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

on the treatment of a low-level problem in experimental design arising from a
factor as ideologically and culturally neutral as battery life.
The epistemic significance of a bit of evidence can depend on the entrenchment
of 16 a technique or piece of equipment, i.e., the extent to which the investigators
depend on it to produce or interpret data, and the extent to which they
treat it as epistemically unproblematic.
William Labov’s critique of the arguments by which educational psychologists
tried to demonstrate severe language deficits in inner city black children is an
illustration. In one experiment, the investigator (a white adult male) showed a
black child a toy airplane and asked “what would you say this looks like?”, “what
color is it?” “what would you use it for?” and “where do you think we could
get another one of these?”. The data (audio tapes of the interviews) exhibited
hesitant, monosyllabic replies broken by pauses of up to 20 seconds. These
were the features of the evidence on which the educational psychologists based
their arguments. Labov was impressed instead by the children’s intonation – an
equally audible feature which was not salient to the psychologists. In accordance
with standard socio-linguistic practices, he transcribed the interviews in a notation
designed to indicate intonation patterns. Thus an utterance of “I don’t know” is
written:
2 a
3 ‘o’
2 know
James Bogen
Labov argued that because such intonation patterns are typical of black children’s
responses in comparable situations they find threatening the data may be
indicative, not of verbal incapacity, but of defensive behavior elicited by fear of the
investigator and the apparent pointlessness of his questions (Labov, 1972,
pp. 206–7). Labov’s consideration of intonation led also to the design of new
experiments which had not occurred to the psychologists (Labov, 1972, pp. 208,
214). Because different techniques were entrenched in their research practices
a feature of the data which was salient to the socio-linguists was ignored by the
psychologists. As this example illustrates, philosophers should concern themselves
with the epistemic import of entrenchment.
Technology and ideology
Recall that in Lloyd’s primatology example, increased battery storage would have
enabled the investigators to record long enough to produce data on typical, as
well as atypical female orgasms. This suggests how important a role the nature of
the equipment and technology available to the researcher can play in the interactions
which bring cultural biases to bear on data production. Galison’s account of
symbiosis in the development of spark and bubble chamber experimental technologies
and the conceptual resources of particle physics is a well-documented
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