The British Society for the Philosophy of Science

Review: The New Experimentalism

Author(s): Robert Ackermann
Source: The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Jun., 1989), pp.
185-190
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Society for the Philosophy of Science
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/687509 .
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Brit.J. Phil.Sci.40 (1989), 185-190 Printedin GreatBritain

REVIEW ARTICLE

TheNew Experimentalism*
Allan Franklin has written an important book that should be requiredreading
for philosophers of science. Franklin, an experimental high-energy physicist
who is now concentrating on the history and philosophy of science, offers
precisely what might be expected from an experimental physicist; a layout of
data concerning experimental sequences in physics. Four important experi-
mental sequences are considered in detail; the discovery of parity nonconser-
vation, the discovery of the failure of CP invariance, Millikan'sdiscovery of the
unit charge of the electron, and the nondiscovery of parity nonconservation.
The last of these, marked by the failure to observe something important, is
especially interesting, since it avoids projectingexperimental sequences worth
recovering as only those that culminate in success. The data gathered from the
experimental sequences is deployed to question existing pronouncements by
philosophers of science on experiment, but Franklin does not develop an
articulated general philosophy of science that incorporates his new experi-
mentalism. This book is a provocation for any current philosopher of science
who would develop an account of science, that could take the details of actual
experimental practice into account.
If philosophers will have to draw some of their own conclusions from
Franklin's study, the significance of his focus on experimentation is worth
some discussion. The philosophy of science that developed out of 20th century
positivism placed a heavy foundational emphasis on observational fact as the
means of controlling theoretical growth, but although theoretical statements
were logically articulated against observational statements in increasingly
sophisticated ways as positivism developed, positivism paid little attention to
the way in which statements of observational fact were produced in
experimental practice. One simply began to philosophize on the assumption
that science was capable of delivering a data base of settled observational
statements. In the vengeful dismantling of positivism undertaken after Kuhn's
work, the old connotations of fact were replaced by assertions that theoretical
expectations somehow determined the observations of science, and later by
suggestions that observations are constructed by groups of scientists engaged
in a social process of negotiation. Neither of these positions is really compatible
with the intuition that experimental observation and theoretical conjecture
* Review of Allan Franklin
[1986]: TheNeglectof Experiment.Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity
Press. xii+290 pp. ISBN 0-521-32016-X.
I86 RobertAckermann
should, somehow, have a symmetrical status with respect to scientific
development, either being capable of producing a temporary fixed point onto
which progress can be hinged. In order to recover this fundamental intuition
based on scientific practice, a number of recent studies have gone back to the
history of science to study experimentationas a means of grounding the nature
and origins of the observational facts that many still think must offer
important objective constraints for scientific theory, at least at certain pivotal
points in scientific development. Empiricism is in this way resurrected
(although transformed) by finding a philosophical account of experimental
data that are especially worth having, and that function as solid hinge points
for controlling theoretical conjectures. Experiment must be important to
science, or it would die out as an outmoded fashion. Some philosophical
account of its ongoing importance seems required.
A philosophical context for Franklin'swork is providedby Hacking [1983].
Hacking suggests that the old model of the structureof science, in which layers
of theory and observation are brought into a logical linkage by such notions as
explanation and confirmation, needs to be replaced by a set of activities in
science including speculation, calculation, and experimentation. These activi-
ties are to be related by the production of (usually simplified) models in a
context that allows clear points of contact, the models being developed with an
eye to easy computation and accessible experimental verifications. Hacking's
survey of the complexity of actual scientific practice makes a powerful case for
the replacement that he proposes. An important point of comparison between
the old notion of observation and the newer concentration on experimentation
is that an experiment is a complex activity undertaken over time (involving the
design and manufacture of equipment, the calibrationof equipment, checks on
the proper functioning of the equipment, etc.) that may issue in observations
that can be reported as data. What's needed in this context is a discussion of
whether specific experimental practices can in some sense legitimate or
validate observational reports, and how the strength of such legitimation
might be taken into account in a philosophy of science. Hacking's suggestion
points to a legitimate area of exploration, but at this point no settled directions
of development for the new experimentalism have come into view.
If the notion of experimentation is to be central to a new philosophy of
science, there are at least two possibilities to consider: that the notion of
experimental legitimation could be exploited towards the end of providing a
new experimental foundationalism, and that the notion of experimental
legitimation could be exploited towards the end of providing a dialectical
account of scientific progress in which either theory or experiment could
provide the temporary support and constraint for the tentative advance of the
other, given the concrete set of scientific practices available at a specific point
in time. Franklin tends towards the first of these options, asking as his central
philosophical questions what role experiment plays in theory selection or
 TheNew Experimentalism 187
confirmation, and how experiments can be organized so as to result in the
rational separation of experimental fact from experimental artifact. But no
matter how persuasively rational a retrospective account of physics experi-
ments may be, such an account cannot settle the question of whether a
methodology involving experimentation can be made applicable to contem-
porary growth points in physical theory. Such a methodology would require a
framing philosophy that Franklin does not provide in philosophically satisfy-
ing detail. At times, Franklinwavers subtly between suggesting that there is an
epistemology that can distinguish experimental fact from artifact, and
suggesting the somewhat more sceptical conclusion that observational facts
can be acceptedas valid when all of the plausible sources of error in the relevant
experimental sequences have been eliminated. The gap between these two
positions could only be closed by a philosophical account of plausibility. In
tending to think of fraud,or outright mistake, rather than of error, as the major
foil to validated experimental work, Franklin slips past some of the difficulties
with the notion of plausibility that seems so crucial to his methodological
remarks. That Franklin hasn't yet closed the gap is evident in his discussion of
Millikan's oil drop experiment, where his account of Millikan's apparently
prescient and simultaneously seemingly arbitrary exclusion of specific data
raises once again the rough details of practice that always seem to cut against
the idea that a generally satisfactory epistemology can be teased out of the
experimental narratives. It is the rough data, contrasted with the philosophical
temptations, that provides the philosophical excitement in Franklin's discus-
sion.
It would seem reasonable to ask whether the narratives offered, no matter
how stimulating in their detail, can be regarded as the indubitable core of the
experimental sequences in question. The reaction to Hanson [1963] suggested
that differentlaboratories involved in the same major experimental sequences
can be inserted at the nodes of a kind of parody of popular accounts of relativity
theory in which each laboratory sees itself as the centre of progress, its own
activities causing the reactions and developments in the other laboratories.
Probably there would be specialist quibbles with these narratives, and
dubieties expressed by some of the participants, but these narratives suggest
that a crucial level of scientific historiography is now being attained by
scientists who become reflective historians of their craft. This kind of internal
history is likely to be decisive in the next stages of piecing together more
adequate philosophies of science. Franklin's narratives are basically exposi-
tory, but the level of exposition depends on some prior knowledge of the
physics involved. Many philosophers will have to put Franklin's book down
and consult other material if they are to get beyond the gist of the reasons for
the experimental sequences. Between the literature suggested in the footnotes
and the bibliography, however, it is possible to come onto a quite detailed
understanding of these experimental sequences and their complexities from a
188 RobertAckermann
rather modest basis. Working at Franklin'stext is likely to put some useful flesh
onto the bare bones of a philosopher's conception of the reporting of
observational data. This is history at a level that should be the input into the
philosophy of science as its experimental check.
An important subtext of Franklin's histories concerns the question of why
experiment has been rigorously neglected in history and philosophy of science
by comparison to theory. Almost all physicists were experimentalists (if also
theorists) until the 20th century, giving physics a grounding in an intimate
knowledge of experimentation that would be difficult to locate in most
philosophical accounts of theorizing in physics. The emerging age of
autonomous theorists was caught up into emerging positivism in a way that
seems in retrospect to have caused experimentalists to recede automatically
into the background, partly because positivism looked at the logical structure
of writtenscientific books and papers, and writing is both essential to history
and yet biased towards the representation of theory. An irony of Franklin's
book is that an actual experimental set-up is only portrayed once in its fully
contingent form, and that in the glorious confusion of apparatus in the dust
jacket photograph. Inside, as an all 'histories' of experimentation, experimen-
tal set-ups are given in schematic diagrams that portray the theory of how
apparatus could work so as to produce meaningful data, and observational
data are represented in the smoothed form gathered from properly working
apparatus (with the notable exception of reproductions of some of Millikan's
data sheets, and some reproductions of electron micrographs). In fact, the
details of experimental sequences represent an almost irrational opportunism
to the orderly philosophical mind. An experimentalist may wish to measure a
certain phenomenon, but have available an apparatus that can only measure
another phenomenon, so that progress involves turning the firstphenomenon
into the second so that it can be measured. It may be that one piece of
apparatus designed to produce the phenomenon to be measured can only be
placed where one would like to place the only apparatus that can apparently
measure the phenomenon. In a dizzyingvariety of such variations, experimen-
talists must permute and adjust what is available in order to simulate what is
desired. The validity of experimental results for scientists often depends on an
intimate scientific grasp of what's available in the way of equipment,
threatening any logical narrative that doesn't fill in this surround with failing
to produce the data required for an understanding of scientific judgments of
validity. The constraints on experimental sequences are but one of the things
that must be more reflectivelyexploredbeforethe inherent problemsin writing
experimental histories can be resolved in a manner that would allow a fuller
probing of the possibilities latent in the new experimentalism for the
philosophy of science.
Galison [1987] provides an associated and complementary look at experi-
mental sequences in physics. Galison asks explicitly why experiments end, that
 TheNew Experimentalism 189
is, why experimenters stop performing a given experiment, and move on to
new ones. A refinement in Galison's account relevant to evaluating Franklinis
that Galison finds the appropriate ending of experiments in his experimental
sequences to depend on the kind of measuring and data analysis devices that
are involved in the sequences. Also dealing with some modern high-energy
experiments, Galison exploits a distinction between an image-producing
apparatus and a counting apparatus. An experiment involving an image-
producing apparatus often ends appropriatelywith a 'golden event,' that is, a
picture or image of something whose existence has been conjectured, but
possibly questioned. An experiment involving a counting apparatus often ends
appropriatelywhen a decision based on some probabilitymodel suggests that
enough counts have been taken for some purpose. A counting sequence will
typically not have quite as decisive a final (ending) event. Galison is not as
concerned with the question of legitimation as Franklin seems to be, noting
that experiments never have a strictly logical terminus, so that the decision to
end experiment always involves risk. Not surprisingly, Galison is more relaxed
about Millikan's missing drops, observing that Millikan's pragmatism and
experienced eye caused him to make decisions that we can recognize in
retrospectas justified. Galison thus moves more towards the philosophical
equipoise of theory and experiment suggested above, and a joint reading of
Galison and Franklin is highly recommended as a way of becoming aware of
the space opened up for consideration by what seem to be two major variants
in the emerging new experimentalism.
It has already been noted that Franklin attacks some extant philosophical
opinion on the basis of his narratives. At times, some very sharp points against
philosophical opinion are scored. For example, philosophers who suppose that
increasing refinement of experimental technique and instrumentation will
cause a gradual (or asymtotic) approximation of the true data values should be
shocked by Franklin'sdecisive counterexamples in which sudden large leaps to
new values can be observed in experimental sequences that seemed to have
been converging to 'correct' values. At times, there is an apparent fixation on
the past of the philosophy of science. Franklin worries too much about the
Quine-Duhem problem, which he would like to outflank by an elaborate
Bayesian solution involving an experimentalist setting of the prior probabili-
ties of auxiliary hypotheses. The Quine-Duhem problem is generated within
the old philosophy of science by its reliance on the logicalarticulation of theory
and observation. A more thorough reworking of philosophical concerns
within the new philosophy of replacements suggested by Hacking would make
the Quine-Duhem problems, as it is traditionallyformulated, simply irrelevant.
The models used to connect theory and data, or more properly theoretical and
experimental activity, are not in general logical consequences of accepted
statements of theory or data, but simplifications of complexity chosen by an
adroit manipulation of simplifications against the background of the accepted
mathematical practices.
Igo90 Robert Ackermann

The philosophy of science seems to be in a state of flux, and the possibilities

opened up by the new experimentalists seem to offer genuine hope for a
recovery of some of the solid intuitions of the past about the objectivity of
science, but in the context of a much more detailed and articulate understand-
ing of actual scientific practice. If the studies of experimental sequences now
being offered seem driven by the old paradigm of physics as central, these
studies provide plenty of material for intelligent cross-fertilization and new
theorizing as more data on experimentation in other sciences becomes
available. Franklin'sbook should continue to be central in new developments.
ROBERTACKERMANN
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst

REFERENCES
GALISON, P. [1987] How ExperimentsEnd. Chicago:The Universityof ChicagoPress.
HACKING, I. [1983]: Representingand Intervening.Cambridge:Cambridge University
Press.
HANSON, N. [1963]: TheConceptof the Positron.Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversityPress.