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The Influence of Knowledge on the Description of Facts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Dudley Shapere
Dudley Shapere*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Extract

Every inquiry, or at least every inquiry that aims at knowledge, has a subject-matter - that which the inquiry is about, which is the object or set of objects studied. Let us, for the sake of brevity, and without further analysis for the present, call the set of things studied in an investigation the domain of the inquiry, and the particular things that make up the domain the items of the domain. (These “items” might, in particular inquiries, be spoken of as “objects,” “processes,” “behavior,” “facts,” or in still other ways; but such ways of speaking involve problems which, being irrelevant to present purposes, I wish to avoid by speaking more generally of “items.” Sometimes it is convenient to speak of classes of items as themselves items which are objects of investigation.)

Type
Part V. Growth of Scientific Knowledge — To What Extent Does Prior Knowledge Condition the Acquisition of New Knowledge?
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 281 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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References

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