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III. Non-Mechanical Concepts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

C. W. Churchman
C. W. Churchman*
Affiliation:
Philosophy Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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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
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , July 1945 , pp. 165 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1945

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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.