Hans Radder

TWO OPPOSING VIEWS ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP between concepts and the world can be found in the history of philosophy. One view—deriving from Immanuel Kant and endorsed by Karl Popper, among many others—claims that in forming and using concepts we structure the world. Concepts produce or increase order. Hence, the world, insofar as it is knowable by human beings, is necessarily a conceptually structured world. The second, still older view—represented by the Aristotelian tradition and by John Locke, for example—holds that concepts are formed by abstracting from the particularities of the world. By leaving out the accidental or irrelevant features of particular entities, we abstract a concept as a general representative of a kind.

Since the late 1980s, the neglect of experiment by philosophers and historians of science has been replaced by a keen interest in the subject. In this volume, a number of prominent philosophers of experiment directly address basic theoretical questions, develop existing philosophical accounts, and offer novel perspectives on the subject, rather than rely exclusively on historical cases of experimental practice. Each essay examines one or more of six interconnected themes that run throughout the collection: the philosophical implications of actively and intentionally interfering with the material world while conducting experiments; issues of interpretation regarding causality; the link between science and technology; the role of theory in experimentation involving material and causal intervention; the impact of modeling and computer simulation on experimentation; and the philosophical implications of the design, operation, and use of scientific instruments.

In his influential book, "Changing Order", H.M. Collins puts forward the following three claims concerning experimental replication. (i) Replication is rarely practiced by experimentalists; (ii) replication cannot be used as an objective test of scientific knowledge claims, because of the occurrence of the so-called experimenters' regress; and (iii) stopping this regress at some point depends upon the enculturation in a local community of practitioners, who tacitly learn the relevant skills. In my paper I discuss and assess these claims on the basis of a more comprehensive analysis of experimentation and experimental reproducibility. The main point is that Collins' claims are not, strictly speaking, wrong, but rather too one-sided and therefore inadequate. This point also calls for a reconsideration of the radical (social constructivist) conclusions that Collins has drawn from his studies of scientific experimentation.