Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-pkt8n Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-07T09:45:03.778Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Spectrometers as Analogues of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Daniel Rothbart
Daniel Rothbart*
Affiliation:
George Mason University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Traditional empiricist epistemologies have raised major philosophical obstacles to a clear understanding of instruments. Empiricist philosophers have given scant attention to instruments as a separate topic of inquiry because the reliability of instruments is presumably reducible to the epistemology of common sense experience. Instruments function presumably to magnify our physiologically limited sensory capacities by linking the specimen's sensory properties to accessible empirical data; such data are then validated by the same empiricist standards used to access ordinary (middle-sized) phenomena. Thus, no epistemic insight is revealed by studying instrumentation per se, according to empiricists.

Critics of empiricism have championed the cause that all sensory data are theoryladen. Yet even this dictum has the effect of minimizing the philosophical significance of instruments. This is because many critics of empiricism are working within the empiricist's distinction between the subjectivity of theory and the apparent objectivity of data.

Type
Part IV. Philosophy of Chemistry
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 140 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ackennann, R. (1985), Data, Instruments, and Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bair, E. (1962), Introduction to Chemical Instrumentation. New York: Mcgraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Dretske, F. (1981), Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Galison, P. and Assmus, A. (1989), “Artificial Clouds and Real Particles,” in Gooding, Pinch and Schaffer (eds.), The Uses of Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 225–274.Google Scholar
Gouk, P. (1986), “Newton and Music: From the Microcosm to the Macrocosm,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: The Dubrovnik Paper I, 1: 36–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacking, I. (1983), Representing and Intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harré, R. (1961), Theories and Things. London: Sheed and Ward.Google Scholar
Harré, R. (1986), Varieties of Realism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hesse, M. (1980), Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Hesse, M. (1991), “Science, Beyond Realism and Relativism”, in Raven, D., et. al., (eds.), Cognitive Relativism and Social Science. London: Transaction Publishers, pp. 91–106.Google Scholar
Heelan, P. (1983), “Natural Science as a Hermeneutic of Instrumentation,” Philosophy of Science, 50:181–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hooker, M. (1987), “On Global Theories”, A Realistic Theory of Science. Albany, New York: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Newton, I. (1959), “Newton to Oldenburg: 7 December 1675”, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Volume I: 1661-1675, Turnbull, H. W. (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 376.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothbart, D. and Slayden, S. (1994), “The Epistemology of a Spectrometer,” Philosophy of Science 61: 25–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woodward, J. (1989), “Data and Phenomena”, Synthese 79: 393–472.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Fraassen, B. (1980), The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar