The new relevance of experiment

a postmodern problem

Patrick A. Heelan

pp. 197-213

in: Lee Hardy, Lester Embree (eds), Phenomenology of natural science, Berlin, Springer, 1992

Abstract

A post-modern view of science in our culture should recognize two things about science suppressed or forgotten when it was appropriated by modernism: 1. that science is an experimental art in the domain of the performing arts, and 2. that the tradition of experimental science is transmitted by rituals and accompanying narratives which give to science an exemplary—and not necessary mythic—legitimizing dimension that was hidden pom the purview of modernist inquiry.