Empiricism in Practice: Teleology, Economy, and Observation in Faraday's Physics

Abstract

M /ICHAEL FARADAY is highly regarded for his major factual discoveries. He is also known for his imaginative visual representations of electric and magnetic phenomena as interacting systems of lines of force. During the 1840s he and others developed this visual language into a set of qualitative explanations that led to a new mathematical representation of electric, magnetic, and optical phenomena. Faraday thought that mathematical representations could and should stay close to their observational sources, which he believed to be the phenomenal manifestations of real agents and processes. This characterization of his achievements and his epistemology fits a traditional view of science, according to which metaphysics and theology are important determinants of scientific theorizing, but the production of observational evidence still plays a crucial role both as a stimulus to theory and as a constraint on it. Experimentation thus lays the empirical foundations on which the success of any theory ultimately depends. My account of Faraday's work on magnetism, although it qualifies this view of observation as source and foundation for theory, supports the traditional view that experimentation mediates between beliefs and experience. But the mediating role of experimentation requires a nonempiricist interpretation because of overwhelming objections to the traditional understanding of why a properly scientific theory must submit to observational constraints: an understanding based on the empiricist assumption that knowledge of an independent world can be given in sensory experience, or derived from it. Further, recent historical and sociological studies of science argue that empirical evidence is rarely (if ever) crucial to the acceptance or rejection of a theory. Instead, the role of experiment is normative rather than informative, the standards that a good experiment must meet are not self-evident but a matter of consensus, and controversies about whether particular experiments actually meet such standards are resolved by negotiation. In sum, the evidential relevance of fact to theory, the exactness of fit between data and theory, and the reality of facts and data are socially deter-