How do Scientists Reach Agreement about Novel Observations?

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 17 (2):205 (1986)
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Abstract

I outline a pragmatic view of scientists' use of observation which draws attention to non-discursive, instrumental and social contexts of observation, in order to explain scientists' agreement about the appearance and significance of new phenomena. I argue that: observation is embedded in a network of activities, techniques, and interests; that experimentalists make construals of new phenomena which enable them communicate exploratory techniques and their outcomes, and that empirical enquiry consists of communicative, exploratory and predictive strategies whose interdependence ensures that, notwithstanding the constructedness of representations and the empirical underdetermination of theories, observations contain information about the natural world

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Citations of this work

Experiments in history and philosophy of science.Friedrich Steinle - 2002 - Perspectives on Science 10 (4):408-432.
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Visualizing Scientific Inference.David C. Gooding - 2010 - Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (1):15-35.
Credentialing scientific claims.Frederick Suppe - 1993 - Perspectives on Science 1 (2):153-203.

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References found in this work

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
Laboratory Life. The Social Construction of Scientific Facts.Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar - 1982 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 13 (1):166-170.
The Roots of Reference.W. V. Quine - 1974 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27 (1):93-96.
Against Putting the Phenomena First: the Discovery of the Weak Neutral Current.Andy Pickering - 1984 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 15 (2):85.

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