A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

4. Instruments in Scientific Practice

Several authors have defended that the theory-ladenness problem of instruments can be excluded in some cases. A favored example is observations by means of microscopes and other instruments with which objects can be made visible (e.g. Hacking 1983; Zik 2001; Chalmers 2003). This also holds for data. Data given by instruments – such as data produced by a conductivity meter – may be given independent of a theory. Instruments create an invariant relationship between their operations and the world. After a change in theory, it will continue to show the same reading. However, the meanings of data – such as superconductivity – are not given by the data, since the data are interpreted as a phenomenon by theories. Thus, although data have an internal stability, which results from being reproducible by instruments, their meaning is neither manifest nor stable (e.g. Ackermann 1985; Gooding 1990). In particular in exploratory experiments it requires the formation of new basic concepts, such as the notion of a current circuit in the case of Ampère, before the data produced by the instrument can be interpreted as a phenomenon (e.g. Harré 1998; Steinle 2002; Heidelberger 2003).

Nevertheless, the view that data produced by instruments are independent of theory has also been challenged. Even the most basic “data-generating” instruments, such as thermometers, have gone through a long, intellectually and experimentally challenging route to knowing that these ...