Observation and Experiment in the Natural and Social Sciences

According to a long tradition in philosophy of science, a clear cut distinction can be traced between a context of discovery and a context of justification. This tradition dates back to the birth of the discipline in connection with the Circles of Vienna and Berlin, in the twenties and thirties of last century. Convicted that only the context of justification is pertinent to philosophy of science, logical empiricists identified its goal with the "rational reconstruction" of scientific knowledge, taken as the clarification of the logical structure of science, through an analysis of its language and methods. Stressing justification as the proper field of application of philosophy of science, logical empiricists intended to leave discovery out of its remit. The context of discovery was then discarded from philosophy of science and left to sociology, psychology and history. The distinction between context of discovery and context of justification goes hand in hand with the tenet that the theoretical side of science can - and should - be kept separate from its observational and experimental components. Further, the final, abstract formulation of theories should be analysed apart from the process behind it, resulting from a tangle of context-dependent factors. This conviction is reflected by the distinction between theoretical and observational sentences underpinning the Hempelian view of theories as nets, whose knots represent theoretical terms, floating on the plane of observation, to which it is anchored by rules of interpretation.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

From Throry to Experiment and Back Again.- NaÏve Probability.- From Theory to Experiments and Back Again ... and Back Again ... Comments on Patrick Suppes.- Emergence and Future of Experimental Economics.- Rationality in Experimental Economics: An Analysis of Reinhard Selten's Approach.- Experiments, Heuristics and Social Diversity: A Comment on Reinhard Selten.- Where do New Ideas Come From? a Heuristics of Discovery in the Cognitive Sciences.- Comments on Gerd Gigerenzer.- On the Concept of Discovery Comments on Gerd Gigerenzer.- Styles of Experimentation.- On French Concepts and Objects Comments on Ursula Klein.- Some Comments on "Styles of Experimentation" by Ursula Klein.- Improving "Styles of Experimentation" a Comment on Ursula Klein.- Experiments and Thought Experiments in Natural Science.- The Advantages of Theft Over Honest Toil Comments on David Atkinson.- Thinking About Thought Experiments in Physics Comment on "Experiments and Thought Experiments in Natural Science".- The Dynamics of Thought Experiments A Comment on David Atkinson.- An Attempt at a Philosophy of Experiment.- An Attempt at a Philosophy of Experimental Error a Comment on Giora Hon.- O Happy Error a Comment on Giora Hon.- Bayesian Evidence.- On Bayesian Logic Comments on Colin Howson.- On Bayesian Induction (and Pythagoric Arithmetic).- Probability and Logic Comments on Colin Howson.