Philosophical Instruments: Minds and Tools at Work

by Daniel Rothbart, Rom Harré (Foreword by)

Overview

The surprising roles of instruments and experimentation in acquiring knowledge

In Philosophical Instruments Daniel Rothbart argues that our tools are not just neutral intermediaries between humans and the natural world, but are devices that demand new ideas about reality. Just as a hunter's new spear can change their knowledge of the environment, so can the development of modern scientific equipment alter our view of the world.

Working at the intersections of science, technology, and philosophy, Rothbart examines the revolution in knowledge brought on by recent advances in scientific instruments. Full of examples from historical and contemporary science, including electron scanning microscopes, sixteenth-century philosophical instruments, and diffraction devices used by biochemical researchers, Rothbart explores the ways in which instrumentation advances a philosophical stance about an instrument's power, an experimenter's skills, and a specimen's properties. Through a close reading of engineering of instruments, he introduces a philosophy from (rather than of) design, contending that philosophical ideas are channeled from design plans to models and from model into the use of the devices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252031366
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	06/25/2007
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Daniel Rothbart is a professor of philosophy at George Mason University. He is the author of Explaining the Growth of Scientific Knowledge: Metaphors, Models, and Meanings. His edited volumes include Science, Reason and Reality and Modeling: Gateway to the Unknown by Rom Harré.

Date of Birth:

1954

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PHILOSOPHICAL INSTRUMENTS

MINDS AND TOOLS AT WORK

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By Daniel Rothbart

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Daniel Rothbart
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03136-6

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Chapter One

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY

[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.... Therefore[,] our most important assets are always the symbols of our general orientation in nature, on the earth, in society, and in what we are doing. -Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art

The apparatus that generated a revolution in seventeenth-century science were known as philosophical instruments. Telescopes, compound microscopes, and thermometers were hailed for their capacities to reveal new vistas of knowledge, empowering experimenters with the ability to discover truths about previously inaccessible particles or corpuscles. As the frontiers for inquiry expanded to reveal wondrous and sometimes bizarre events, the metaphysical speculations advanced by the Medieval Schoolmen were denigrated as philosophical fantasies. The champions of experimental inquiry could see new realms of beings by properly operating these new machines. It was aglorious time for natural philosophy, not only because of the truths these instruments unveiled but also because of the philosophical ideas they confirmed. The stock-in-trade for designers of philosophical instruments of the seventeenth century was both ideas and tools.

Although not used to characterize contemporary devices, the notion of a philosophical instrument is neither trivial nor anachronistic. The seventeenth-century idea can be extended to instruments of twentieth- or twenty-first-century research. By the mid-twentieth century, the natural sciences witnessed another revolution in instrumental technologies, generating entirely new methods of inquiry. The profound transformation in research techniques from "wet chemistry," for example, to a chemistry driven by the fingerprinting techniques of electronic instrumentation had a profound effect on "pure research." The instrumentation revolution of the twentieth century was waged in the offices, conference rooms, and laboratories of the chemical industry, responsive to the needs of manufacturers, government agencies, and military institutions (Morris 2002). For example, invention and refinement of the infrared spectrometer were driven by work in industrial companies, particularly in the synthetic rubber program and for petroleum refinement. In organic chemistry, the new detection methods of the century were driven by discoveries in physical chemistry of the ways in which molecules are held together, bonds are formed and broken, and reactions occur at the molecular level.

The use of sophisticated research technologies carries with it specific convictions about the standards for knowledge. The alleged privilege given to pure researchers over instrument makers was undermined. The very boundary between detectable realm and unruly territory changed with the instrumental revolution of the twentieth century. More than merely an assembly of metals, wires, and plastics, the new instruments are channels of philosophical ideas about knowledge acquisition, ideas that are commissioned for laboratory studies. The new technologies reinvigorate the old notion of a philosophical instrument. Based on conceptions of human skill, instrumental power, and nature's properties, our inquiry reveals that tools blend with ideas in the (philosophical) instruments of the twentieth century.

In using instrumental technologies, researchers are committed to certain modes of inquiry. Instrument designers take a stance on how knowledge of materials can be attained and how such knowledge can be conveyed to others. Strict adherence to precise principles, commonplace in the history of philosophy, is not necessary and may even paralyze attempts to express how knowledge is gained from material skill.

I invite the reader to explore in the following pages how the twentieth-and twenty-first-century revolution in instrumental technologies demands its own standards of knowledge-inquiry as conceived in design plans for instruments and realized in laboratory studies. Important philosophical commitments about know-how are revealed in the standards of the so-called professional arts. Such commitments are not reducible to discursive knowledge from the theoretical sciences. As experimenters use instruments to explore the microscopic realm, unfamiliar vistas open and familiar ones are closed. The technologies that have radically transformed twentieth-century laboratory research with stunning results are true philosophical instruments, enabling researchers to reveal reliable information about the world. Of course, we must not force-fit philosophical prescriptions on the design of such technologies. Since instrumental technologies lie at the core of all contemporary laboratory research, attention to engineering design can yield insight into the experimenter/world relationship and reveal important commitments about inquiry. Philosophical ideas about knowledge acquisition are exposed, not imposed, through the careful study of the engineering of instruments.

Insight into the experimenter's relationship to the microscopic realm is gained by exploring the designs of mediating technologies. A philosophy from instrumentation, in contrast to a philosophy of instrumentation, emerges from such designs. Underpinning the engineering of information-generating technologies are commitments about knowledge acquisition. The designer imagines how a segment of the environment could be changed, anticipating the results of his or her possible action on the material world. Instrumentation requires both manipulation and analysis: experimenters manipulate, agitate, and transform a segment of the microscopic world, then analyze, monitor, and distill the results. Design plans define the instrument as well as the standards for attaining reliable information.

ACQUIRING SKILLS

For philosophers working in the logical empiricist tradition, the validity of findings from laboratory apparatus presumably relies on the same kind of epistemic standards for acquiring empirical knowledge through the naked senses. The laboratory instruments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as the compound microscope, telescope, and air pump, function as mere tools, intermediate devices that extend the range of the senses. A skilled use of tools serves merely to enhance, correct, or validate the sensory experiences of observers. The methods of inquiry are quasi-transparent, and potential contaminants that arise from biasing factors can be removed from inquiry. Although demonstrating technical skills in their construction, such devices offer no special reward for the philosophical study of science.

None of the familiar theories of knowledge from the logical empiricist tradition in philosophy can adequately explain how knowing is achieved through the skilled use of tools. With the stunning advances in apparatus, many scholars today place instrumental skill at the forefront of laboratory research, dismissing familiar assumptions of rationalist philosophies. Between experimenters and an assembly of atoms are manipulative technologies, properly used. The notion of techné, referring to processes of creating artifacts through the skillful use of material, must be recognized as an essential and privileged aspect of inquiry. Experimental research is more an activity to produce new states than an application of abstract theories to a laboratory setting. A laboratory technician becomes an agent who, like the ancient artisan, starts a process, removes obstacles, and frees natural possibility from concealment toward the production of an artifact. In so doing, the agent exploits the concealed capacities of nature, hidden from immediate detection by the naked senses but revealed indirectly from the products of such operations. Validating data requires using apparatus skillfully. Rather than a secondary aspect of research, subordinate to the logic of confirmation, the production of artifacts is essential to data acquisition. The fundamental relationship between experimenters and the scientific world is invaded by the pragmatics of technical efficacy (Queraltó 1999; Agazzi 1999). The history of the physical sciences can be written as a chronology of successive discoveries of measuring devices. Machines dominate the historical landscape of research in ways that cannot be explained by rationalist philosophies of science. The practical ability of knowing how to achieve certain goals is an irreducible aspect of scientific practice.

Michael Polanyi argues against the a priori distinction between "knowing how" and "knowing that" (1969). The tacit knowledge required for the skilled use of tools is drawn from both the concrete, practical realm of individual experience and the abstract realm of theoretical prediction. But at some point, the performer must turn away from the immediacy of sensory experience and attend to participation in an entire experimental system (pp. 126-28). In teaching novices how to use tools, experienced hands move back and forth from concrete individual experiences to general patterns of associations among human bodies, tools, and raw materials. The old distinction between pure science, as the discovery of a given reality, and technology, as the deliberate production of artifacts, collapses for contemporary research. Science discovers through the production of artifacts.

Excessive attention to scientific theories-their character, construction, and confirmation-has generated utopian fantasies about inquiry, as Ian Hacking famously argues (1983). Between the proper use of the term "electrons" and the efficient use of electrons is a complex network of mediating agents, both human and nonhuman. Theories come and go, but the causal properties of certain entities deployed for purposes of research remain stable. Real-world entities are those that function as manipulating tools in the investigation of other, more hypothetical elements of nature (p. 263). Engineering, and not theorizing, reveals how certain entities are exploited to intervene in a specimen's dynamic properties.

In writings that followed Representing and Intervening, Hacking broadens his perspective to address the cultural dimensions of laboratory research. Stability of science is found in the mutual adjustment of ideas, materials, and marks (1992b, p. 30). Ideas comprise the questions, background knowledge, topical hypotheses, and modeling of apparatus; materials include the substance to be studied, apparatus, detectors, and tools; marks are the uninterpreted inscriptions, data processing, data reduction, and interpretation. All phenomena occurring in the laboratory are crafted artificially from the mutually adjusted segments of material practice (p. 49). The reliability of findings rests on adjustment of theory, apparatus, data, and much more (Hacking 199 a, p. 49). Any disunifying factor, such as unexpected data, can be assimilated by making suitable revisions to the relevant practice, retaining the system's closure from the real world. One segment of research can be vindicated by the mutual adjustment of the system as a whole (Hacking 1992b, p. 56). Theories have no privileged status in the system.

In a series of richly detailed studies of instrumental technologies, Davis Baird applauds Hacking's commitment to the manipulative character of laboratory research. Baird privileges the material culture of researchers (2004). The hands-on knowledge needed to operate sophisticated apparatus cannot be explained by theories about nature or prescriptions for rational science (Baird and Faust 1990; Baird and Nordmann 1990). Baird examines the cyclotron (Baird and Faust 1990), the grating spectrograph (Baird 1991), the direct reading emission spectrometer (2000b), and various other spectrometers made by his father Walter's company, Baird Associates (Baird 1998). In some cases, standards for "objectivity" give greater weight to social and economic factors driving industrial production of the device than to accuracy and precision of the technique itself. Cost efficiency supersedes instrumental accuracy in the notion of objectivity of technique (2000a, p. 110). Chemical knowledge is judged more on research techniques associated with manipulating and controlling materials than on the theoretical representations of microscopic processes that presumably provide the rationale for such techniques (2002). A well-known manufacturer of analytical instruments, with cutting-edge contributions to emission and infrared spectroscopy in the 1930s and 1940s, Baird Associates illustrates how the instrumentation revolution changed forever how scientific knowledge is acquired and the way science and technology are mutually supportive.

Much debate over the unity/disunity of science centers on the role of agency. David Gooding provides a detailed study of the material, cultural, and (individual) human agents that determine experimental practice as he constructs a complex mapping system of a researcher's thoughts and actions in his analyses of the experiments of Michael Faraday (Gooding 1990) as well as of the quark-search experiments of Giacomo Morpurgo (Gooding 1992).

Andrew Pickering examines how material and social resources are brought to bear on the daily work of laboratory physicists. The physicist maneuvers in a field of materials, constructing machines, putting segments of the environment in service as if domesticating nature (1995, p. 7). Artifacts of a scientific culture bring together human and nonhuman agents within networks of capacities (p. 21). The properties of material agents are manifested in a world of human agency, typically through the application of skills, under the pressures of cultural factors associated with the production of machines. Conversely, the network of human agency is revealed in performances associated with the production of artifacts. Ultimately, the practices are mangled from an inescapable tension between the need to accommodate some agents (material, social, culture) and the need to resist others (p. 23).

Through their sociological studies of science, Harry Collins and Steven Yearley attempt to redress the mistaken privilege given to science-as-theory doctrines. Experimental researchers are driven by the same kinds of cultural factors that determine the participants in our everyday social world (Collins and Yearley 1992). In her rich studies of biological laboratories, Karin Knorr-Cetina also argues that laboratory practices are deeply anchored in the culture of daily life, a life occurring outside of scientific research institutions (1992). A laboratory culture comprises various material, social, and conceptual elements, not amenable to a single systematic order. In his wonderfully detailed explorations of a physics laboratory, Peter Galison argues that a laboratory is a site for competing scientific cultures, that is, a trading zone for exchanging goods. Both sides impose constraints on the nature of the exchange without threatening the identity of either culture. Trading requires consensus about the procedure for exchange, determining which goods are valued equally (Galison 1997, p. 803). The interaction between competing scientific cultures requires local (but not global) coordination, without sacrificing the identity of either culture.

Pierre Laszlo examines another element of laboratory culture (1998). For Laszlo, the physical display of laboratory tools is rationalized by utopian pretensions about their purpose, masking their actual function as rhetorical devices. He defines instruments as inscription devices for constructing the texts of science. Rather than revealing the real-world properties of atoms and compounds, Laszlo argues, the new devices are used to convey prestige and power as chemists proudly show off their contraptions to visitors or advertise their techniques to journal referees. The so-called revolution in instrumentation enhances the mystique of researchers and perpetuates a professional myopia, as he puts it, about the rhetoric of chemistry.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword by Rom Harré....................ix
Preface....................xiii
1. Science, Technology, and Philosophy....................1
2. Analogies of Design....................16
3. Testing Design Plans....................26
4. Icons of Design and Images of Art....................36
5. Microscopes, Machines, and Matter....................58
6. Atoms: Easier than Ever Before....................82
7. Specimens as Machines....................100
Afterword....................109
Notes....................113
Glossary....................119
References....................123
Credits....................135
Index....................137

Editorial Reviews

"Exceptional for its clarity of prose and argument. . . . Rothbart integrates profound issues of ontology and epistemology with compelling case studies that traverse the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries."—Technology and Culture

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