This book does two things: First it makes clear to students of the sciences the utility of treating experimental practice as a practice of controlling, observing, representing, and appraising the flow of information in natural systems and between these systems and experimentalists. Such a treatment provides clarification of experimental practice and the way it relates to other parts of the scientific enterprise that is sometimes obscured by our focus on a narrow set of epistemological considerations, and in particular on patterns of justification of knowledge claims. The book moves the focus o ... More

This book does two things: First it makes clear to students of the sciences the utility of treating experimental practice as a practice of controlling, observing, representing, and appraising the flow of information in natural systems and between these systems and experimentalists. Such a treatment provides clarification of experimental practice and the way it relates to other parts of the scientific enterprise that is sometimes obscured by our focus on a narrow set of epistemological considerations, and in particular on patterns of justification of knowledge claims. The book moves the focus of epistemological discussion away from justification toward the conceptual structure itself of the claims that are made in the course of experimental practice: experimental claims about various systems. Second the book shows how the account can unify all the different practices that go under the name "experiment" into a single coherent practice or set of practices that are related by more than the name alone. To accomplish this it first shows that such practices as thought experimentation, for example, can really be fruitfully understood as experimental in a robust sense. This in turn helps to illuminate the role that experiment plays in our general scientific practice. What becomes clear is that the extraction of information from worldly systems and using that information to gather information about other systems is the fundamental business of empirical science, and that this just is the basic structure of knowledge generation through experimental practice.