Observation consists of receiving
knowledge of the immediate
environment or the outside world
through our senses or recording
information using scientific tools and
instruments.
Any data recorded during an
experiment can be called an
observation.
Systematic Observation
Observation alone is not enough, it must be
systematic.
Observing everything you do one day
does not constitute a systematic
observation.
The scientist must observe things that are
relevant to the theory and are structured in a
way that they either support or refute the
theory.
Reasoning from observations has been
important to scientific practice at least since
the time of Aristotle.
However, philosophers did not talk about
observation as extensively as we do now
until the 20th century when logical empiricists
and logical positivists transformed
philosophical thinking about it.
The first transformation was accomplished
by ignoring the implication of a long standing
distinction between observing and
experimenting.
To experiment is to isolate, prepare and
manipulate things in the hope of producing
epistemically useful evidence. It had been
customary to think of observing as noticing
and attending to interesting details of things
perceived during the course of an
experiment.
Contrivance and manipulation were
significant features of observable
experimental results.
A second transformation that took place was
the shift from things observed in natural or
experimental settings to logic of observation
reports.
The shift was justified by appeal to the
assumption that a scientific theory is a
system of sentences or sentence-like
structures to be tested by comparison to
observational evidence.
If inferential relations hold only between
sentence like structures, it follows that
theories must be tested not against
observations or things observed, but
against sentences, propositions used to
report observations (Hempel, 1935,
Schlick 1935)
What Do Observation Reports Describe?
Observation is a perceptual process. To
observe is to look at, listen to, touch, taste or
smell something, attending to details of the
resulting perceptual experience.
Observers may have the good fortune to
obtain useful perceptual evidence simply by
noticing what is going on around them, but in
many cases they must arrange and
manipulate things to produce informative
perceptible results. In either case,
observation sentences describe perceptions
or things perceived.
Observers use magnifying glasses,
microscopes or telescopes to see things that
are too small or far away to be seen, or seen
clearly enough without them.
Similarly amplification devices are used to
hear faint sounds and spectroscopic data
can be obtained from Infra red spectrometer.
But if to observe something is to perceive it,
not every use of instruments qualifies as
observational.
Philosophers agree that you can observe the
moons of Jupiter with a telescope or a heart
beat with a stethoscope.
However, minimalist empiricists like Bas Van
Fraassen (1980) deny that one can observe
things that can be visualized by electron
light microscopes. Many philosophers don’t
mind microscope but find it unnatural at best
that high energy physicists observe particles
or particle interactions when they look at
bubble chamber photographs.
Their intuition comes from the plausible
assumption that one can observe only what
one can see by looking, hear by listening or
feel by touching.
The identification of observation and
perceptual experience persisted well into the
the 20th century so much so that Carl
Hempel could characterize the scientific
enterprise as an attempt to predict and
explain the deliverances of the senses
(Hempel, 1952).
According to what Hempel called the
phenomenalism report, observation reports
describe the observer’s subjective
perceptual experiences.
Empirical Facts and
Philosophical/Conceptual Facts
Consider a case of what is probably the most
straightforward sort of fact.
Let us assume that you are sitting at a desk and
that you placed a pencil on the desk
That there is a pencil on the desk in front of you
is as clear an example of a fact you can find.
You can see and feel the pencil and hear the
sound the pencil makes as you tap it on the
desk.
You have straightforward, direct observational
evidence that there is a pencil on the desk
Facts of this type are often referred to as
empirical facts.
Now consider another case in which two pencils
are placed on the desk.
One of the pencils is removed and placed in the
desk drawer.
Chances are that you believe that there are two
pencils on the table even when you are not
seeing one of them.
Reflect on your reasons for the beliefs.
The reason for believing that there is a pencil in
the drawer cannot be the same as the one for
believing that there is a pencil on the desk.
The belief about pencil on the table is based
on direct observational evidence, whereas
the belief about pencil in the drawer cannot
be based on direct observational evidence
since the pencil cannot be seen.
The belief that there is a pencil in the drawer
is based on the way we view the world.
Most people cannot imagine that objects go
out of existence when they are no longer
being observed.
Our conviction of the world we live in-the
world consists largely of stable objects that
remain in existence even when they are not
being observed.
What does these two situations have to do
with history and philosophy of Science?
A scientific theory has to respect the
relevant facts.
But in looking at theories from the history of
science and in looking at the facts those
theories were required to respect, we can
from hindsight clearly see that some of
those facts (although people believed they
reasonably have clear empirical facts) were
actually based on conceptual convictions of
the sort of world the people involved
inhabited.
An example may help illustrate this point.
From the time of the ancient Greeks and until
the early 1600s it was widely believed that
planets moved with perfectly circular and
uniform motion.
For example all motion associated with a
planet such as Mars was thought to be
perfectly circular.
In contrast, our current theories (backed up
with sufficient evidence) show that a planet
such as Mars moves in an elliptical (not
circular) orbit about the sun.
These sorts of facts, that is strongly held
beliefs that turn out to be based heavily on
philosophical views are generally referred to
as philosophical/conceptual facts.
Importantly, empirical facts on the one hand,
and philosophical/conceptual on the other
are not absolute categories i.e most beliefs
do not fall clearly into one or the other.
Rather most beliefs are based on a mixture
of empirical, observational evidence,
together with some more general views
about the sort of world we inhabit.
