On observational statements as epistemic public goods: an inferentialist reconstruction of Neurath's Protokollsätze

Philosophy of Science Colloquium
The Institute Vienna Circle holds a Philosophy of Science Colloquium with talks by our present fellows.

Date: 25/04/2024

Time: 16h45

Venue: New Institute Building (NIG), Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, HS 3F

Abstract:

Philosophical discussions have tended to concentrate much more on how observational statements are 'theory laden' than on what is what makes them observational to begin with. After discrediting the notion of a 'purely observational language' or the existence of 'pure sense data', consensus has apparently been that it is a concern for the practicing scientists themselves to determine by acquaintance or familiarity what counts in each case as an 'observation', without the possibility of having something like a 'general philosophical theory of scientific observation'. Without denying the role of contextual and tacit knowledge in the process of determining what can be taken as an observational statement, this talk tries to recover Otto Neurath's idea of Protokolsätze by immersing it in an inferentialist account of scientific activity (or 'science as a game of persuasion') and by employing some concepts derived from economics and game theory, in particular Milgrom's notion of 'public events' as a possible solution of the problem of common knowledge in games of coordination. Further consequences are derived in regard of the relation between private and public knowledge, and about the revisability of observational information.