Freddy Purcell covers Adrian Currie and Kirsten Walsh’s talk on the epistemic benefits of situating the scientist within an experiment.
For the 36th Colloquium we welcomed no one, because they were already here. Our own Adrian Currie and Kirsten Walsh gave a fascinating talk on some of their upcoming work.
Adrian took the first part of the duo’s talk, introducing the classic philosophy of science stance that labs are mere places of data production, something he argued misses the role of the scientist. In unsurprising Exeter philosophy style, this brought Adrian to reevaluate scientific experimentation through the lens of 4e cognition, the broad idea that cognition and affectation are scaffolding by the environment. To ground their 4e leaning, Adrian turned to Nguyen’s 2020 work on games, where Nguyen argues that by introducing constraints through rules, games encode the players agency in a specific way to achieve particular aims. For example, when playing floor is lava, the player must avoid touching the floor, so their agency forms around this singular aim as they understand their environment in terms of the game’s rules. In playing this game, there is therefore the aesthetic experience of enjoying a game and appreciating its challenge, but also an epistemic experience where the player learns a specific form of practical reasoning and way to encode their agency.
It is these aesthetic and epistemic elements of games that Adrian, Kirsten and Alice Murphy will use to understand scientific experimentation in their forthcoming paper. Like a game, they argue that experiments constrain the scientist with rules on proper scientific practice and aesthetic rules on what phenomena to attend to, as well as a physical setup. Adrian therefore claims that these constraints underlie how the scientist acts within an experiment. An experiment can then be evaluated on the aesthetic dimension of how well a scientist situates themselves in relation to their object of study, as well as the experiment’s ability to produce good data. One benefit Adrian and Kirsten hope to gain out of this paper is an argument against automation in science by demonstrating the importance of the scientist.
With this background in place, Adrian then introduced the idea of agential distance as the relationship between a scientist’s capacities within a scientific setup and the phenomena they’re trying to examine. He identified two aspects in which agential distance can manifest, temporal distance being the time it takes the see the result of an experiment and proximal distance being the number of steps a scientist needs to take to access the result. Although Adrian did indicate that there are many ways to understand agential distance.
For a demonstration of how agential distance functions in reality, Kirsten took to the stage and introduced Newton’s work on optics. As part of this work, Newton makes the strange claim that the proof of his experiments should be accessed by enacting them, instead of by simply reading the conclusions he makes. In this experiment, Newton makes a small hole to allow sunlight into his room, directing it into a prism to separate the white light into rays of spectral colour. There are several variations on this experiment.
3-Sunlight is directed through the prism onto a screen and Newton examined how the prism makes a longer circle than the one allowed into the room. He would have seen the results instantly, so there is no temporal distance, and he was studying the difference in circle size, so there is no proximal difference.
6-His experimentum crucis. Newton directed the beam of light through one prism, onto a screen with a small aperture, allowing a small beam to pass through to another screen. Here, another small aperture allowed another beam of light to hit a second prism where it refracts a second time onto a final screen. Newton then noted the degrees of refraction, concluding that the disposition to refract is inherent in light as even when disrupted, light still refracts. There is no proximal distance as Newton attended directly to the degrees of refraction. There is no temporal of proximal distance in this experiment either, as the results are instantly and directly measured. However, in a variation, Newton allows the earth’s movements to change the angle of light entering the first aperture, creating some temporal distance.
8-Newton used the prism’s ability to split white light into colours by holding up a text to the light, allowing it to appear on the screen in the colour spectrum (like a projector), noting how some parts of the text would be in focus and others wouldn’t. Different colours helped to highlight what part of the text was focussed. Newton then measured the degrees of refraction through the colours, suggesting some proximal distance as while he measured colour, his target was degrees of refraction. There was again no temporal distance here.
Kirsten argued that this sort of analysis can be applied to all sorts of experiments, from measurement of soil quality to what goes on in the Hadron collider. She also argued that Newton’s experiments show that agential distance offers the scientist access to different resources. Proximal distance in experiment 8 allows Newton to study refraction through the colours of the light spectrum, while temporal distance in experiment 6 provides weightier proof to Newton’s work by showing it’s not a chance phenomenon. Kirsten concluded that Newton’s experiments show that proof isn’t so much contained in the experiment, but in the agential distance that allows the scientist to witness their target of study within the constraints of the experiment. This puts the agent in an essential role within experimentation.
I really enjoyed this talk, so I hope to have done it justice here. I will admit that even after hearing about Newton’s experiments about a year ago, they still bamboozle me. Be sure to look out for Adrian and Kirsten’s paper when it comes out soon!
Bibliography:
Nguyen, T. (2020) Games: Agency as Art. Oxford University Press.