ABSTRACT
This book is about the things scientists do in the world with the help of instruments and the understanding they acquire of it as a result. Already in 1620, Francis Bacon could foresee that much could be hoped for from the collaborative work of the hand and of the mind, and alerted to the sterility of the ‘naked hand’ and of the ‘understanding left to itself ’. The naked hands of practical scientists (‘men of experiment’), who were like ants, could only collect and use their gatherings. The minds of the theoretical scientists (‘reasoners’), who were like spiders, could only produce material out of their own substance. Scientists should instead combine both practical and rational
gatherings by a Bacon’s prescriptions and it did so at an ever-increasing pace. The interactive work performed by the hand and the mind has also been extended to the human world, of which experimental economics is a case in point. Yet experiment did not attract the attention of philosophers of science.
Scientists’ practical engagements with the material world were not considered a philosophically interesting subject matter. This is not to say that the role of experiment in science was denied. Quite the contrary. Experiment and the empirical base it provided were simply taken-for-granted. Theory was philosophy’s subject matter par excellence. Only in the latter quarter of the twentieth century did experiment start to
attract philosophers’ interest. But experiment still remains an under-studied subject matter. This book is therefore intended as a contribution to the understanding of the work performed by the hand and the mind in the laboratory. It offers a comprehensive account of scientists’ practical engagements with their objects of study and the knowledge they acquire as a result – the social epistemology of experiment. And it applies this account of experimental practice to the recently established experimental field of economics. This chapter sets the stage for the present work. It briefly reviews the stu-
dies of experiment undertaken thus far and presents the field of experimental economics. The overview of the book is given in the last section.
