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Shapere on Observation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Toby Linden
Toby Linden*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland at College Park
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, 4360 Computer and Space Science Building, University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, MD 20742-7615, USA.
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Abstract

In his article “The Concept of Observation in Science and Philosophy” (1982), Dudley Shapere argues for an analysis of what it is for an object to be directly observed (observable). He does so by presenting two contrasting ways of observing the center of the sun. However, his examples, which are probabilistic in nature, are at odds with his analysis, which is absolute. I argue that of the three features of the examples which could serve as the basis for the analysis only one—the amount of alteration to the information being transmitted—can plausibly do so. Having reworked Shapere's analysis on the basis of this feature, I show that the analysis still fails to provide a sufficient condition for observation.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 293 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1992

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Footnotes

†

I would like to express my gratitude to Frederick Suppe for his help. I also benefited from the comments of two referees.

References

Shapere, D. (1982), “The Concept of Observation in Science and Philosophy”, Philosophy of Science 49: 485–525.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapere, D. (1985), “Observation and the Scientific Enterprise”, in Achinstein, P. and Hannaway, O. (eds.), Observation, Experiment and Hypothesis in Modern Physical Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 210–245.Google Scholar
Shapere, D. (n.d.), “Rationalism and Empiricism: A New Perspective”. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar