Explanation and the epistemic significance of experiment in nineteenth-century British philosophy of science.

摘要

In this dissertation I develop an account of the epistemic significance of experiment for the generation and justification of explanatory claims in 19th-century British philosophy of science. The importance of this discussion stems from two central debates among the prominent British natural philosophers John F. W. Herschel, William Whewell, and John Stuart Mill. The first debate concerns whether the explanation of phenomena in natural philosophy consists solely in understanding the governing laws of these phenomena or whether it also requires understanding the underlying causes responsible for producing these phenomena. The second debate concerns whether a priori ideas were essential to the justification of explanatory claims. Given that 19th-century British inductivists recognize the essential epistemic function of experiment in generating and justifying explanatory claims, my goal in this dissertation is to assess these debates by exploring several important sets of experimental research in the early history of electromagnetism. To this end I analyze experiments conducted by the British experimentalist Michael Faraday as well as the joint experimental work of the British natural philosophers Charles Babbage and John F. W. Herschel.;I argue that the primary epistemic function of experiment is to produce an understanding of phenomena that can serve as stable basis from which one can infer basic explanatory principles. These explanatory principles have significant theoretical implications for the kinds of claims one can make concerning the underlying productive causes of phenomena. Thus, experimental evidence provides a robust framework from which one can seek grounded theoretical explanations of the real physical powers or agencies causally responsible for observed phenomenal effects. But the experimental research I survey in this work does not decisively settle the debate concerning the epistemology of the sciences. It does, however, suggest a significant challenge for proponents of the view that experience alone acts as a justificatory ground for explanatory claims: they must provide an analysis of the justification of the conceptual models and ideas essential to experimental processes. I conclude with an exploration of the impact of this challenge on the debate between Herschel, Whewell, and Mill concerning the role of a priori ideas in the sciences.