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Experiment and Observation

Presented By:
1. Puput Yulianawati
2. Bunga Nuur Primayu Utami
What is Observation?

Observation is the active acquisition of


information from a primary source. In
human beings, observation uses the
senses. In science, observation can also
involve the recording of data with the use
of instruments.
Observation

Quantitative
Qualitative if a numerical value is
That is only the absence or attached to the observed
presence of a property is phenomenon by counting
noted (fieldnote) or measuring.
What do observation reports
describe?
One answer to this question assumes that observation is a
perceptual process so that to observe is to look at, listen
to, touch, taste, or smell something, attending to details of
the resulting perceptual experience. Observers may have
the good fortune to obtain useful perceptual evidence
simply by noticing what’s going on around them, but in
many cases they must arrange and manipulate things to
produce informative perceptible results. In either case,
observation sentences describe perceptions or things
perceived.
Observers use magnifying glasses, microscopes, or telescopes to
see things that are too small or far away to be seen, or seen
clearly enough. The tools amplification devices are used to hear
faint sounds. But if to observe something is to perceive it, not
every use of instruments to augment the senses qualifies as
observational. Philosophers agree that you can observe the moons
of Jupiter with a telescope, or a heart beat with a stethoscope.
Their intuitions come from the plausible assumption that one can
observe only what one can see by looking, hear by listening, feel
by touching, and so on.
The identification of observation and perceptual experience
persisted well into the 20th century—so much so that Carl
Hempel could characterize the scientific enterprise as an attempt
to predict and explain the deliverances of the senses (Hempel
1952, 653). This was to be accomplished by using laws or lawlike
generalizations along with descriptions of initial conditions,
correspondence rules, and auxiliary hypotheses to derive
observation sentences describing the sensory deliverances of
interest.
Theory testing was treated as a matter of comparing
observation sentences describing observations made in
natural or laboratory settings to observation sentences
that should be true according to the theory to be tested.
This makes it imperative to ask what observation
sentences report. Even though scientists often record
their evidence non-sententially, for example n the form
of pictures, graphs, and tables of numbers, some of what
Hempel says about the meanings of observation
sentences applies to non-sentential observational
records as well.
How observational evidence might
be theory laden

Thomas Kuhn (1962), Norwood Hanson (1958), Paul


Feyerabend (1959) and others cast suspicion on the
objectivity of observational evidence in another way by
arguing that one can’t use empirical evidence to teat a
theory without committing oneself to that very theory.
Although some of the examples they use to present their
case feature equipment generated evidence, they tend to
talk about observation as a perceptual process.
For example we can challenge the use of a thermometer reading,
e, to support a description, prediction, or explanation of a
patient’s temperature, t, by challenging theoretical claims, C,
having to do with whether a reading from a thermometer like this
one, applied in the same way under similar conditions, should
indicate the patient’s temperature well enough to count in favor
of or against t. At least some of the Cwill be such that regardless
of whether an investigator explicitly endorses, or is even aware of
them, her use of e would be undermined by their falsity. All
observations and uses of observations evidence are theory laden
in this sense.
Operationalization and
observation reports
Looking at a patient with red spots and a fever, an investigator
might report having seen the spots, or measles symptoms, or a
patient with measles. Watching an unknown liquid dripping
into a litmus solution an observer might report seeing a
change in color, a liquid with a PH of less than 7, or an acid.
The appropriateness of a description of a test outcome
depends on how the relevant concepts are operationalized.
What justifies an observer to report having observed a case of
measles according to one operationalization might require her
to say no more than that she had observed measles
symptoms, or just red spots according to another.
one might suppose that operationalizations are
definitions or meaning rules such that it is analytically
true, e.g., that every liquid that turns litmus red in a
properly conducted test is acidic. But it is more faithful
to actual scientific practice to think of
operationalizations as defeasible rules for the
application of a concept such that both the rules and
their applications are subject to revision on the basis of
new empirical or theoretical developments. So
understood, to operationalize is to adopt verbal and
related practices for the purpose of enabling scientists to
do their work. Operationalizations are thus sensitive and
subject to change on the basis of findings that influence
their usefulness (Feest, 2005).
Conclusion
Grammatical variants of the term ‘observation’ have been applied to
impressively different perceptual and non-perceptual process and to
records of the results they produce. Their diversity is a reason to doubt
whether general philosophical accounts of observation, observables, and
observational data can tell epistemologists as much as local accounts
grounded in close studies of specific kinds of cases. Furthermore, scientists
continue to find ways to produce data that can’t be called observational
without stretching the term to the point of vagueness.

It’s plausible that philosophers who value the kind of rigor, precision, and
generality to which l logical empiricists and other exact philosophers
aspired could do better by examining and developing techniques and
results from logic, probability theory, statistics, machine learning, and
computer modeling, etc. than by trying to construct highly general theories
of observation and its role in science. Logic and the rest seem unable to
deliver satisfactory, universally applicable accounts of scientific reasoning.

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