Background
Hanson, Norwood Russell was born on August 17, 1924 in New York, United States.
Philosopher of science Pragmatist
Hanson, Norwood Russell was born on August 17, 1924 in New York, United States.
Cambridge and Oxford.
1952-1957, University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science, University ol Cambridge. 1957-1963, Professor of Philosophy. Indiana University, Bloomington.
1963-1967. Pr°" fessor of Philosophy, Yale.
Norwood Russell Hanson was a seminal influence ln contemporary philosophy of science. He was one of the earlier philosophers to make applications to the philosophy of science of ideas derived from the later Wittgenstein concerning logical relationships between perception and concepts to •he philosophy of science. His critical response to a number of leading doctrines of logical positiVlsm and logical empiricism was to set the scene for much of the discussion of the 1960s. In Particular with his views on perception and explanation he challenged a number of central doctrines of the tradition of positivism. A standard view of logical positivism is that there exists a public world of sensory experience which Is available to all observers. This world is neutral w'th respect to any individual or social and cultural point of view and its contents can be observed with the senses and reported in neutral observation sentences. Were this so there would Be, at least in principle, an observational language available to us to report direct observations and it would always be possible for different percipients to see the same thing, process or property and rePort its presence in an observation language regardless of differences in conceptual or belief Background between the percipients. This language is to be distinguished from the theoretical language, the language in which the content of scientific theories is expressed. Against this view Hanson argued that the idea °f neutral observation and a corresponding observation language are philosophical fictions. He attempts to demonstrate, principally by means °f examples drawn from the psychology of Perception and the history of science, that in Perception whatever we perceive to be the case is mfluenced by our conceptual and theoretical Background. If this is so a critical question then arises for science: is the objectivity and hence authority of science thereby undermined? While the view that all seeing is ‘theory laden’ and that ‘Observation of x is shaped by prior knowledge of x’ leads to substantial revision of the traditional account of the relation between observation and theory, it can be argued that this view implies neither relativism nor subjectivism in science, for in learning to perceive we are trained in circumstances where stimuli from the external world arc publicly available and are partly intended to be the causes of what we see. These external ingredients, though possibly not separable in analysis, are available to anyone with normal sensory faculties and enable us to test and maybe revise current and future theories and in so doing provide a guarantee of the objectivity of science. A particular application of the above critique of Hanson’s concerns a central account of the nature of scientific understanding and theorizing embraced by positivism. The positivist account of these is that theories are axiom systems expressed in the theoretical language and incorporated into hypothetico-deductive structures which are then used to deduce observations. Such structures provide us with either predictions or explanations for particular events depending on the temporal position of the scientist with respect to observation and theoretical statement. This view is summed up in the doctrine of logical symmetry between explanation and prediction. However, if the distinction between observation and theory is not viable then the above account of scientific explanation fails as it is formulated in terms of that distinction. Further themes pursued in Patterns of Discovery include positivist views concerning the viability of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, the nature of scientific reasoning and the analysis of the concept of a cause. For each Hanson offers an alternative, and for some philosophers, persuasive account.