Technology and Technique: The Role of Skill in the Practice of Scientific Observation

Despite the vast amount of work produced by philosophers, historians and sociologists on the nature of scientific activity, “observation itself is rarely the focus of attention and almost never the subject of historical inquiry in its own right”. This general lack of interest in the nature of scientific observation was perhaps most clearly reflected in the Vienna Circle’s attempt to establish an analysis of science beginning at the level of protocol sentences. To do so, of course, they had to disregard the humidity and fogged lenses facing the primatologist in the jungle, or the way in which flights aboard military aircraft were once sought by physicists in order to expose...