Monday, December 25, 2017

Experimentalism, Truth, Efficacy

In the following assertion, the otherwise usually insightful Whitehead expresses a misunderstanding of Experimentalism: "Experiment is nothing else than a mode of cooking the facts for the sake of exemplifying the law."  The root of the misunderstanding is expressed in the "cooking the facts" image, which implies a falsification.  But, the measure of the Experimental method is not Truth qua correspondence between representation and fact, but Truth qua efficacy.  Accordingly, for the Experimentalist, "exemplifying the law" means "confirmation that effects can be reliably produced", the primary concern of Technology, regardless of Whitehead's Leibnizian orientation, which does not recognize the reality of such efficacy.

No comments:

Post a Comment