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Experimental Localism and External Validity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Francesco Guala
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Abstract

Experimental “localism” stresses the importance of context-specific knowledge, and the limitations of universal theories in science. I illustrate Latour's radical approach to localism and show that it has some unpalatable consequences, in particular the suggestion that problems of external validity (or how to generalize experimental results to nonlaboratory circumstances) cannot be solved. In the last part of the paper I try to sketch a solution to the problem of external validity by extending Mayo's error-probabilistic approach.

Type
Science and Social Context
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 70 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers , December 2003 , pp. 1195 - 1205
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Financial and logistic support from the Cognitive Science Laboratory of the University of Trento, where this paper was written, is gratefully acknowledged. Matteo Motterlini provided useful comments on an earlier version—of course all the remaining mistakes are mine.

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