Some experimental results in science are productively surprising or beautiful. Such results are disruptive in their epistemic nature: by violating epistemic expectations they mark the phenomenon at hand as worthy of further investigation. Could it be that there are emotions beyond these two which are also useful for the epistemic evaluation of scientific experiments? Here, I conduct a structured sociological survey to explore affective experiences in scientific experimental research. I identify that learning the results of an experiment (...) is the high emotional point in the experimenting process. Thus, experimental results can be challenging, beautiful, or boring, and they can worry, amuse, make one sad, and so on. They can also drive meta-cognitive evaluations as well as motivate specific research-related actions. From this, I advance two claims: that emotions beyond surprise and disruptive beauty are epistemically useful in empirical research, and that emotions help to overcome specific challenges of reasoning about new experimental results. (shrink)

Reactivity, or the phenomenon by which subjects tend to modify their behavior in virtue of their being studied upon, is often cited as one of the most important difficulties involved in social scientific experiments, and yet, there is to date a persistent conceptual muddle when dealing with the many dimensions of reactivity. This paper offers a conceptual framework for reactivity that draws on an interventionist approach to causality. The framework allows us to offer an unambiguous definition of reactivity (...) and distinguishes it from placebo effects. Further, it allows us to distinguish between benign and malignant forms of the phenomenon, depending on whether reactivity constitutes a danger to the validity of the causal inferences drawn from experimental data. (shrink)

The collection provides an analysis of the concept of beauty in the evaluation of experiments. What properties do practicing experimenters value? How have the aesthetic properties of scientific experiments changed over the years? Secondly, the volume looks at the role that aesthetic factors, including negative values such as ugliness, as well as experiences of the sublime and the profound, play in the construction of an experiment and its reception. Thirdly, the chapters provide in-depth historical case studies from (...) the Royal Society, which also allows for a study of the depiction of scientific experiment in artworks, as well as contemporary examples from the LHC and cases of AI-designed experiments. Finally, it offers a exploration of the commonalities between how we learn from experiments on the one hand, and the cognitive value of artworks on the other. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉBeaucoup ont soutenu qu'il n'y a pas de place pour des expériences scientifiques dans les sciences naturelles d'Aristote : les expériences interviennent dans la nature, mais Aristote soutient que nous devons simplement observer la nature; si nous intervenions, le résultat serait quelque chose d'artificiel ou contraire à la nature. Contre cela, je soutiens qu'Aristote a non seulement effectué des expériences scientifiques, mais a également maintenu qu'il y a beaucoup de connaissances sur la nature qui peuvent être découvertes expérimentalement.

Discusses the experiments of Aristotle, William Beaumont, Robert Norman, Stephen Hales, Konrad Lorenz, Galileo, Robert Boyle, Theodoric of Freibourg, Louis Pasteur, Ernest Rutherford, A.A. Michelson, E.W. Morley, F. Jacob, E. Wollman, J.J. Gibson, A.L. Lavoisier, Humphrey Davy, J.J. Thomson, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, J.J. Berzelius, and Otto Stern.

This article explores the aesthetic dimensions of scientific experimentation, addressing specifically how aesthetic features enter the construction, evaluation and reception of an experiment. I highlight the relationship between experiments and artistic acts in the early years of the Royal Society where experiments do not serve only epistemic aims but also aim to generate feelings of awe and pleasure. I turn to analysing which aspects of experiments are appreciated aesthetically, identifying several contenders, from the ability of an (...) experiment to uncover nature’s beauty, to encapsulating original designs and human creativity. Following this analysis, I focus on the notion of beauty: what makes an experiment beautiful? Several common qualities are explored, from the simplicity and economy of the experiment, to the significance of the experimental results. (shrink)

Practical realism is focused on the problem of how science really works. In the case of physics and chemistry, experiment is the centrepiece of scientific practice. The rapid development of contemporary natural science does not leave the experiment unaffected. The classical experiment is normally applied only to systems that can be considered structurally stable, repeatability being the key feature. After the introduction of the theoretical basis of irreversibility by Ilya Prigogine the essence of the experiment changed. The strict requirement (...) of repeatability has to be dropped. It will be discussed, whether the change is big enough for calling it revolutionary. There are means to update the understanding of the experiment by applying the experimental settings. The material experiment will probably be with us forever but its position on the scientific landscape will be shifted. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the major transformations in the Marburg neo-Kantian account of experience. By focusing on the problem of ‘conceptualism’, it traces connections between four issues that are central to the transcendental projects of the Marburg philosophers: the interpretation of Kant, the critique of experiential givenness, the account of objective cognition in science, and the relation between scientific and pre-scientific experience. My historical narrative identifies two shifts. The first is from Cohen's conceptualist answer to the threat of subjectivism (...) to Cassirer's functionalist answer to empiricism. The second is from Cassirer's conceptualism about scientific experience to his symbolic non-conceptualism about everyday perception. My reconstruction reveals the fate of neo-Kantian conceptualism to be linked to the fate of pre-scientific perception and suggests that the continuing significance of the Marburg philosophers lies in their responses to the coming apart of the manifest and the scientific image. (shrink)

Gandhi's politics is thoroughly biopolitical and ‘minoritarian’ in all its aspects. His political practice and concepts could be redefined as micro-political experiments in the Deleuzian sense. Gandhi himself viewed his life and practices as ‘experiments’. Like Gilles Deleuze, who grants the concept of becoming-woman a privileged position in his philosophical idea of becoming, Gandhi gives becoming-woman a decisive role in his experiments of ‘self-rule’ in both its personal and collective sense. He sees woman as the emblem of (...) ahimsa, which according to him is the only principle and means to attain ‘self-rule’. Gandhi identifies the minoritarian political potential of woman as against Man, who resists becomings by being himself destined to be static and standardised, that is, ‘Majoritarian’. From this perspective, Gandhi's concept of the practice of Brahmacharya is an experiment in becoming-woman by creating a new line of relation between man and woman that goes beyond the confinement of conjugal sexuality and familial desire. Building upon the complementary relation between the philosophical concepts of Deleuze and the political practice of Gandhi, this paper attempts a detailed re-evaluation of Gandhi's practice of Brahmacharya as a political experiment in liberating man, who otherwise acts as a subject of the colonial, national, patriarchal and biopolitical powers. (shrink)

Lewis S. Feuer shows that the gestation of the hypotheses of original-minded scientists, such as Darwin, Einstein, or Bohr, is in large part a subconscious process. Scientists try to project upon the world structural laws that, beside fitting the given physical realities, will also realize their own emotional longings among alternative worldviews. Repeatedly, too, in examining the standpoints of philosophical figures ranging from Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, and Mill to contemporary figures such as Einstein, Lovejoy, and Hook, Feuer illumines how sociological (...) antipathies project themselves into scientific divergences. Feuer delves into the bearing of emotive beliefs such as pacifism, socialism, anti-Semitism, upon the formation of concurrent worldviews, often fixations of scientific belief, held with the same passion in science as in religion. (shrink)

Despite the many turns that philosophy of technology has undergone in recent decades, the question of the nature and limits of technological determinism (TD) has been neglected, because it was considered as solved and overcome, and therefore not worth further discussion. This paper once again raises the problem of TD, by trying to save the opposing, but complementary elements of truth of the two main forms of TD that I shall call “nomological” and “normative”: (a) technology is all-pervasive and has (...) an inexorable capacity for extending itself into every field of human life, and (b) we have a capacity to counteract and orient technology, at least in some measure. In order to reconcile these seemingly inconsistent claims, the key move for my argument is a brief analysis of the notion of scientific experiment from the perspective of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. As a result, two senses of technology are distinguished, which I shall call respectively “reflective” and “methodological.” From the point of view of this distinction, the all-pervasiveness and inexorability of technology and the in principle irreducibility of human persons to technology—which nomological and normative TD assert dialectically one against the other—can be reconciled. Among other things, this requires the rejection (in one fundamental sense) of the widely held assumption, made both by nomological and normative TD, that technology is a cultural field whose contents can be neatly separated from the rest of human culture. This thesis should be replaced by the more qualified claim of the reflective unity and the methodological multiplicity of technology. (shrink)

The paper investigates the role played by pre-scientific experience in the philosophy of Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl. Such a notion, generally associated with Husserl’s conception of the life-world (Lebenswelt) in the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), finds an equivalent and historical antecedent in Royce’s distinction between a world of description and a world of appreciation. The final goal is to show how, despite their different philosophical frameworks, Royce and Husserl agree on the idea that, through (...) the rejection of the world given through mere perception (Lebenswelt/world of appreciation), European sciences have somehow failed their task of universality. As it will be shown, this idea is also due to methodological affinities among the two thinkers. The experience of interconnectedness among individual minds, while precluded in the mere scientific explanation of the world, it becomes possible through the enactment of the Lebenswelt or, as in Royce’s case, through a return to the experience of the world of appreciation. (shrink)

There are two basic approaches to the problem of induction:the empirical one, which deems that the possibility of induction depends on how theworld was made (and how it works) and the logical one, which considers the formation(and function) of language. The first is closer to being useful for induction, whilethe second is more rigorous and clearer. The purpose of this paper is to create an empiricalapproach to induction that contains the same formal exactitude as the logical approach.This requires: (a) that (...) the empirical conditions for the induction are enunciatedand (b) that the most important results already obtained from inductive logic are againdemonstrated to be valid. Here we will be dealing only with induction by elimination,namely the analysis of the experimental confutation of a theory. The result will bea rule of refutation that takes into consideration all of the empirical aspect of theexperiment and has each of the asymptotic properties which inductive logic has shown tobe characteristic of induction. (shrink)

Preservice teachers' preparedness, perception, and affect toward certain technology systems influence the student acquisition of science knowledge, process skills, teaching innovation, and willingness to use technology in their classroom. The purpose of this study was to explore teachers' affective responses to a virtual reality-enabled scientific experiment system. Fifty-one preservice teachers majoring in educational technology participated in the study. They were divided into two groups, and their reactions were measured separately on two occasions. The first occasion used a standard system (...) following the principle of Donald Norman's affective design model. The VaSE system was then revised with a strict version of ADM before the participants' reactions were measured for a second time. The positive and negative affect scale was utilized for affective state evaluation. Semi-structured interviews that focused on affective experiences were organized using an ADM framework and conducted immediately after the participants used VaSE. The results indicated that the positive affect experienced by the preservice teachers was significantly enhanced, and the negative affect was significantly weakened. Academic level, gender, and prior experience were important random effect factors that impacted the affective experience. It was also revealed that participants were more likely to be affected by immersion and interactivity in terms of enhancing positive affect and were more likely to be affected by behavioral layer elements in terms of weakening negative affect. A conclusion has been drawn to provide theoretical and practical suggestions for training preservice teachers in ways that improve their ability to integrate technology into the classroom. (shrink)

There are few doubts about the significance of science and technology for modern human culture and society. But as historians, we are still struggling to find appropriate descriptive terms to capture the broad processes of transformation brought about by “techno-science,” the merging of technical production and modern institutionalized science. This dissertation argues that the term “experience” may serve as such an analytic lens in the specific historical setting of German aviation research from the 1920s through 1945. I reconstruct, on the (...) one hand, the theorization of experience as a concept by the technical physicist Paul von Handel, influenced by the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington’s distinction between "scientific" and "everyday" experience. On the other hand, I use the term as a historian’s analytic concept to investigate practices in the context of flight experiments that I take to be constitutive of my historical actors’ experiences. These are recordings of experimental pilots’ cognitive judgements and bodily actions, some of them—such as in-flight note taking—continuous with older cultural technologies. On both of these levels of analysis, I explore the different resonances of “experience” as a term with a legacy as a central epistemological concept in the modern sciences, and as capturing the changing everyday reality in an increasingly technicized environment. My analysis of the textual theorization and simultaneous practical constitution of "techno-scientific experience" serves to read in a new light the story of the pilot and physicist Melitta Schiller-Stauffenberg. Of Jewish descent, Schiller chose to work for the Luftwaffe, the German air force, until her death in 1945 on a flight searching for her husband, Count Alexander Stauffenberg, who was imprisoned after his brother’s failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. The concept and practical reality of “experience” are key to understanding the two striking choices Schiller made as intrinsically connected: the professional choice of working simultaneously as a pilot and a physicist, and the political choice of supporting the Reich’s war effort. Schiller’s story may be understood as exemplifying the fragile identity of the experiencing and the knowing self in 20th-century techno-scientific modernity. (shrink)

The philosophical literatures on models and thought experiments have been developing exponentially, and independently, for decades. This independence is surprising, given how similar models and thought experiments are. They each have “lives of their own,” they sit between theory and experience, they are important for both pedagogy and cutting-edge science, they galvanize conceptual changes and paradigm shifts, and they involve entertaining imaginary scenarios and working out what happens. Recently, philosophers have begun to highlight these similarities. This entry aims (...) at taking the idea further, by trying to systematically identify places where insights from one literature can be taken up in the other. Along the way, important differences will also be highlighted. (shrink)

Objective: To analyse medical students’, graduate students’ and doctors’ and medical teachers’ perceptions of research contributions as criteria for authorship in relation to the authorship criteria defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors .Design: Medical students with or without prior instruction on ICMJE criteria, graduate students/doctors and medical teachers rated the importance of 11 contributions as authorship qualifications. They also reported single contributions eligible for authorship, as well as acceptable combinations of two or three qualifying contributions.Results: Conception and (...) design, Analysis and interpretation and Drafting of article formed the most important cluster in all four groups. Students without prior instruction rated Critical revision and Final approval lower than the other three groups. “Final approval” was a part of the least important cluster in all groups except among students with instruction.Conclusions: Conception and design, Analysis and interpretation and Drafting of article were recognised as the most important of the ICMJE criteria by all participants. They can be considered independent of previous instruction or experience. Final approval and Critical revision should be actively taught as important authorship criteria to future scientists. (shrink)

Are science and religion completely independent of each other? Can scientists work exclusively in the scientific domain without being influenced in any way by their own religious or other commitments? These questions have been treated in a number of ways in the course of history. In recent decades, advances in physics and biology have raised new possibilities for a deeper understanding of the issue and for a clearer picture of the right kind of interaction between science, religion, and moral (...) values. (shrink)

I claim that one way thought experiments contribute to scientific progress is by increasing scientific understanding. Understanding does not have a currently accepted characterization in the philosophical literature, but I argue that we already have ways to test for it. For instance, current pedagogical practice often requires that students demonstrate being in either or both of the following two states: 1) Having grasped the meaning of some relevant theory, concept, law or model, 2) Being able to apply (...) that theory, concept, law or model fruitfully to new instances. Three thought experiments are presented which have been important historically in helping us pass these tests, and two others that cause us to fail. Then I use this operationalization of understanding to clarify the relationships between scientific thought experiments, the understanding they produce, and the progress they enable. I conclude that while no specific instance of understanding (thus conceived) is necessary for scientific progress, understanding in general is. (shrink)

Otto Neurath’s empiricist methodology of economics and his contributions to politi- cal economy have gained increasing attention in recent years. We connect this research with contemporary debates regarding the epistemological status of thought experiments by reconstructing Neurath’s utopias as linchpins of thought experiments. In our three reconstructed examples of different uses of utopias/dystopias in thought experiments we employ a reformulation of Häggqvist’s model for thought experiments and we argue that: (1) Our reformulation of Häggqvist’s model more (...) adequately complies with many uses of thought experiments, especially with the open-ended discussions of utopias and dys- topias in thought experiments. (2) As a strict logical empiricist, Neurath is committed to a strictly empiricist account of thought experiments. John Norton’s empiricist argument view can indeed account for the justifications of empirical beliefs and genuine discoveries targeted by scientific utopianism in three distinct (yet connected) ways, all of which Neur- ath already contemplated: (2.I) Dealing with utopias and thought experiments on a regular basis increases creativity and inventiveness. (2.II) Particular ways of presenting knowl- edge facilitate scientific discovery and social progress. (2.III) The use of utopias in thought experiments can prompt conceptual change and allow access to new phenomena. We con- clude by highlighting that, even though thought experiments support a positive attitude for exploring new social possibilities, Neurath points out that active decisions are unavoidable. The exploration of alternatives and the awareness of a need for decisions in policy discus- sion avert a technocratic outlook in social science. (shrink)

Peter Anstey has suggested that in our analyses of early modern natural philosophy we should abandon a frequently used distinction: that between rationalism and empiricism. He argues that we should replace it with another distinction, that between experimental and speculative natural philosophy. The second distinction, he argues, was not only widely used at the time, but has a greater explanatory range. It follows, he suggests, that it is a better way of “carving up” the writings of that period.It is clear (...) that a distinction between experimental and speculative natural philosophy did become common in the late seventeenth-century. But I am less convinced that it is a useful one. This.. (shrink)

What makes conscious experience a difficult or confusing subject for science to deal with is its personal or individualistic character (that is to say the fact that a given experience is an experience apparently tied to a particular individual). It is in this respect very different from the other phenomena studied by science, where while the phenomena may be observed by a particular individual they are considered to be in principle independent of that individual. To say that an individual’s experience (...) is merely the functioning ofthat individual’s brain does not fully resolve the problem, since experiences are so very different in nature from brain processes. (shrink)

This book addresses central issues in the philosophy and metaphysics of science, namely the nature of scientific theories, their partial truth, and the necessity of scientific laws within a moderate realist and empiricist perspective. Accordingly, good arguments in favour of the existence of unobservable entities postulated by our best theories, such as electrons, must be inductively grounded on perceptual experience and not their explanatory power as most defenders of scientific realism claim. Similarly, belief in the reality of (...) dispositions such as causal powers which ground the natural necessity of scientific laws must be based on experience. Hence, this book offers a synthetic presentation of an original metaphysics of science, namely a metaphysics of properties, both categorical and dispositional, while at the same time opposing strong versions of necessitarism according to which laws are true in all possible worlds. The main theses and arguments are clearly presented in a non-technical way. Thus, on top of being of interest to the specialists of the topics discussed, it is also useful as a textbook in courses for third year and more advanced university students. (shrink)

Thought experiments (TEs) are important tools in science, used to both undermine and support theories, and communicate and explain complex phenomena. Their interest within philosophy of science has been dominated by a narrow question: How do TEs increase knowledge? My aim is to push beyond this to consider their broader value in scientific practice. I do this through an investigation into the scientific imagination. Part one explores questions regarding TEs as “experiments in the imagination” via a (...) debate concerning the epistemic status of computer simulations in science. I outline how, against Hacking, TEs also have “a life of their own” and I argue against accounts that privilege experiments over simulations (and by extension TEs) in light of their capacity to surprise in a productive way. Part two develops a pluralist account of the nature of the imagination in science. At its core, my view is that when we attend to a number of examples of TEs and consider the context in which they are used, we see that TEs engage a variety of our imaginative capacities. Existing monistic views fail to recognise the richness of the imagination and its potential in science. Part three looks to the “beauty” of TEs which is currently overlooked in the aesthetics of science literature. I put forward a new account that demonstrates the epistemic value of aesthetic features in science by showing how an appropriate fit between form and content enhances the usability of a TE, and its effectiveness as a prompt for our imagination. This also enables a more nuanced take on the proposed similarities between TEs and literary fictions. In the concluding chapter, I outline ways in which the core features of my account can be extended beyond TEs to illuminate the significance of the imagination and aesthetic values in other areas of science. (shrink)

This paper argues against general claims for the epistemic superiority of experiment over observation. It does so by dissociating the benefits traditionally attributed to experiment from physical manipulation. In place of manipulation, we argue that other features of research methods do confer epistemic advantages in comparison to methods in which they are diminished. These features better track the epistemic successes and failures of scientific research, cross-cut the observation/experiment distinction, and nevertheless explain why manipulative experiments are successful when they (...) are. (shrink)

This article concerns the way in which philosophers study the epistemology of scientific thought experiments. Starting with a general overview of the main contemporary philosophical accounts, we will first argue that two implicit assumptions are present therein: first, that the epistemology of scientific thought experiments is solely concerned with factual knowledge of the world; and second, that philosophers should account for this in terms of the way in which individuals in general contemplate these thought experiments (...) in thought. Our goal is to evaluate these assumptions and their implications using a particular case study: Albert Einstein's magnet-conductor thought experiment. We will argue that an analysis of this thought experiment based on these assumptions – as John Norton (1991) provides – is, in a sense, both misguided (the thought experiment by itself did not lead Einstein to factual knowledge of the world) and too narrow (to understand the thought experiment's epistemology, its historical context should also be taken into account explicitly). Based on this evaluation we propose an alternative philosophical approach to the epistemology of scientific thought experiments which is more encompassing while preserving what is of value in the dominant view. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider V. S. Ramachandran's in-principle agnosticism concerning whether neurological studies of religious experience can be taken as support for the claim that God really does communicate with people during religious experiences. Contra Ramachandran, I argue that it is by no means obvious that agnosticism is the proper scientific attitude to adopt in relation to this claim. I go on to show how the questions of whether it is (1) a scientifically testable claim and (2) a (...) plausible hypothesis, serve to open up some important philosophical issues concerning interpretive backgrounds that are presupposed in the assessment of scientific hypotheses. More specifically, I argue that naturalism or scientific objectivism in its various forms is not simply a neutral or default methodological backdrop for empirical inquiry but involves acceptance of a specific ontology, which functions as an implicit and unargued constitutive commitment. Hence, these neurological studies can be employed as a lever with which to disclose something of the ways in which different frameworks of interpretation, both theistic and atheistic, serve differently to structure and give meaning to empirical findings. (shrink)

Several writers have argued for the implausibility of there being naturalistic explanations of mystical experience. These writers recognize that the evidential significance of mystical experiences for theism depends upon whether explanations that exclude supernatural agency can be discounted; but they seem unaware of some of the best scientific work done in this area. Part I of the present paper introduces the theory of I. M. Lewis, an anthropologist, and tests it against the case of St Teresa. I use Teresa (...) because of her prominence, and because we have considerable biographical data for her. I conclude that Lewis's approach, suitably supplemented, is strikingly successful in explaining this case. (shrink)