OBSERVATION RECONSIDERED

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Philosophy of Science Association
Observation Reconsidered
Author(s): Jerry Fodor
Source: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Mar., 1984), pp. 23-43
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science
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OBSERVATION RECONSIDERED*
JERRY FODOR
Department of Psychology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Several arguments are considered which purport to demonstrate the impos-
sibility of theory-neutral observation. The most important of these infers the
continuity of observation with theory from the presumed continuity of perception
with cognition, a doctrine widely espoused in recent cognitive psychology. An
alternativepsychological account of the relation between cognition and percep-
tion is proposed and its epistemological consequences for the observation/theory
distinction are then explored.
Grannyand I think that things have gone too far, what with relativism,
idealism and pragmatismat Harvard, graffiti in the subway stations, and
Lord knows what all next. Granny and I have decided to put our foot
down and dig our heel in. Granny is particularly aroused about people
playing fast and loose with the observation/inferencedistinction;and when
Granny
is
aroused, she
is terrible. "We
may
not have
prayers
in the
public
schools," Granny says, "but by G-d, we will have a distinction between
observation and inference."
The observation/inference distinction according to Granny:
"There are", Granny says, "two quite different routes to the fixation
of belief. There is, on the one hand, belief fixation directly consequent
upon the activation of the senses (belief fixation 'by observation', as
I
shall say for short) and there
is
belief fixation
via
inference
from
beliefs
previously held ('theoretical' inference, as I shall say for short). This
taxonomy of the means of belief fixation implies, moreover, a corre-
spondingtaxonomy of beliefs. For, the characterof an organism's sensory
apparatus-and, more generally, the characterof its perceptual psychol-
ogy-may determine that certain beliefs, if acquired at all, must be in-
ferential and cannot be attained by observation. It is, for example, an
accident (of our geography) that our beliefs about Martian fauna are non-
observationallyacquired. By contrast, it is not an accident that our beliefs
about the doings of electromagnetic energy in the extreme ultraviolet are
all inferential. If there are Martianfauna then were we close enough, we
could observe some (unless Martians are very small). But making obser-
vations in the extreme ultraviolet would require alterationof our
sensory/
*Received August 1983; revised October 1983.
Philosophyof Science,51 (1984) pp. 23-43.
CopyrightC 1984by the Philosophyof ScienceAssociation.
23
24
JERRYFODOR
perceptual mechanisms; beliefs about the extreme ultraviolet must, for
us, all be inferential.
"Some beliefs are thus nonobservational in the nature of things. (To a
first approximation, no beliefs
are noninferential
in
the nature of things;
any belief could be fixed by inference excepting, maybe, tricky ones of
the 'I exist' variety.) Moreover, beliefs that are fixed by observation play
an interesting and central role in the acquisition of knowledge. (Not, per-
haps, so interesting and central as philosophers have sometimes sup-
posed, but still.
. .
.) For one thing, observationally fixed beliefs tend,
by and large, to be more reliable than inferentially fixed beliefs. This is
primarilybecause the
etiological route from the fact that
P
to the belief
that P is metaphorically-and
maybe literally-shorter
in
observation
than in inference; less is likely to go wrong because there's less that can
go wrong. And, because beliefs that are fixed by observation tend to be
relatively reliable, our rational confidence in our knowledge claims de-
pends very largely on their ability to survive observational assessment.
"Second, the observational fixation of belief plays a special role in the
adjudication and resolution of clashes of opinion. When observation is
not appealedto, attemptsto settle
disputes often
take
the
form
of
a
search
for premises that the disputants share. There is, in general, no point to
my convincing you that belief B is derivable from theory T unless T is a
theory you endorse; otherwise, my argument will seem to you merely a
reductio of its premises. This is a peculiarly nasty property of inferential
belief fixation because it means that the more we disagree about, the
harder it will likely be to settle any of our disagreements. None of this
applies, however, when the beliefs at issue are observational. Since ob-
servationis not a process in which new beliefs are inferred from old ones,
the use of observation to resolve disputes does not depend on a prior
consensus as to what premises may be assumed. The moral, children, is
approximatelyBaconian. Don't think; look. Try not to argue."
Also sprach Granny. Recent opinion, however, has tended to ignore
these
homely truths. In this paper,
I
want to
claim
that widely
endorsed
arguments against the possibility
of
drawing
a
principled observation/
theory distinction have, in fact, been over-sold. This does not amount
quite to Granny's vindication, since I will not attemptto say in any detail
what role the notion of observational belief fixation might come to play
in
a reasonablenaturalizedepistemology. Suffice it, for present purposes,
to have cleared the
way
for such a reconstruction.
The claim, then, is that there is a class of beliefs that are typically
fixed by sensory/perceptual processes, and that the fixation of beliefs in
this class is, in a sense that wants spelling out, importantlytheory neutral.
As a first shot at what the theory neutralityof observation comes to: given
the same stimulations, two organisms with the same sensory/perceptual
OBSERVATIONRECONSIDERED
25
psychology will quite generally observe the same things, and hence arrive
at the same observational beliefs, however much their theoretical com-
mitmentsmay difer. This will get some pretty comprehensive refinement
as we go along, but it's good enough to start from.
There are, as far as I know, three sorts of arguments that have been
alleged to show that no serious observation/inference distinction can be
drawn.' These are: ordinary language arguments, meaning holism argu-
ments, and de facto psychological arguments. I propose to concentrate,
in what follows, mostly on argumentsof the thirdkind; I think that recent
changes in the way (some) psychologists view sensory/perceptual pro-
cesses have significant implications for the present philosophical issues.
But it's worth a fast run-throughto see why the first two sorts of argu-
ments are also, to put it mildly, less than decisive.
1. The OrdinaryLanguage Argument. The main contention of this pa-
per is that there is a theory-neutralobservation/inference distinction; that
the boundary between what can be observed and what must be inferred
is largely determined by fixed, architectural features of an organism's
sensory/perceptual psychology. I'm prepared
to concede, however, that
this is not the doctrine that emerges from attention to the linguistic prac-
tices of working scientists. Scientists do have a use for a distinction be-
tween what is observed and what is inferred, but the distinction that they
have in mind is typically relativized to the inquiry they have in hand.
Roughly, so far as I can tell, what a working scientist counts as an ex-
perimentalobservation depends on what issue his experiment is designed
to settle and what empirical assumptions the design
of his
experiment
takes for granted. One speaks of telescopic observations-and
of the tel-
escope as an instrument of observation-because the functioning
of the
telescope is assumed in experimental designs that give us observations of
celestial events. One speaks of observed reaction times because the op-
erationof the clock is assumed in the design of experiments when reaction
time is the dependent variable. If, by contrast, it begins to seem that
perhaps the clock is broken, it then becomes an issue whether reaction
times are observed when the experimenter reads the
numerals that the
clock displays.
That way of using the observation/inference distinction is, of course,
responsive to an epistemically important fact: not all the empirical as-
sumptions of an experiment can get tested in the same design; we can't
'Well, four really. But I shan't discuss ontological approaches which support a distinc-
tion between observation terms and others by claiming that only the former denote (eg.
because whatever is unobservable is ipso facto fictitious). That the assumptions of the
present discussion are fully Realistic with respect to unobservables will become entirely
apparentas we proceed.
26
JERRY
FODOR
test all of our beliefs at once. It is perfectly reasonable of working sci-
entists to want to mark the distinction between what's foreground in an
experimentand what is merely taken for granted, and it is again perfectly
reasonable of them to do so by relativizing the notion of an observation
to whatever experimental assumptions are operative. But, of course, if
that is what one means by the observation/inferencedistinction, then there
is no interesting issue about whether scientific observation can be theory
neutral. Patently, on that construal, the theory of the experimental in-
strumentsand the (e.g. statistical) theory of the experimental design will
be presupposedby the scientist's observational vocabulary, and what the
scientist can (be said to) observe will change as these backgroundtheories
mature. We can now observe craters on Venus (small differences in re-
action times) because we now have powerful enough telescopes (accurate
enough clocks). On this way of drawing it, the observation/inference
distinction is inherently heuristic; it is relativized not just to the
sensory/
perceptualpsychology of the observer, but also to the currently available
armementariumof scientific theories and gadgets.
Much that is philosophically illuminating can, no doubt, be learned by
careful attentionto what working scientists use terms like 'observed' and
'inferred'to do; but naturalizedepistemology is not, for all that, a merely
sociolinguistic discipline. Though one of the things
that these
terms are
used for is
to mark
a
distinction that
is
beyond
doubt
theory-relative,
that
does not settle the case against Granny. For, it is open to Grannyto argue
like this:
"True, there is an epistemologically importantdistinction that it's rea-
sonable to call 'the' observation/inference distinction, and that is theory-
relative. And, also true, it is this theory-relative distinction that scientists
usually use the terms 'observed' and 'inferred' to mark. But that is quite
compatible with there being another distinction, which it
is
also reason-
able
to call
'the' observation/inference distinction,
which is also of cen-
tral significance to the epistemology of science, and which is not theory-
relative. No linguistic considerations can decide this, and I therefore pro-
pose to ignore mere matters of vulgar dialectology henceforth."
In her advanced years, Granny has become quite bitter about ordinary
language arguments.
2. Argumentsfrom Meaning Holism. Think of a theory (or, mutatis
mutandis, the system of beliefs a given person holds)
as
represented by
an infinite, connected graph.
The nodes of the
graph correspond
to the
entailments of the
theory,
and the
paths
between the nodes
correspond
to
a variety of semantically significant relations that hold among its theo-
rems; inferential relations, evidence relations,
and so forth. When the
theory is tested, confirmation percolates
from node to node
along
the
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