Articulating the World: Experimental Systems and Conceptual Understanding

Abstract

Attention to scientific practice offers a novel response to philosophical queries about how conceptual understanding is empirically accountable. The locus of the issue is thereby shifted, from perceptual experience to experimental and fieldwork interactions. More important, conceptual articulation is shown to be not merely ‘spontaneous’ and intralinguistic, but instead involves a establishing a systematic domain of experimental operations. The importance of experimental practice for conceptual understanding is especially clearly illustrated by cases in which entire domains of scientific investigation were first made accessible to articulated conceptual understanding. We thereby see more clearly how experimental systems themselves, and not merely the theories and models they make possible, have an intentional directedness and ‘representational’ import.

Acknowledgements

This paper originated as a keynote address to the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice at the University of Twente in August 2007. I thank the organizers of the Society for this opportunity, and the audience at the meeting for their many helpful questions and comments.

Notes

Although I will not belabour the point here, it is relevant to my subsequent treatment of experimental systems that, strictly speaking, the Michelson-Morley experiment does not instantiate the constant velocity of light in different inertial frames, since the experiment is conducted in an accelerated rather than an inertial setting.

Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, ch. 6, 1048a (1941). Hacking's initial discussion of the creation of phenomena criticized just this conception of phenomena as implicit or potential components of more complex circumstances:

• We tend to feel [that] the phenomena revealed in the laboratory are part of God's handiwork, waiting to be discovered. Such an attitude is natural from a theory-dominated philosophy. … Since our theories aim at what has always been true of the universe—God wrote the laws in His Book, before the beginning—it follows that the phenomena have always been there, waiting to be discovered. I suggest, in contrast, that the Hall effect does not exist outside of certain kinds of apparatus. … The effect, at least in a pure state, can only be embodied by such devices. (Hacking 1983, 225–226)

Notable defences of the systematic character of experimental systems and traditions include Galison (1987, 1997), Kohler (1994), Rheinberger (1997), Klein (2003), and Chang (2004).

Fleck, at least, was not unaware of the role of experimental systems in conceptual articulation, although he did not quite put it in those terms. One theme of his study of the Wassermann reaction was its connection to earlier vague conceptions of ‘syphilitic blood’, both in guiding the subsequent development of the reaction, and also thereby articulating more precisely the conceptual relations between syphilis and blood. He did not, however, explicitly connect the systematicity of experimental practice with its conceptual-articulative role. Hacking was likewise also often concerned with conceptual articulation (especially in the papers collected in Hacking 2002 and 1999), but this concern was noticeably less evident in his discussions of laboratory science (e.g. Hacking 1983, chs 12, 16; Hacking 1992).

My emphasis upon inferential articulation as the definitive feature of conceptualization is strongly influenced by Brandom (1994, 2000, 2002), with some important critical adjustments (see Rouse 2002, chs 5–7). Inferential articulation is not equivalent to linguistic expression, since conceptual distinctions can function implicitly in practice without being explicitly articulated in words at all. Scientific work is normally sufficiently self-conscious that most important conceptual distinctions are eventually marked linguistically. Yet the central point of this paper is to argue that the inferential articulation of scientific concepts must incorporate the systematic development of a domain of phenomena within which objects can manifest the appropriate conceptual differences. The experimental practices that open such a domain thereby make it possible to form judgements about entities and features within that domain, but the practices themselves already articulate ‘judgeable contents’ prior to the explicit articulation of judgements.

The distinctively revealing character of negative descriptions was brought home to me by Hanna and Harrison (2004, ch. 10).

Classical-genetic loci within any single chromosome are especially cogent illustrations of my larger line of argument, since prior to the achievement of DNA sequencing, any given location was only identifiable by its relations to other loci on the same chromosome. The location of a gene was relative to a field of other genetic loci, which were in turn only given as relative locations.

Chang (2004) points out that in the case of state changes in water, ironically, ordinary ‘impurities’ such as dust or dissolved air, and surface irregularities in its containers, helped maintain the constancy of boiling or freezing points; removing the impurities and cleaning the contact surfaces allowed water to be ‘supercooled’ or ‘superheated’. My point still holds, however, that canonical circumstances needed to be defined in order to specify the relevant concept, in this case temperature.

For detailed discussion, see Nanney (1983). Sapp (1987) sets this episode in the larger context of debates over cytoplasmic inheritance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Rouse

Joseph Rouse is at the Department of Philosophy, Wesleyan University.