ABSTRACT
Although experimentation has been a staple feature of modern science since the seventeenth century, it was only recently, during the 1980s, that experimental practice attracted the attention of philosophers of science. This chapter addresses some of the salient philosophical issues concerning experiment and its relation to theory that emerged in that period. I will argue that the philosophical analysis of experimentation compels us to reconsider a central tenet of post-positivist philosophy of science, namely the theory-ladenness of observation and its implications for theory choice. To place contemporary philosophical debates on experiment in historical perspective, I start with a brief sketch of the birth of systematic experimentation in the seventeenth century. (For a more detailed history and a bibliography see Arabatzis 2005.)
In Aristotelian natural philosophy, which had been dominant until the seventeenth century, unaided observation and everyday experience played a prominent role in the investigation of nature. In the seventeenth century that role was gradually taken over by experiment – the active interrogation of nature, an intervention in natural processes, and a manipulation of nature’s forces. The rise of experimentation, of which Francis Bacon was an early and influential advocate, was accompanied by the invention of new scientific instruments that performed three different functions. First, they expanded the senses (e.g., the telescope, the microscope). Second, they made possible the production of controlled and, sometimes, artificial conditions (e.g., the air-pump); under those conditions new phenomena were created. Third, they were used to register the quantitative changes of a physical magnitude (e.g., the barometer).
