Viewpoints from Computing to the Epistemology of Experiments

Although experiments have been a core element of the scientific method since the 1600s, experiments per se only caught philosophers' interest in the 1980s. Since the 1980s dozens of philosophical analyses of experiments have been presented, based mostly on physics and biology. A number of philosophers of science have called for bottom-up, "naturalistic" investigations of experiments in various disciplines, especially fields other than physics. This paper presents an epistemological analysis of experiments in computing fields in terms of epistemological characteristics, research milieux, and epistemological features of results. Our analysis of experiments, based on how the term is operationalized in computer science papers, opens new critical viewpoints to the role of experiments in computing, as well as complementary viewpoints to the concept of experiment in the philosophy of science.

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