‘Experiment Lives a Life of its Own!’

This familiar slogan is often thought to capture the epistemic importance and power attributed to experiment. But decades after Hacking and others popularized it in philosophical circles, we are still in need of building a full-bodied philosophy of experiment.

1. • How should we understand this slogan?

2. • Where does the separate life of experiment take place?

3. • How does it manage to get a life of its own?

4. • Why should it want its own life?

Beginning with the first question, we may consider three interrelated glosses on the ‘own life’ slogan.

Experimental Aims: Apart from Theory Appraisal

The first sense in which experiment may be said to have its own life concerns experimental aims: to find things out quite apart from testing or appraising any theory. The goals are the local ones of obtaining, modelling and learning from experimental data: checking instruments, ruling out extraneous factors, getting accuracy estimates, distinguishing real effect from arte fact, signal from noise. Experiments are often directed at taking up the challenge of designing better experiments: how can we learn more, and do it faster? How can we more cleverly circumvent flaws and limitations?

To begin with, researchers wish to explore whether there is even something worth investigating. There may be no theory in place to flesh out, much less to test. The very domain in which any eventual theory might live may be unclear.