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Theory and Observation in Science

First published Tue Jan 6, 2009; substantive revision Mon Jun 14, 2021

Scientists obtain a great deal of the evidence they use by collecting and producing empirical results. Much of the standard philosophical literature on this subject comes from 20th century logical empiricists, their followers, and critics who embraced their issues while objecting to some of their aims and assumptions. Discussions about empirical evidence have tended to focus on epistemological questions regarding its role in theory testing. This entry follows that precedent, even though empirical evidence also plays important and philosophically interesting roles in other areas including scientific discovery, the development of experimental tools and techniques, and the application of scientific theories to practical problems.

The logical empiricists and their followers devoted much of their attention to the distinction between observables and unobservables, the form and content of observation reports, and the epistemic bearing of observational evidence on theories it is used to evaluate. Philosophical work in this tradition was characterized by the aim of conceptually separating theory and observation, so that observation could serve as the pure basis of theory appraisal. More recently, the focus of the philosophical literature has shifted away from these issues, and their close association to the languages and logics of science, to investigations of how empirical data are generated, analyzed, and used in practice. With this shift, we also see philosophers largely setting aside the aspiration of a pure observational basis for scientific knowledge and instead embracing a view of science in which the theoretical and empirical are usefully intertwined. This entry discusses these topics under the following headings: