Uljana Feest

The authors provide an overview of philosophical discussions about the roles of experiment in science. First, they cover two approaches that took shape under the heading of “new experimentalism” in the 1980s and 1990s. One approach was primarily concerned with questions about entity realism, robustness, and epistemological strategies. The other has focused on exploratory experiments and the dynamic processes of experimental research as such, highlighting its iterative nature and drawing out the ways in which such research is grounded in experimental systems, concepts and operational definitions. Second, the authors look at more recent philosophical work on the epistemology of causal inference, in particular highlighting discussions in the philosophy of the behavioral and social sciences, concerning the extrapolation from laboratory contexts to the world.

I offer an analysis of operationism in psychology, which is rooted in an historical study of the investigative practices of two of its early proponents (S. S. Stevens and E. C. Tolman). According to this analysis, early psychological operationists emphasized the importance of experimental operations and called for scientists to specify what kinds of operations were to count as empirical indicators for the referents of their concepts. While such specifications were referred to as “definitions,” I show that such definitions were not taken to constitute a priori knowledge or be analytically true. Rather, they served the pragmatic function of enabling scientists to do research on a purported phenomenon. I argue that historical and philosophical discussions of problems with operationism have conflated it, both conceptually and historically, with positivism, and I raise the question of what are the “real” issues behind the debate about operationism.

The chapter argues that whereas traditional accounts of progress have typically focused on scientific theories (evaluating them with regards to their truthlikeness or their explanatory and predictive success), we should pay closer attention to efforts of forming and developing scientific concepts (evaluating them with regards to how well such concepts serve the respective aims of research, which can include, but are not limited to, explanation and prediction). If we focus on concepts rather than theories, our attention is drawn to the questions of (a) what is the status of the subject matter of psychological research and (b) what are basic requirements for conceptual progress with regards to this subject matter.

The conceptual pair of "Erklären" and "Verstehen" (explanation and understanding) has been an object of philosophical and methodological debates for well over a century. Discussions – to this day – are centered around the question of whether certain objects or issues, such as those dealing with humans or society, require a special approach, different from that of the physical sciences. In the course of such philosophical discussions, we frequently find references to historical predecessors, such as Dilthey’s discussion of the relationship between "Geisteswissenschaft" and "Naturwissenschaft", Windelband’s distinction between nomothetic and idiographic methods, or Weber’s conception of an interpretative sociology. However, these concepts are rarely placed in the historical contexts of their emergence. Nor have the shifting meanings of these terms been analyzed. The present volume considers a variety of intellectual, social, and material factors that contributed to the debate. Far from reducing the debates to their cultural and institutional contexts, however, the volume also offers careful systematic reconstructions of the arguments at hand, thereby enabling the reader to not only appreciate the situatedness of this exciting period of intellectual history, but also to reflect upon the current relevance of the various interpretations of the dichotomy between explanation and understandin