Philosophy Of Science Essay

The main topic of essay is “There is more to seeing than satisfies the eyeball”.

These are words of D. R. Hanson, and I’ll try to present here my own point of view. In the work “Observation” Hanson says that if two different people (for example, microbiologists), take a look at prepared go, they give several answers for question what did they will see there. It means, they will see the same object, but their feelings and understanding of object, as well their definitions over it are different.

Hanson gives the following answer: ” ‘These are different interpretations of what every observers see in common. Retinal reactions to work are almost identical; also are the visual sense-data, since our drawings of what we see will have the same content. There is not any place in the seeing for the differences, so they must lay in the interpretations put on what we should see. ” (Hanson, s. 9) Therefore , everything will depend on interpretations in the object – the characteristics get by us, while finding the same simply by different people. Let’s take a picture and will try to search for what can be seen there.

Once again, some people can easily see only birds – they see a great opened bick of several big bird, the others observe horns and antelope. One more question: do the people, who may have never seen antelope, discover an burro in this picture? We can see the style as one condition, then since another. All of us interpret that and see this as we interpret it. (Hanson, p. 7) Another thought which Hanson gives is kind of model depends on encounter.

So let’s take since example the style of an Xray tube viewed from the cathode. Some knowledgeable physicist will certainly recognize below an X-ray tube, yet a small baby and a driver, for instance , will have one more interpretation depending on their visual experience. They will see the same object, but have different understanding. Hanson says: ” Finding is not only the having of the visual knowledge; it is also how the visual experience can be had”. (Hanson, p. 8). A physicist saw this kind of object at school, but from his aesthetic experience he saw only an instrument made from metal and glass.

If he studied with the university, this individual learned about this instrument and saw the development in the book and had completely one other interpretation. The object didn’t transform, but the aesthetic experience would. So , for driver to find the same what physicist views, he needs to learn physics.

The baby is blind to what driver views, although he could be not impaired and sees the same subject. Seeing means also some kind “to know about certain sorts” (Hanson, l. 11). Let’s take another scientist, Hacking, with his document “Do we come across through a microscope? ” He speaks about the ways we get new kinds of perception once we use several objects to control a world we all cannot find by each of our normal eye-sight. Hacking says that “we don’t see through a microscopic lense, we see using a microscope”.

For instance , we can employ electrons to obtain other effects, and by this process, we are convinced of their living with their steady properties. It doesn’t imply that we have a complete knowledge concerning those electrons, but we certainly have those houses as regarded because of each of our experience. In this article comes the slogan: ” If you can change them, they have to be actual. ” (I.

Hacking, s. 150). Therefore , really, we can make a conclusion that “There much more to finding than meets the eyeball”.