Abstract
“While philosophers and historians commonly speak of science in terms of theory and experiment, when they speak of the development of scientific knowledge, they speak in terms of theory alone.” A decade ago, this observation was generally true. The analysis of experimentation and instrumentation is a relatively new trend in the history and philosophy of science. The post-positivistic philosophy of science tended to focus on the theoretical aspects and created a framework unfriendly to the contributions of experiment, instrumentation, and measurement to scientific knowledge.1 Until very recently, both philosophers and historians of science paid very little attention to the “everyday activities” of scientists in the laboratory.
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Goudaroulis, Y. (1994). Can the History of Instrumentation Tell us Anything About Scientific Practice?. In: Gavroglu, K., Christianidis, J., Nicolaidis, E. (eds) Trends in the Historiography of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 151. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3596-4_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3596-4_12
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