Theory-free characterizations of experimental systems miss normative and conceptual components that sometimes are crucial to understanding their historical development. In the following paper, we show that these components may be part of the intrinsic capacities of experimental systems themselves. We study a case of non-exploratory and theory-oriented research in experimental neuroscience that concerns the construction of free-viewing as an experimental system to test one particular pre-existing hypothesis, the Temporal Correlation Hypothesis (TCH), at a laboratory in Santiago de Chile, during 2002–2008. We show that the system does not take well-formulated pre-existing predictions or hypotheses to test them directly, but re-creates them and re-signifies them in terms that are not implied by the theoretical background from which they originally derived. Therefore, we conclude that there is a sui generis way in which experimental systems produce proper theoretical knowledge.

实验系统的无理论特征缺乏规范性和概念性成分，这些成分有时对于理解其历史发展至关重要。在接下来的论文中，我们表明这些组件可能是实验系统本身固有能力的一部分。我们在圣地亚哥的一个实验室中研究了一个关于实验神经科学的非探索性和理论导向性研究案例，该案例涉及将自由视点作为实验系统来测试一种特定的现有假设（时间相关假设）的实验系统的构建。智利，2002-2008年。我们证明该系统没有采用结构合理的预先存在的预测或假设来直接对其进行测试，但以它们最初源自的理论背景未暗示的术语重新创建它们并重新表示它们。因此，我们得出结论：实验系统产生适当理论知识的特殊方式。