The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science - The Department ...

James Bogen
Whewell (1991) and Duhem (1991) – and earlier empirically minded thinkers –
like Bacon (1994), Boyle (1661), and Hooke (1968) – who engaged in what
amounts to philosophy of science before the subject became institutionalized in
its present form, the logical positivists and their sympathizers treated observation
and experiment as black boxes which outputted observation sentences in
relatively mysterious ways of next to no philosophical interest. 6 Decades would
pass before philosophers of science began to appreciate how much the epistemic
value of empirical data as evidence for or against a scientific claim depends
upon the way it was produced, and the degree to which some features of
scientific practice can be illuminated by considering facts about data production
instead of logical relations between theoretical claims and descriptions of
empirical results. But you didn’t have to sympathize with the logical positivists
to ignore empirical methods. In the late 1950s, a group of their critics including
Kuhn, Hanson, and Feyerabend developed new distractions associated with
Hanson’s slogan, “seeing is a theory laden enterprise” (Hanson, 1958, p. 19) to
direct philosophers’ attention away from empirical practice. As a result of all of
this, Alan Franklin could complain 30 years later that someone who told philosophers
of science of the death of Lummer and Prigsheim would “get the same
reaction – total unconcern – that the ambassador from England gets at the end
of Hamlet when he announces the death of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern”
(Franklin, 1989, p. 1). (Lummer’s and Prigsheim’s investigations of black body
radiation featured “some of the most important experiments in the history of
physics” (ibid.)). 7 Feyerabend (1985), Kuhn (1970), Hanson, and their followers
understood theory loading in different ways. The most common understandings
resembled one or more of the following substantially different versions Kuhn
developed of his own idea that paradigms 8 influence observation to such an extent
that observers who work in different paradigms cannot “see” the same things.
(Kuhn, 1970, pp. 111–23.)
K1: Perceptual
Bruner and Postman found that on short exposures, subjects looking at normal
and anomalous playing cards described them all as if they were normal, failing,
e.g. to report that a black four of hearts was black. It took repeated, longer exposure
for them to learn to describe the anomalous cards correctly (Kuhn, 1970, p.
63). Kuhn interprets this as indicating that someone who lacks the concept of a
deck containing a red club or a black diamond cannot have (or notice having) the
same visual experience as an observer who has it. He goes on to suggest that scientific
paradigms determine observers’ concepts to such an extent that when investigators
with conflicting paradigms look at the same thing, their observations will
differ. In particular, an investigator’s paradigm may prevent her from observing
what would otherwise support a competing paradigm’s theoretical claims (Kuhn,
1970, pp. 111, 113–14, 115, 120–1).
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