Cartwright on theory and experiment in science

Cartwright on theory and experiment in science

E. Feser

The supposition that science amounts to theory plus experiment is, Cartwright observes, widespread among laymen, scientists, and philosophers alike.  The mathematically expressible kind of scientific theory, familiar from modern physics and enshrined in equations like F = ma, is taken to be the gold standard.  From such equations, it is thought, specific observable consequences are predicted, and the point of experimentation is to test these predictions.  And that’s basically it.  Except, as Cartwright shows, that isn’t it, not by a long shot.  In addition to theory and experimentation, there are models, narratives, diagrams, illustrations, concrete applications, and so on.  None of these is reducible to theory or experiment, and neither are they any less essential to the practice and content of science.  And when we take account of them, both science and the world it describes are seen to be far more complicated than the common conception of science and its results implies.

Operationalism held that the solution was to define a theoretical concept in terms of some operation by which the scientist could measure the empirical phenomenon captured by the concept.  But there are several reasons why this won’t work.  For one thing, it entails reductionist analyses that we can independently know to be false.  Cartwright offers the example of behaviorism, which was an application of operationalism to psychology.  The behaviorist would define anger, for example, in terms of the observable behavior on the basis of which we would attribute anger to someone. 

Logical empiricism, as Cartwright notes, was another failed attempt to solve the problem.  The “logical” component of logical empiricism had to do with its application of modern formal logic to the formulation of scientific theories, e.g. as axiomatic systems from which theorems could be deduced.  The “empiricism” component had to do with the idea that the claims of a theory could be verified by observation.  Here too there are several problems. 

For one thing, exactly what counts as an observation? 

There are a few minor political shots but I feel like the bulk of the article is neutral enough politically speaking that I felt it was ok to post it here...