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Against Correspondence: A Constructivist View of Experiment and the Real

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Andy Pickering
Andy Pickering*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Extract

This paper is about realism. The ideas presented were developed as part of a response to a persistent criticism levelled against the relativist/constructivist programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), namely that this programme fails to allow the real any role in the articulation of scientific thought. This criticism I believe to be mistaken, and justified, if at all, only by the relative silence of the SSK tradition on the role of the real. To indicate that this silence is a contingent, rather than a necessary attribute of the tradition, my aim here is to explore what can be said about the relation between the real and the articulated on the basis of empirical studies of scientific practice.

To situate what follows, let me note that the standard philosophical debate on realism concerns the reality, or lack of it, of unobservable entities appearing in well confirmed theories (Leplin 1984).

Type
Part V. Experimentation
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1986 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1986 , 1986 , pp. 196 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

This paper was written while I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and I am grateful for its support. I thank Ian Hacking for his comments on a draft of this paper; James T. Cushing for arguments over, and pointers to the literature on, realism; and Barry Barnes for keeping me up to date on his own thinking on realism.

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