Talk:Theory-ladenness

Individual vs collective meaning.
The introductory sentence "In the philosophy of science, observations are said to be "theory-laden" when they are affected by the theoretical presuppositions held by the investigator." is biased toward an application to individuals. It does not apply to scientific theories and their basic statements, which are the results of collective agreements. Theory-ladenness is way more significant when applied to theories and their basic statements. In fact, the only reference provided in the article is essentially about application to theories. In particular, it says that the notion of observation is less important in science than we naively think. We speak more of data in science than we speak of observations. The data are typically the result of complex computations. So the theory describes relations in data that are themselves the results of complex computations. So, if we want to infer anything about the connection to the "reality" behind this data, we need to consider the underlying theory that explains the data itself. The provided reference explains that in science, we often don't care, but instead focus on applying these "observed" relations to create something useful. Dominic Mayers (talk) 04:27, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Proper credit missing
Another serious issue is the lack of credit given to Popper and Lakatos. The important role of theory-ladenness was already present in Popper's work in Logic of Scientific Discovery (see the English 1959 version p.25-26, original German version in 1935). He made this much clearer in "Conjecture and Refutations" 1963 where he mentions the holistic view of Duhem-Quine. This was further explained by Lakatos in The methodology of scientific research programmes 1978.

To be fair, proper credit is probably given to Norwood Russell Hanson for in the individual psychological notion of theory-ladenness. Apparently, the different, in my oppinion much more fundamental view, which applies to the theories themselves, was developped separately by Popper, Quine, Duhem and Lakatos and perhaps others.

Dominic Mayers (talk) 13:49, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

I attempted to correct the problem: I added the section "history". Unfortunately, this was deleted without and reasonable explanation.


 * Dear Deepthoghtabout, thank you for trying to contribute to this article. I reverted your edit for the following reasons:
 * it was not written in an encyclopedic style
 * it was not clearly linked to the topic of this article: theory-ladenness
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