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Scientific Evidence: Creating and Evaluating Experimental Instruments and Research Techniques

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

William Bechtel
William Bechtel*
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
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Extract

The question of how scientific hypotheses and theories should be evaluated in light of evidence has been a central question in philosophy of science. Far less attention has been given to the questions of how evidence is developed and is itself evaluated. From this neglect, one might assume that the processes by which scientists develop and evaluate evidence are unproblematic. An examination of the actual practice of experimental scientists, however, reveals that they are far from unproblematic. Much of the evidence used to assess scientific theories is gathered with elaborate instruments. At a given time many instruments used in a particular science are noncontroversial. The techniques for using them are agreed upon so that, in a fairly routine way, scientists are able to generate evidence to settle empirical or theoretical disputes. To capture the fact that such instruments and techniques are not questioned, Latour (1987) refers to them as black boxes.

Type
Part X. Experiment
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 558 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1990

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Footnotes

1

I gratefully acknowledge the support of a fellowship in the history of cell biology from the American Society for Cell Biology and research grant DIR 89-12106 from the National Science Foundation.

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