Abstract
Current scientific practice is often identified with the experimental framework. Yet, what “experimenting” means could be less than perfectly clear. Going beyond the common sense conception of experiment, two broad categories of experiments can be tentatively identified: the generative experiment and the demonstrative experiment. While the former aims at generating new knowledge, new corroborations of hypotheses etc., the latter—which is actually the kind of experiment most laypeople came to terms with in their lives—is designed so that, by being successful, it reverberates knowledge on the experimenters/witnesses, thus instructing them, albeit the experimental outcome was well known beforehand. Prima facie the uninformed observer may not always be able to tell whether an experiment is generative or demonstrative, therefore the existing distinction must rely on something else, namely the framework they are embedded into. The concept of epistemic warfare, recently introduced by Magnani, can be of help in investigating this distinction, also to the scope of showing that it is not a sterile dichotomy but rather a theoretically fruitful continuum, and can help the analysis of epistemically relevant issues such as the repetition/replication of experiments and their potential failure.
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Notes
- 1.
This view on thought experiments is not universal. Some scholars contend that they can in fact be reduced to straightforward arguments [28].
- 2.
- 3.
Hacking [10] contends as well that many phenomena come to happen uniquely as they are created in laboratories.
- 4.
This rule was introduced by Gabbay and Woods as a tenet of their new approach to logic, referring to the fact that logic should model how real agents think: one should try to correct the model so it fits the facts, and not try to amend or obliterate facts to make them fit the model [6, 35]. In this context, I use it to suggest that philosophy of science should match what science really is, and not arbitrarily cut out aspects of the problem by labeling them as external to the analysis (for instance, “social”).
- 5.
The onlooker’s gain of a renewed commitment towards science, be it specific for a particular research/discipline or to scientific endeavor in general, is just as vital for the development of science as the generation of new knowledge through experimentation. Contemporary knowledge societies massively rely on the development of science, which in turn relies on the will of citizens to care and spend for it [17]: funds are just as vital as genius and intelligence for the survival of science. This view is coherent with Magnani’s conception of science as an epistemic warfare [19], which also includes non-epistemic strategies that are nevertheless crucial for science, such as those for the dissemination of knowledge, the acquisition of funding and so on.
- 6.
I specify epistemic target, as the scope of the experiment, to differentiate it from Hacking’s use of the word target, by which he refers to a part of the “materiel” of the experiment (cf. [11, p. 509]).
- 7.
Steinle’s aim in describing exploratory experimentation is to allow the appreciation of the epistemological importance of this kind of experiment, while the “standard view” tended to disregard them as part of epistemically irrelevant discovery processes. Exploratory experiments are particularly relevant for entering new fields requiring new concepts and new general facts [33]. The explanatory experimentation can also be extremely tacit, and consist chiefly of “thinking through doing” [16].
- 8.
Hacking suggests several examples from the actual history of natural science that refute Popper’s claims according to which “theory dominates the experimental work from its initial planning up to the finishing touches in the laboratory” [10, p. 155]. The debate on the theory-ladenness of experimental facts is often brought to quasi-metaphysical issues: one way to tackle it is to appeal to the intuitive notion of theory (as folk theory). Experiments may precede particular theories, and yet rely on past sub-theories about substances, agency, causation etc. Thus, to say that an experiment precedes theory—and so does the experimental observation that follows such experiment—does not indeed equal saying that the experiment generates new coherent knowledge ex nihilo. After all, we could claim that intuitive, hard-wired theory precedes even out every-day observation, even at the lowest levels of the perception of images, sounds etc. [30].
- 9.
This concept is well exemplified by a sign hung in my chemistry laboratory at high school, which would read something along the lines of “If I listen I will forget; if I see I will remember; if I do I will understand”. The experimental dimension is taught as completely subsidiary to abstract theory.
- 10.
Please understand this word in an intuitive sense, as in “What they taught me about the Theory T does indeed happen in real life”, and not as laden with implications about the epistemological debate about the truthfulness or acceptability of a scientific theory.
- 11.
This claim clearly begs for some considerations about the failure of an experiment: I will address this issue in Sect. 3.2.
- 12.
The expression is a bit of an oxymoron, but it means to stress the staged dimension of many demonstrative experiments. Concerns about the esthetic dimension of their replication will be addressed in Sect. 3.1.
- 13.
To make students assimilate this concept, physics teachers often deploy plethoric lists of settings (e.g. here, at the Equator, on mount Everest, on the Moon, on Mars, in a billion years, and so on) where a law (such as “All metal bars expand when heated”) must apply for it to be universal. The different settings correspond to a series of real or potential repetitions of one or more experiment concerning the law in question.
- 14.
“Scientists do not repeat the same experiment ad nauseam. They perform an experiment a ‘sufficient’ number of times (whatever that might be), and then perform it no more. The experiment becomes a part of history, to be performed again, if at all, only by science students as an exercise” [23, p. 248].
- 15.
This conception was rather absent in early modernity: “Recent methodological frameworks highlight robustness, the importance of multiple determinations of experimental outcomes through a variety of independent procedures. While some parts of Fontana’s project could perhaps be reconstructed in hindsight as multiple determinations of experimental results, neither he not Redi [a physician and naturalist at the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany] explicitly called for independent determinations by different means to make an experimental result more reliable” [32, p. 344].
- 16.
Of course, in the latter case, something must be wrong either in one of the procedures, or in the theorization on which the experiment relied. About this issue, see Sect. 3.2.
- 17.
Furthermore, Schickore seems to connect the early-modern care for repetition in se with a chiefly demonstrative dimension: “References to multiple repetitions have been interpreted as an echo of an Aristotelian conception of experience; as a literary device to bolster an experimental report; as a literary tool to highlight the wealth of the experimenters’ patrons; or as an expression of a general commitment to experience that marked the beginning of modern experimental science” [32, p. 329]. Such an understanding of repetition clearly embeds it in a demonstrative framework akin to the non-epistemic strategies advocated by Magnani’s epistemic warfare (see footnote 5). Schickore also hints at how repetition, in Galileo, served as a conceptual wrapper to run experimental observations as general facts: “Claiming results that accrued from trials repeated ‘a full hundred times’ was a way of saying ‘things always behave this way,’ and hoping that the reader would believe it” [4, p. 134].
- 18.
See also footnote 14.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the participants of the MBR’012_Italy conference for the valuable comments on my presentation: many of them contributed to the final form of this paper. In particular, I would like to thank Viola Schiaffonati for the insight about the anomaly of robotics with respect to my distinction.
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Bertolotti, T. (2014). Generative and Demonstrative Experiments. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 8. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37428-9_27
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