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Deciding on the Data: Epistemological Problems Surrounding Instruments and Research Techniques in Cell Biology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

William Bechtel
William Bechtel*
Affiliation:
Washington University in St. Louis
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Extract

The primary focus of philosophy of science in this century has been on theories and theoretical knowledge. Except for concern about whether phenomenal reports or reports of objects and events should count as data reports and whether data might be theory-laden and what consequences that might have for objectivity of science, data have been taken to be relatively unproblematic. But for scientists, questions about what are the data are often of paramount concern. Such controversies often overshadow controversies over theories or explanatory models. Scientists’ questions about data, moreover, do not turn on the philosophical questions just identified. Instead, for scientists, the overriding question is whether purported data is actually informative about the phenomenon in nature under investigation or whether it represents an artifact; that is, whether it was so much the product of the procedures used to generate the data that it could not be interpreted as providing information about the underlying phenomenon.

Type
Part VI. Search Heuristics, Experimentation, and Technology in Molecular and Cell Biology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 166 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Support for this research was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (RH-21013-91), and is gratefully acknowledged.

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