A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

3. New Experimentalism

New Experimentalists share the view that a number of problems, such as the underdetermination of theory by empirical knowledge, the theory-ladenness of observation, and extreme skeptical positions – such as social constructivist – that result from it, stem from the theory-dominated perspective on science of positivistic philosophers of science. They defend that focusing on aspects of experiments and instruments in scientific practice holds the key to avoiding these problems. Some of the key figures of this movement in the 1980s and early 1990s are Ian Hacking, Nancy Cartwright, Allan Franklin, Peter Galison, Ronald Giere, Robert Ackermann, and more recently Deborah Mayo. These authors do not accept the restriction to the logic of science that positivistic philosophers had set for themselves. Traditional philosophical accounts of how observation provides an objective basis for evaluation of theories – by the use of confirmation theory or inductive logic – should be replaced by accounts of science that reflect how experimental knowledge is actually arrived at and how this knowledge functions. The traditional distinction between the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification,” which motivated why philosophers should restrict their task to the logic of justification of scientific theories, is abandoned. New Experimentalists, instead, aim at an account of the rationality of scientists in scientific practices that includes how scientists reason about ...