Le Grand H.E. (ed.) Experimental Inquiries: Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science

Springer, 1990. — 275 pp.The studies in this volume complement and extend the recent, growing body of analyses of the multifarious roles of experiment in science. All share a naturalistic approach in that each is attentive to the interpretative and argumentative practices of scientists. Yet, each has a different focus, both in terms of experimentation per se and in terms of scientific subject matter. Some of the contributors are concerned primarily with recovering the cognitive and social contexts in which specific experiments were conducted and interpreted, others with the use of experiment as an argumentative resource, still others with the variable linkages between experiment and theory. The experiments surveyed extend from those of the era of the 'Scientific Revolution' of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries down to the 1980s and includes examples drawn from not only physics, chemistry and biology but also anthropology, geology and medicine.Foreword.
Introduction: Setting Up the Apparatus (by Homer Le Grand).
Natural Philosophy, Experiment and Discourse in the 18th Century (by John Schuster and Graeme Watchirs).
The Force and Reason of Experiment (by Bruno Latour).
The Dynamometer and the Diemenese (by Miranda Hughes).
Humphry Davy and the 'Lever of Experiment' (by Jan Golinski).
The Nine Lives of Gregor Mendel (by Jan Sapp).
Manipulable Systems and Laboratory Strategies in a Biomedical Research Institute (by David Turnbull and Terry Stokes).
Experiment and the Molecularity of Meaning (by Stephen Gaukroger).
Openness and Closure: On the Goals of Scientific Practice (by Andy Pickering).
Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Experiments? (by Homer Le Grand).