Metaphorical Models of Mastery: or, How to Learn to Do the Problems at the End of the Chapter of the Physics Textbook

Abstract

Without question, one of the most important cluster of issues in recent philosophy of science has centered around the attack on the rigid positivist distinction between theory and observation or between a theoretical language and an observational language. Kuhn, Feyerabend, Hanson, Toulmin, and Polanyi are all names closely associated with one version or another of this attack.1 All have argued that observational categories are essentially theory-determined and there is no determinate observational base, or neutral observational language. Thus at least the positivist account of the objectivity of scientific knowledge would seem to be seriously threatened by the thesis of the theory-ladenness of observation. For without an independently accessible observational base against which to test scientific theories, wherein would objectivity consist?