EMPIRICAL TOOLS AND EMPIRICISM 141 



stant pressure, but corrected values hypothetically representing the 

 results of constant- volume experiments. Conversely, when we make 

 due allowance for this correction, Dulong and Petit's law becomes 

 able to furnish more reliable predictions of what we will observe in 

 new cases, cases not before examined. Third, and perhaps most im- 

 portant: however less objective they may or may not be, the corrected 

 values are certainly very much more impersonal. Different scientists 

 measuring the "same thing" under different conditions observe differ- 

 ent raw values, which each subjects to the corrections appropriate to 

 his own experimental conditions. Only at the level of the corrected 

 values is general agreement reached, and the attainment of such 

 agreement cannot but strengthen our confidence in the correction 

 terms. For there is nothing "artificial" or contrived about this impres- 

 sive concordance: the correction formulae involved in the operating 

 protocol are established before we know the actual values of the 

 measurements reduced with their aid to agreement. 



No matter how the concurrence of observers is facilitated by use of 

 an instrument, the instrument always constitutes at most the core of 

 denotation. We never achieve completely explicit categorical denota- 

 tions. The denotation always must be filled out with an operating 

 protocol involving words and symbols for proper understanding of 

 which we must, ultimately, rely at least in part on the "good judg- 

 ment" of the investigator. He is trained to such judgment by educa- 

 tion, by the editorial policies of his journals, and by the example of 

 distinguished colleagues. So pervasive are these influences of the 

 international community of organized science that ordinarily tve 

 need not even state the auxiliary protocol that completes an instru- 

 mental denotation. Ordinarily we safely assume that protocol "under- 

 stood" by all competent and responsible scientists— for of course it is 

 simply shaped to take account of colligative relations that find a 

 place in the theories known and accepted by all. In using this par- 

 ticular instrument, I design my experiment and correct its results in a 

 way determined by my awareness of the effect of other variables on 

 the parameter I seek to measure. Thus, for example, knowing the rela- 

 tion between barometric pressure and boiling temperature, all sci- 

 entists will duly allow for the first when determining the second. The 

 denotative uncertainty introduced by the necessary, if wholly tacit, 

 involvement of an operating protocol is, then, ordinarily negligible. 



Pointer readings. Still yearning to establish completely categorical 



