before there had been almost no reflective philosophy of experiment. What little had been published was not seen as writing about experiment—that was not something to write about—but as discussion of the theory/observation distinction, or the impossibility of eliminating a theory by crucial experiment, etc. The even-handed Dictionary of Scientific Biography discreetly cut articles on experimenters and expanded those on theorists. Thaddeus Trenn's (1977) on the experimental discovery of isotopes was poorly received.

Type
Part V. Experiment
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 147 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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