Observations as the Building Blocks of Science in 20th-Century Scientific Thought

Abstract

Although there continue to be many interpretations of the nature of science, not simply thought up from afar by philosophers, but in the highest ranks of scientific circles, there are only a few that are significantly different from one another and influential (Wisdom, 1971). I shall confine myself to instrumentalism, conventionalism, and induction. (I shall omit even operationalism as being easily subsumable under conventionalism.) The main thesis will be that they constitute different ways of regarding knowledge as rooted in pure observation, and that the philosophy of observationalism they presuppose is false. The falsifiability interpretation does not view knowledge in this way and is not discussed here.