Experimental Knowledge in the Face of Theoretical Error

Much of the advancement of scientific knowledge is due to or consists of advances in experimental knowledge. Such experimental progress, moreover, owes a great deal to advances in our understanding of how to systematize, quantify and eliminate error. It is therefore no surprise that the turn by philosophers of science toward error as a subject of interest in its own right is strongly associated with their turn toward experiment, beginning with the ‘New Experimentalists’ in the 1980s. Much of the work that characterized the New Experimentalism in philosophy of science emphasized the idea that, in Hacking’s words, ‘experimentation has a life of its own’, a slogan that could be interpreted differently depending on whether one wished to emphasize the continuity of experimental methods across radical changes in theory, ¹ the possible independence of experimental evidence from theoretical assumptions, ² or the growth of knowledge at the experimental rather than the theoretical level as the driver of scientific advancement. ³