A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

2. Instruments in Science

Philosophy of science, on the other hand, has long ignored the role of instruments and laboratory experiments in science. In a traditional philosophical view, the aim of science is the production of reliable, adequate or true knowledge about the world. The role of experiments is testing hypotheses in controlled laboratory settings. But experimentation was seen as a mere data-provider for the evaluation of theories, and the production of empirical knowledge by instruments is not a topic of philosophical concern. We observe nature through technological spectacles, which do not influence the resulting picture of nature, and instruments are instrumental to the articulation and justification of scientific knowledge of the world.

Some of the philosophical problems in traditional philosophy of science seem to result from this neglect of the role of instruments and experiments. One such problem for the positivistic idea of testing theories is the Duhem–Quine problem of underdetermination of theories by empirical evidence. If an experiment or observation is persistently inconsistent with theory, one could either revise the theory or revise the auxiliary hypotheses – for instance those which are about the proper functioning of the instruments. Another severe problem to the positivistic image of science came from Popper (1959), who claimed that all observation is theory-laden. To him, observations, and observation-statements that represent experimental results, are ...