The Philosophical Grammar of Scientific Practice

Abstract

I seek to provide a systematic and comprehensive framework for the description and analysis of scientific practice—a philosophical grammar of scientific practice, ‘grammar’ as meant by the later Wittgenstein. I begin with the recognition that all scientific work, including pure theorizing, consists of actions, of the physical, mental, and ‘paper-and-pencil’ varieties. When we set out to see what it is that one actually does in scientific work, the following set of questions naturally emerge: who is doing what, why, and how? More specifically, we must arrive at some coherent philosophical accounts of the following elements of scientific practice: the agent—free, embodied, and constantly in second-person interactions with other agents; the purposes and proximate aims of the agent; types of activities that the agent engages in; ontological principles necessarily presumed for the performance of particular activities; instruments and other resources that the agent pulls together for the performance of each activity. After sketching the general framework, I also give some illustrative contrasts between the more traditional descriptions of scientific practice and the kind of descriptions enabled by the proposed framework.

Acknowledgements

This paper is an updated version of the opening keynote address on 23 August 2007 at the First Biennial Conference of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP). I would like to thank my fellow organizers of SPSP for making the whole enterprise possible, especially Mieke Boon and the University of Twente for hosting the inaugural conference; there have now been two further biennial conferences, at the University of Minnesota (2009) and the University of Exeter (2011). Members of the local SPSP branch in London helped me generate and sharpen the ideas expressed here. I thank Grant Fisher and Sabina Leonelli for very helpful comments on an earlier draft, and the late David Gooding for his encouragement and comments on a related presentation.

Notes

Krieger continues with a more nuanced judgement: ‘This does not mean that these latter descriptions are wrong, but rather that they are governed by the demands of scholarly inquiry within particular disciplines.’

On Wittgenstein on grammar, see Baker and Hacker (1985); Wittgenstein's Philosophical Grammar itself is not explicit on what is meant by ‘grammar’.

See Chang (2011, §2) for further details.

David Gooding, among others, has made a strenuous and effective advocacy of ‘putting agency back’ into descriptions of scientific activity; see Gooding (1992) and references therein to his other works.

See, for example, Noë (2005) and many references therein.

We may ask: can we have meaningful second-person relationships with beings that are not individual humans? (The opposite is clear: we can fall into having less than second-person relationships with other human beings.) Some people clearly do have second-person relationships with some animals, but can we have second-person relationships with inanimate objects or systems? Do we, in any sense that is more than purely metaphorical, know and respond to the habits, temperaments, decisions, preferences and capabilities of our experimental apparatus and specimens, for example? Are Latourian ‘non-human actants’ ever really second persons?

See De Regt, Leonelli, and Eigner (2009) for a collection of many interesting attempts. My own peculiar notion of understanding is expressed in a chapter in that volume (Chang 2009a).

I thank David Teira for my basic education on these matters, which he gave me in the course of writing his recently completed PhD dissertation at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hasok Chang

Hasok Chang is at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.