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Abstract
With the introduction of large commercial industrial laboratories at the end of the nineteenth century, many types of experiments were institutionalized that do not aim at testing hypotheses. This paper builds a typology of experiments in techno-science, by analysing more than two hundred and fifty real-life technical projects. This resulted in four testing types (tests of hypotheses, of designs, of means-end knowledge, and of models or software), three determining types (developing working principles, preferred actions, and determining values of variables or relationships between variables) and one trial-and-error type of pure exploration. The typology is developed by working back and forth between thick descriptions of the experiments including their goals, and the development of six criteria of differentiation, to wit: determining versus testing; measurement scales of (in)dependent variables; intrinsic versus instrumental value of the outcomes; proximate function of the outcome; distant role of the outcome in the embedded project; the descriptive or normative character of the proximate or distant outcomes. The typology opens up inspiring methodological and philosophical research questions.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges fruitful discussions about experiments with Maarten Franssen and Léna Soler.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Marcorini, The History of Science and Technology, 367.
2 Gordon, “10 Moments That Made American Business.”
3 Franklin and Perovic, “Experiment in Physics.”
4 Hacking, Representing and Intervening.
5 Cf. Vaclav Smil’s characterization of the period 1867–1914 as ‘The Age of Synergy’. Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century.
6 Zwart and de Vries, “Methodological Classification of Innovative Engineering Projects.”
7 We take engineering projects as plans in the sense of Bratman’s Intention, plans, and practical reason.
8 Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science”, 90.
9 Norton, Dynamic Fields and Waves, 83.
10 Shankland, “Michelson–Morley Experiment,” 32.
11 For similar reasons Hansson writes “we should distinguish between … interpretations of experiments. It is conceivable for one and the same experiment to be used for both purposes, i.e. interpreted in both ways”. Hansson, “Farmers’ Experiments and Scientific Methodology,” note 2.
12 Bratman, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason, section 3.1.
13 Einstein: “If the Michelson–Morley experiment had not brought us into serious embarrassment, no one would have regarded the relativity theory as a (halfway) redemption.” Fölsing, Albert Einstein.
14 Note that this distinction depends on thick descriptions.
15 Boyle, A defence of the doctrine touching the spring and weight of the air, 58. To what extent the historical Boyle was ambivalent in his commitment to "Boyle type" experiments we leave to the historians of science. Here it should be taken as just a label.
16 Hansson, “Experiments Before Science.”
17 In practice, developing the details of a design, and testing them, often alternate in an iterative design process.
18 Hansson, “Farmers’ Experiments and Scientific Methodology.” Kroes’s practical experiments also seem similar, but the learning involved there is suggested not to be based on “regularities and control” but on storytelling. Kroes, “Design Methodology and the Nature of Technical Artefacts,” 32.
19 Here, we leave aside that the Swan/Raven experiments inspired Froude to research the question why the 6ft to 12ft models scaling satisfied Frédéric Reech’s (1805–1884) scaling law, and the scaling from 3ft to 6ft did not. This led eventually to Froude’s famous quantitative scaling method.
20 Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know it, 139.
21 E.g. Carlton, Marine Propellers and Propulsion, 93.
22 Steinle, “Experiments in History and Philosophy of Science”, S70.
23 Hansson, “Experiments Before Science,” 99.
24 Cf. e.g. Stanley and Williamson, “Knowing How.”
25 This does not make the computational simulations themselves physical experiments.
26 Silver et al., “A General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm that Masters Chess, Shogi, and Go Through Self-Play.”
27 This type also harbors those experiments carried out outside a specific research project living “a life of [their] own.” Hacking, Representing and Intervening, xiii; Franklin and Perovic, “Experiment in Physics”.
28 Steinle “Experiments in History and Philosophy of Science.”
29 Burian, “Exploratory Experimentation”.
30 Steinle, “Experiments in History and Philosophy of Science,” S69.
31 Steinle, Ibid., S70. See also Franklin, “Exploratory Experiments”; Elliott, “Varieties of Exploratory Experimentation in Nanotoxicology”; Waters, “The Nature and Context of Exploratory Experimentation”; Karaca, “A Case Study in Experimental Exploration.”
32 Steinle, “Experiments in History,” (S69) and (S71), respectively.
33 Hansson, “Experiments Before Science.”; “Experiments: Why and How?”; “Farmers’ Experiments and Scientific Methodology.”
34 Hansson, “Farmers’ Experiments and Scientific Methodology,” note 2.
35 Hansson, “Experiments Before Science,” 92.
36 Steinle, “Entering New Fields,” S69.
37 Hansson, “Farmers’ Experiments and Scientific Methodology,” note 2,
38 Zwart and de Vries, “Methodological Classification of Innovative Engineering Projects.”
39 De Groot, Methodology, section 1.1.
40 Note that the use of the six types mentioned needs the criteria 3–5 of section 2.
41 Bratman, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason, sect.3.1.
42 Zwart and Kroes, “Substantive and Procedural Contexts of Engineering Design.”
43 Hansson, “Experiments Before Science,” 99.
44 Hansson, Ibid., 99.
45 Maarten Franssen pointed out this issue.
46 It already gave rise to the acknowledgment of the directionless experiments in section 3.1.1.
47 James, The Meaning of Truth, preface.
48 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. “I argue that the attempt (which has defined traditional philosophy) to explicate "rationality" and "objectivity" in terms of conditions of accurate representation is a self-deceptive effort to eternalize the normal discourse of the day” p.11.