Observation and Experiment in the Natural and Social Sciences

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. From Throry to Experiment and Back Again

   • Patrick Suppes

   Pages 1-41

3. NaÏve Probability

   • Paolo Legrenzi

   Pages 43-55

4. From Theory to Experiments and Back Again ... and Back Again ... Comments on Patrick Suppes

   • LÀszlÓ E. SzabÓ

   Pages 57-62

5. Emergence and Future of Experimental Economics

   • Reinhard Selten

   Pages 63-70

6. Rationality in Experimental Economics: An Analysis of Reinhard Selten’s Approach

   • Wenceslao J. Gonzalez

   Pages 71-83

7. Experiments, Heuristics and Social Diversity: A Comment on Reinhard Selten

   • Roberto Scazzieri

   Pages 85-98

8. Where do New Ideas Come From? a Heuristics of Discovery in the Cognitive Sciences

   • Gerd Gigerenzer

   Pages 99-139

9. Comments on Gerd Gigerenzer

   • David Papineau

   Pages 141-151

10. On the Concept of Discovery Comments on Gerd Gigerenzer

    • Jeanne Peijnenburg

    Pages 153-158

11. Styles of Experimentation

    • Ursula Klein

    Pages 159-185

12. On French Concepts and Objects Comments on Ursula Klein

    • Aristides Baltas

    Pages 187-197

13. Some Comments on “Styles of Experimentation” by Ursula Klein

    • Donald Gillies

    Pages 199-201

14. Improving “Styles of Experimentation” a Comment on Ursula Klein

    • GÜrol Irzik

    Pages 203-207

15. Experiments and Thought Experiments in Natural Science

    • David Atkinson

    Pages 209-225

16. The Advantages of Theft Over Honest Toil Comments on David Atkinson

    • Daniel Andler

    Pages 227-236

17. Thinking About Thought Experiments in Physics Comment on “Experiments and Thought Experiments in Natural Science”

    • MiklÓs RÉdei

    Pages 237-241

18. The Dynamics of Thought Experiments A Comment on David Atkinson

    • Michael StÖltzner

    Pages 243-258

19. An Attempt at a Philosophy of Experiment

    • Giora Hon

    Pages 259-284

20. An Attempt at a Philosophy of Experimental Error a Comment on Giora Hon

    • Raffaella Campaner

    Pages 285-293

According to a long tradition in philosophy of science, a clear cut distinction can be traced between a context of discovery and a context of justification. This tradition dates back to the birth of the discipline in connection with the Circles of Vienna and Berlin, in the twenties and thirties of last century. Convicted that only the context of justification is pertinent to philosophy of science, logical empiricists identified its goal with the “rational reconstruction” of scientific knowledge, taken as the clarification of the logical structure of science, through an analysis of its language and methods. Stressing justification as the proper field of application of philosophy of science, logical empiricists intended to leave discovery out of its remit. The context of discovery was then discarded from philosophy of science and left to sociology, psychology and history. The distinction between context of discovery and context of justification goes hand in hand with the tenet that the theoretical side of science can – and should – be kept separate from its observational and experimental components. Further, the final, abstract formulation of theories should be analysed apart from the process behind it, resulting from a tangle of context-dependent factors. This conviction is reflected by the distinction between theoretical and observational sentences underpinning the Hempelian view of theories as nets, whose knots represent theoretical terms, floating on the plane of observation, to which it is anchored by rules of interpretation.

• experimentation
• heuristics
• philosophy of science
• probability
• science

• University of Bologna, Italy

  Maria Carla Galavotti

Policies and ethics