Experiments

 

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Real science is experiments. Experiments are collections of standard repeatable procedures performed in a particular order to produce a predicted result. It is because of successful experiments that science has its prestige. It is with experiments made into industrial procedures that we can build airplanes, I-phones, bridges and the like. Chemistry does all its miracle harvests of food, and medicine does all its cures of diseases with experimentally created substances tested by further experiments in the field. The most advanced technology is the product of many experiments all turned into industrial procedures. All these experiments are sets of procedures done here and now, and all one needs to know is what to do with instruments, substances and other things that we can manipulate. Knowledge about what we cannot manipulate, for example an electron, is not necessary to do an experiment. What is needed is to do something we can do and convey how to do to someone else. Knowing how to repeat a procedure and get the same result allows us to do it on a massive scale, and knowing how to combine experiments has allowed for unimaginable complexity. Science is not a question of truth or falsehood, but of what we can and cannot do. Stories about the big bang and the fourth dimension are all well and good, but they have nothing in them of the scientific method. A scientific truth is a successfully predicted outcome of an experiment. The Scientific World Picture of fields and microscopic particles plays no part.

An the beginning of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein imagines a language game consisting of only four words. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass him the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block", "pillar", "slab", "beam". A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.——Conceive this as a complete primitive language.

Wittgenstein uses this simple language to criticize the “Augustinian” concept of language, namely that words name objects. In this case the words do not name objects but order the helper to perform a task with objects. The word “slab” is a command to do something, bring a kind of stone. These words are not an abbreviation or translation of a longer expression, for example, “bring me a slab.” They make a “complete primitive language” all by themselves.

The builders need not have used the names of the stones in the command, and by using them have taken the risk that the helper might take the command “slab” to be a command to look at or even simply imagine the appropriate stone. Of course, if he did so the builder would soon correct him. Experiments are teachable by the use of language and demonstration.

The command might have been made with any word. The Augustinian concept of language is not wrong, just limited, and its description tempts one to think it complete. Common words are used in many varied ways during the course of our lives, and it is extremely likely that at times we will take a word that is used to give instructions for a procedure in an Augustinian way as naming an object. This, I argue, is the case with the Scientific World Picture .