Phi 272 F06, reading guide

In this chapter Carnap looks more closely at experiment, an important means of testing and source of premises on which to base induction. Much of the chapter is devoted to the nature of experimentation but Carnap begins with two issues that are worth discussing in their own right.

The first is the distinction between observation and experiment. Carnap has a little to say about the relative value of the two but is mostly concerned to note that experiment is not always possible. A sharper way of the describing the difference can be found near the beginning of the scientific revolution in the words of Francis Bacon in a work dating from 1620. (You can take him to mean by “natural history” a record of observations; and, in this era and context, “philosophy” refers roughly to what we would call “natural science.”)

… A natural history which is composed for its own sake is not like one that is collected to supply the understanding with information for the building up of philosophy. They differ in many ways, but especially in this: that the former contains the variety of natural species only, and not experiments of the mechanical arts. For even as in the business of life a man’s disposition and the secret workings of his mind and affections are better discovered when he is in trouble than at other times, so likewise the secrets of nature reveal themselves more readily under the vexations of art than when they go their own way.…

Francis Bacon, New Organon, bk. 1 aphorism 98, in The Works of Francis Bacon, Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, eds. (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1869).

Leibniz recast Bacon’s point even more sharply. As part of a defense of logic in 1696, he argued that a systematic art of questioning was useful and said:

Here belongs also the art of inquiry into nature itself and of putting it on the rack—the art of experimenting which Lord Bacon began so ably.

“Letter to Gabriel Wagner on the Value of Logic,” in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, Leroy Loemeker, ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), p. 465.

But are Bacon and Leibniz right? Is it always true that the best way to discover the secrets of nature is to “vex” or disturb nature—or even to torture it on the rack?

A second issue raised by Carnap is the possibility of experiment in the social sciences. He discusses mainly ethical and political limitations on experiments with large groups. Are these the only issues? Do whatever limitations there are on experiments with social groups imply limitations on the status of social sciences as sciences?

Finally, think through Carnap’s discussion of the details of experiment in which he eventually focuses on an experimental determination of gas laws. You should do two things here. First, identify what you take to be the central points Carnap wishes to make. Also, ask yourself whether the sort of experiment he describes is sufficiently typical for the key issues regarding experimentation to all arise in connection with it and to all arise in the same way as with other sorts of experiment.

For example, compare the sort of experiment Carnap describes with the experiment Isaac Newton describes in the attached selection from his Opticks (experiment 6 of book 1, part 1). It is one of a series designed to show that “the light of the sun consists of rays differently refrangible” (i.e., with different indices of refraction). If you are curious about the other experiments in the series, here is the full text for this series of experiments; and, if you are curious about the rest of the work, you can find several editions on the website of the Burndy Library:

Newton described the same experiment first in 1671 in a letter to the Royal Society that is available on JSTOR (in Philosophical Transactions (1665-1678), vol. 6 (1671), pp. 3075-3087; the experiment is described on pp. 3078f).

The attached text is a facsimile of the original edition of 1704, so you will need to get used to older spelling and type, in particular to the “long s” that looks like an f without a crossbar—if your browser will show it, the symbol ſ. This appears first in the account of experiment 6 in the printing of the words “Window-shut” and “Prism” (as “Window-ſhut” and “Priſm”).