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Reason Enough? More on Parity-Violation Experiments and Electroweak Gauge Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Andy Pickering
Andy Pickering*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Extract

In recent years a unified strategy in dealing with constructivism has been emerging in the writings of historians and philosophers of science. In my own experience, the strategy is exemplified in the long critiques of all or parts of my book, Constructing Quarks (CQ), set out by Paul Roth, Peter Galison and Allan Franklin. These critiques have two common features. First, the substance of constructivist claims is more or less ignored, in favour a fictional version that simply asserts the opposite of what the critic wants to affirm, which is, second, that the evolution of science should be grasped in terms of some relatively simple and unsituated concept of ‘reason’ (or ‘logic’ or ‘persuasive argument’).1 Allan Franklin’s discussion of the history of parity-violation experiments in atomic and high-energy physics exemplifies both of these features.2 Concerning the first, the position he attributes to CQ is summarised as a pure negative: Pickering, he says, ‘obviously doubts that science is a reasonable enterprise based on valid experimental or observational evidence’ (165).3

Type
Part XII. Three Views of Experiment
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 459 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1991

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