Experiment and the making of meaning: human agency in scientific observation and experiment

Abstract

1: Agency in Observation and Experiment.- 1: The Procedural Turn.- 1.1 Agency in observation and experiment.- 1.2 Discovery, reconstruction and justification.- 1.3 The procedural turn.- 1.4 Representing agency.- 1.5 Epistemological individualism.- 1.6 The making of meaning.- 2: Action and Interpretation.- 2.1 Making sense of new experience.- 2.2 The significance of observational anomaly.- 2.3 Making phenomena visible: Biot and Davy.- 2.4 Constructing self-evidence: Biot, Davy, Ampere.- 2.5 Observation and controversy.- 2.6 Davy's electromagnetic practice.- 2.7 How experiments make hypotheses meaningful.- 2.8 Action and interpretation.- 2.9 Spatio-temporal order: construals and frameworks.- 2.10 Disseminating order.- 3: Making Perception Possible.- 3.1 Intentionality and observation.- 3.2 Privacy, intention and meaning.- 3.3 The diarist's dilemma.- 3.4 A social model of observation.- 3.5 The language of observation.- 3.6 Modelling phenomena.- 3.7 Realism about language.- 3.8 Are there introducing events?.- 4: Making Curves.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 Contexts of construction.- 4.3 Magnetic curves.- 4.4 Curves as a procedural framework.- 4.5 Experimenter's space, action and a field concept.- 5: Making Circular Motion.- 5.1 Construals: the construction of new phenomena.- 5.2 Making circles.- 5.3 Articulating possibilities.- 5.4 Making circular motion: the rotation motor.- 5.5 Patterns of discovery.- 6: Representing Experimentation.- 6.1 Agency, propositions and the world.- 6.2 Representing procedures.- 6.3 Putting the phenomena in context: interdependence.- 6.4 Mapping Faraday's manipulations.- 6.5 Eliciting a natural phenomenon.- 6.6 Discovery paths.- 6.7 Choosing and deciding.- 6.8 Observability and skill.- 6.9 Packaging skill.- 2: Making Natural Phenomena.- 7: A Realistic Role for Experiment.- 7.1 Convergence, skill, and correspondence.- 7.2 Packaging phenomena: experiment as argument.- 7.3 Correspondence.- 7.4 The metaphor of approximation.- 7.5 The myth of approximation.- 7.6 Realism without correspondence.- 8: The Experimenter's Redress.- 8.1 Corrigibility in theory and in practice.- 8.2 Morpurgo's search for quarks.- 8.3 Why do thought-experiments work?.- 8.4 The experimenter's regress.- 8.5 The experimenter's redress.- 8.6 Theory, truth and technology.- 9: Empiricism in Practice.- 9.1 Changing meanings: the implications of induction.- 9.2 Discovering a first principle.- 9.3 How experiment articulates analogy.- 9.4 Remaking meaning.- 9.5 Changing the meaning of experimental practice.- 9.6 Questioning quantitative practice.- 9.7 Making a crucial experiment.- 9.8 Epistemology in practice.- 10: Experiment and Meaning.- 10.1 Which comes first, theory or experiment?.- 10.2 Changing meanings: the nature of force.- 10.3 Extending the reach of magnetic curves.- 10.4 Locally convergent practice.- 10.5 Making divergent practices converge.- 10.6 Changing the sensory core of experience.- 10.7 Refining experimental practice.- 10.8 Refining theoretical practice.- 10.9 Experiment and meaning.- Notes.- Name Index.

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