Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-bt4hw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T23:50:26.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Theory-Ladenness of Observation and the Theory-Ladenness of the Rest of the Scientific Process

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

William F. Brewer  and
Bruce L. Lambert
William F. Brewer*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Bruce L. Lambert
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Chicago
*
†Send requests for reprints to William Brewer, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820; email: w-brewer@uiuc.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We use evidence from cognitive psychology and the history of science to examine the issue of the theory-ladenness of perceptual observation. This evidence shows that perception is theory-laden, but that it is only strongly theory-laden when the perceptual evidence is ambiguous or degraded, or when it requires a difficult perceptual judgment. We argue that debates about the theory-ladenness issue have focused too narrowly on the issue of perceptual experience, and that a full account of the scientific process requires an examination of theory-ladenness in attention, perception, data interpretation, data production, memory, and scientific communication. We conclude that the evidence for theory-ladenness does not lead to a relativist account of scientific knowledge.

Information

Type
Theory-Ladeness and the Neurology of Perception
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 68 , Issue S3: No. 3 Supplement: Proceedings of the 2000 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers Sep., 2001 , 2001 , pp. S176 - S186
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

‡

We would like to thank Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, Ellen Brewer, Clark Chinn, Don Dulany, Allan Franklin, and Lester Loschky for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References

Anderson, Richard C., Reynolds, Ralph E., Schallert, Diane L., and Goetz, Ernest T. (1977), “Frameworks for Comprehending Discourse”, American Educational Research Journal 14:367–381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnes, Barry (1974), Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence W. (1999), “Perceptual Symbol Systems”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22:577–609.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bogen, James and Woodward, James (1988), “Saving the Phenomena”, Philosophical Review 97:303–352.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boring, Edwin G. (1930), “A New Ambiguous Figure”, American Journal of Psychology 42:444–445.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bransford, John D. and Johnson, Marcia K. (1973), “Considerations of Some Problems of Comprehension”, in Chase, William G. (ed.), Visual Information Processing. New York: Academic Press, 383–438.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brewer, William F. (1988), “Memory for randomly sampled autobiographical events”, in Neisser, Ulric and Winograd, Eugene (eds), Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 21–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brewer, William F. (1999), “Scientific Theories and Naive Theories as Forms of Mental Representation: Psychologism Revived”, Science & Education 8:489–505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brewer, William F. (2000), “Bartlett's Concept of the Schema and its Impact on Theories of Knowledge Representation in Contemporary Cognitive Psychology”, in Saito, Akiko (ed.), Bartlett, Culture and Cognition. Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 69–89.Google Scholar
Brewer, William F. and Chinn, Clark A. (1994a), “Scientists' Responses to Anomalous Data: Evidence from Psychology, History, and Philosophy of Science”, PSA 1994, Vol. 1. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association 304–313.Google Scholar
Brewer, William F. and Chinn, Clark A. (1994b), “The Theory-ladenness of Data: An Experimental Demonstration”, Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 61–65.Google Scholar
Brewer, William F., Chinn, Clark A., and Samarapungavan, Ala (2000), “Explanation in Scientists and Children”, in Keil, Frank C. and Wilson, Robert A. (eds.), Explanation and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 279–298.Google Scholar
Brewer, William F. and Lambert, Bruce L. (1993), “The Theory-ladeness of Observation: Evidence from Cognitive Psychology”, Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 254–259.Google Scholar
Brewer, William F. and Nakamura, Glen V. (1984), “The Nature and Functions of Schemas”, in Wyer, Robert S. Jr. and Srull, Thomas K. (eds.), Handbook of Social Cognition, Vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 119–160.Google Scholar
Bruner, Jerome S. and Postman, Leo (1949), “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm”, Journal of Personality 18:206–223.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bugelski, B. R. and Alampay, Delia A. (1961), “The Role of Frequency in Developing Perceptual Sets”, Canadian Journal of Psychology 15:205–211.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Churchland, Paul M. (1979), Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Churchland, Paul M. (1988), “Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality: A Reply to Jerry Fodor”, Philosophy of Science 55:167–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, E. R. and DuMond, Jesse W. M. (1965), “Our Knowledge of the Fundamental Constants of Physics and Chemistry in 1965”, Reviews of Modern Physics 37:537–594.10.1103/RevModPhys.37.537CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, Jerry (1984), “Observation Reconsidered”, Philosophy of Science 51:23–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, Jerry (1988), “A Reply to Churchland's ‘Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality‘”, Philosophy of Science 55:188–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, Jerry (1991), “The Dogma that didn't Bark (A Fragment of a Naturalized Epistemology)”, Mind 100:201–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forbes, Eric G. (1983), “The Pre-discovery Observations of Uranus”, in Hunt, Garry (ed.), Uranus and the Outer Planets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 67–79.Google Scholar
Franklin, Allan (1986), The Neglect of Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gooding, David (1992), “The Procedural Turn; or, Why do Thought Experiments Work?”, in Giere, Ronald N. (ed.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 45–76.Google Scholar
Gopnik, Alison and Wellman, Henry M. (1992), “Why the Child's Theory of Mind Really is a Theory”, Mind & Language 7:145–171.10.1111/j.1468-0017.1992.tb00202.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Stephen J. (1981), The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Gunstone, Richard F. and White, Richard T. (1981), “Understanding of Gravity”, Science Education 65:291–299.10.1002/sce.3730650308CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanson, Norwood R. (1958), Patterns of Discovery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Harrington, Robert S. and Harrington, Betty J. (1979), “The Discovery of Pluto's Moon”, Mercury 8:1–3, 6, 17.Google Scholar
Holton, Gerald (1978), “Subelectrons, Presuppositions, and the Millikan-Ehrenhaft Dispute”, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 9:161–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson-Laird, Philip N. (1983), Mental Models. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Klahr, David and Dunbar, Kevin (1988), “Dual Space Search During Scientific Reasoning”, Cognitive Science 12:1–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klotz, Irving M. (1980), “The N-Ray Affair”, Scientific American 242:168–170, 173–175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Leeper, Robert (1935), “A Study of a Neglected Portion of the Field of Learning—The Development of Sensory Organization”, Journal of Genetic Psychology 46:41–75.Google Scholar
Lindsay, Peter H. and Norman, Donald A. (1977), Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology. 2nd edition. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
McClelland, James L. and Rumelhart, David E. (1981), “An Interactive Activation Model of Context Effects in Letter Perception: Part 1. An Account of Basic Findings”, Psychological Review 88:375–407.10.1037/0033-295X.88.5.375CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neisser, Ulric and Becklen, Robert (1975), “Selective Looking: Attending to Visually Specified Events”, Cognitive Psychology 7:480–494.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nye, Mary J. (1980), “N-rays: An Episode in the History and Psychology of Science”, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 11 (Part 1): 125–156.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pylyshyn, Zenon (1999), “Is Vision Continuous with Cognition? The Case for Cognitive Impenetrability of Visual Perception”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22:341–365.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rees, Geraint, Russell, Charlotte, Frith, Christopher D., and Driver, Jon (1999), “Inattentional Blindness versus Inattentional Amnesia for Fixated but Ignored Words”, Science 286:2504–2507.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rumelhart, David E. and Norman, Donald A. (1988), “Representation in Memory”, in Atkinson, Richard C., Herrnstein, Richard J., Lindzay, Gardner, and Luce, R. D. (eds.), Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology. 2nd edition. Vol. 2, Learning and Cognition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 511–587.Google Scholar
Shipman, Pat (1986), “How a 125 Million-year-old Dinosaur Evolved in 160 years”, Discover 7 (October): 94–102.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. and Kintsch, Walter (1978), “Cognitive Psychology and Discourse: Recalling and Summarizing Stories”, in Dressler, Wolfgang U. (ed.), Current Trends in Textlinguistics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 61–80.Google Scholar
Van Helden, Albert (1974), “Saturn and his Anses”, Journal for the History of Astronomy 5:105–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vicente, Kim J. and Brewer, William F. (1993), “Reconstructive Remembering of the Scientific Literature”, Cognition 46:101–128.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Woolgar, Steve (1988), Science: The Very Idea. Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood.Google Scholar