Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T17:59:51.299Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Do We See Through a Social Microscope?: Credibility as a Vicarious Selector

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Douglas Allchin
Douglas Allchin*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at El Paso
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Credibility in a scientific community (sensu Shapin) is a vicarious selector (sensu Campbell) for the reliability of reports by individual scientists or institutions. Similarly, images from a microscope (sensu Hacking) are vicarious selectors for studying specimens. Working at different levels, the process of indirect reasoning and checking indicates a unity to experimentalist and sociological perspectives, along with a resonance of strategies for assessing reliability. The perspective sketched here can open dialogue between philosophical and sociological interpretations of science and resolves at least one tension regarding the “primary” factors by which scientists evaluate claims.

Type
Philosophy of Social Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 66 , Issue S3: Supplement. Proceedings of the 1998 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers Sep., 1999 , 1999 , pp. S287 - S298
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

Department of Biological Sciences, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso TX 79968.

References

Bechtel, William and Richardson, Richard (1993), Discovering Complexity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Campbell, Donald T. (1974), “Evolutionary Epistemology”, in Schilpp, P. A. (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Popper. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 413–463.Google Scholar
Culp, Sylvia (1994), “Defending Robustness: The Bacterial Mesosome as a Test Case”, in Hull, D., Forbes, M., and Burian, R.M. (eds.), PSA 1994, vol. 1. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 46–57.Google Scholar
Franklin, Allan (1997), “Calibration”, Perspectives on Science 5: 31–80.Google Scholar
Goodman, Nelson (1954), Fact, Fiction and Forecast. London: University of London (Athlone Press).Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian (1981), “Do We See Through a Microscope?”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62: 305–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacking, Ian. (1983), Representing and Intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, David (1988), Science as a Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno (1987), Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve (1979), Laboratory Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Pickering, Andrew (1995), The Mangle of Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothbart, D. and Slayden, S. W. (1994), “The Epistemology of a Spectrometer”, Philosophy of Science 61: 25–38.10.1086/289778CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapin, Steve (1994), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toumey, Christopher P. (1997), Conjuring Science: Scientific Symbols and Cultural Meaning in American Life. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, William C. (1981), “Robustness, Reliability and Overdetermination”, in Brewer, M. and Collins, B. (eds.), Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 124–163.Google Scholar