Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T05:42:37.203Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

III. Non-Mechanical Concepts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

C. W. Churchman*
Affiliation:
Philosophy Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Extract

The reader will be a patient one indeed who has not long since raised in his mind what appear to be pertinent and pressing problems concerning the description of experimental method that has so far been given. These questions are mainly concerned with matters of omission: for example, we have said that if a lack of control is shown, then the image should be changed. But how changed? What principle or method guides the selection of a new image of nature when the old is no longer permissible? Or again, we have said that “observations should be made“. But what is an observation? What principle or method guides the experimenter in deciding which of his activities are observations?

Type
Probability Theory
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1945

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.)

References

Notes

1 The χ2 test, developed by Karl Pearson in a series of classical articles in Biometrika and elsewhere, is designed to test (among other things) whether a system of deviations from their respective expected values is unlikely; in the case at hand, supposing the original universe known, one can test whether the frequencies given in a table of Tippett's numbers deviate significantly from the original universe from which the numbers were supposedly drawn at random.