DRAFT (d.d. Dec. 14th 2006). This article has been published in: A Companion to Philosophy of Technology, (2009). Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, Vincent F. Hendricks (eds.), Blackwell Companions to Philosophy Series, Blackwell Publishers. 78-84. Please quote or cite from the published article.
INSTRUMENTS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MIEKE BOON
Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands. E-mail: m.boon@utwente.nl
Modern science and technology are interwoven into a complex that is sometimes called 'techno-science': the progress of science is dependent on the sophistication of instrumentation, whereas the progress of ‘high-tech’ instruments and apparatus is dependent on scientific research. Yet, how scientific research contributes to the development of instruments and apparatus for technological use, has not been systematically addressed in the philosophy of technology, nor in the philosophy of science. Philosophers of technology have taken an interest in the specific character of technological knowledge as distinct from scientific knowledge, thereby ignoring the contribution of scientific knowledge to technological developments. Philosophers of science such as the so-called New-Experimentalists, on the other hand, recently has become interested in the role of instrumentation, but merely focus on their role in testing scientific theories. By reviewing the two distinct developments and taking them a step further, an alternative explanation of the interwoveness of science and technology in scientific research is proposed. Additional to testing theories, instruments in scientific practice have an important role in producing reproducible phenomena, and these phenomena may have technological applications. Subsequently, technological development of these applications requires theoretical understanding of the phenomenon and of materials and physical conditions that produce it, is not for the sake of theories about the world, but for the sake of understanding a phenomenon and how it is technologically produced.
1. Science and Technology.
At present, many accept that modern science and technology are interwoven into a complex that is sometimes called 'techno-science': the progress of science is dependent on the sophistication of instrumentation, whereas the progress of ‘high-tech’ instruments and apparatus is dependent on scientific research. (c.p. Galison 1987, 1997; Baird and Faust, 1990; Radder, 1996, 2003). From this perspective, an understanding of how scientific research interacts with technology, in particular in the development of instruments and apparatus, is a topic for both philosophy of technology and philosophy of science. The focus taken here is how scientific research contributes to the development of instruments and apparatus for technological use.
In philosophy of technology, recent interest has been in the nature of technological knowledge, (e.g. Vincenti, 1990; Kroes, 1995; Pitt, 2000), rather than in how scientific research contributes to technological development. In that literature, science is valued for its heuristic role, whereas scientific approaches to the development of technology are non-existent. Conceptual and historical reasons may explain this focus. Traditionally, science and technology were distinct domains. The classical dichotomy between scientific knowledge (epistême) and technological knowledge (têchnè) was grounded in the ontological distinction between their objects: Scientific knowledge is about ‘things’ that exist of necessity, things that are universal, eternal, ungenerated and imperishable. Technological knowledge is about things that have their origin in their maker, ‘things’ that are variable, generated and perishable. This dichotomy has caused
conceptual confusion when trying to understand the relation between science and technology in modern scientific practices. Mario Bunge (1966) put forward the thesis that ‘technology is applied science’. What he meant to say is that in technology the method and the theories of science are applied to solving practical problems. An outcome of this scientific approach is technological knowledge, which is made up of theories, grounded rules, and data. This thesis – and its implicit implication, which is that technology results from science – has been much debated in philosophy of technology of the 1970th and 1980th. It was rejected on the basis of conceptual analyses of scientific and technological knowledge (e.g. Skolimowski, 1966). But also historical studies showed that the factual contribution of science to new technologies in the past, was less significant than many seemed to believe. Most technological devices were developed by craftsmen, independent of science. Engineers did not need a scientific understanding of the phenomena that they utilized and of the technological devices that they invented. For development and design they used phenomenological laws and ‘rules of thumb’, (c.p. Layton, 1974).
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 under-determination 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 always interpretations in the light of theories. Kuhn’s (1970) notion of paradigms was conceived in a similar vein: rather than observation, the paradigm is basic to our knowledge of the world, and observations only exist insofar they emerge within the paradigm.
The view that non-empirical factors, such as ontology and theoretical background knowledge, are prior to observation and experiments, has been a severe threat to the traditional view that scientific theories are tested by means of an empirical and logical methodology, as it was conceived by logical positivism and logical empiricism, and opened the road to extreme sceptical appraisals of science. Social constructivists, for instance, have raised objections to the view that experimental results are accepted on the basis of epistemological or methodological arguments, and argue that social factors play an ineliminable role. (e.g. Bruno Latour, Harry Collins, and Andrew Pickering).
3. New Experimentalism.
New Experimentalists share the view that a number of problems, such as the under-determination of theory by empirical knowledge, the theory-ladenness of observation, and extreme sceptical positions - such as social constructivist - that results from it, stem from the theory-dominated perspective on science of positivistic philosophers of science. They defend that focusing on aspects of experiments and instruments in scientific practice holds the key to avoiding these problems. Some of the key figures of this movement in the 1980th and early 90th are Ian Hacking, Nancy Cartwright, Allan Franklin, Peter Galison, Ronald Giere, Robert Ackermann, and more recently, Deborah Mayo. These authors do not accept the restriction to the logic of science that positivistic philosophers had set for themselves. Traditional philosophical accounts of how observation provides an objective basis for evaluation of theories – by the use of
confirmation theory or inductive logic – should be replaced by accounts of science that reflect how experimental knowledge is actually arrived at and how this knowledge functions. The traditional distinction between the ‘context of discovery’ and the ‘context of justification’, which motivated why philosophers should restrict their task to the logic of justification of scientific theories, is abandoned. New Experimentalists, instead, aim at an account of the rationality of scientists in scientific practices that includes how scientists reason about experiments, instruments, data, and theoretical knowledge.
This new philosophical tradition heavily relies on historical case-studies of science, which focus on aspects of experiments and instruments. These historically informed approaches in philosophy of science strengthened the tradition that may have been ushered in by Thomas Kuhn, and which is now called the 'history and philosophy of science'. The focus is on epistemological aspects of experiments, instruments, data and the processing of data, and different layers of theorizing. Thus, although, New Experimentalists admit that non-rational, sociological, and contingent factors may determine the course of science, they deny that sociological factors are determining methodological and epistemological criteria internal to scientific practices. The examples below aim to illustrate how the focus of New Experimentalist on the role of instruments provides new perspectives on scientific research.
4. Instruments in Scientific Practice.
Several authors have defended that the theory-ladenness problem of instruments can be excluded in some cases. A favoured 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 of 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, also the view that data produced by instruments are independent of theory has 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 instruments tell us the temperature correctly. Finding empirical knowledge of temperature involved theoretical assumptions about the properties of matter. Therefore, a basic problem to a philosophical account of empirical science, which demands that theories should be justified by observations, is that observations involve theories, for instance about how things work. (e.g. Chang, 2004)
This latter finding also holds for other instruments and apparatus that inhabit our laboratories. According to Nancy Cartwright such instruments are to be understood as
nomological machines. A nomological machine is a fixed arrangement of components, or factors, with stable capacities that in the right sort of stable environment will give rise to regular behaviour. Laws represent this regular behaviour of nomological machines, which implies that those laws hold as a consequence of the repeated, successful operation of nomological machines. Therefore, laws - understood as a necessary regular association between properties - do not necessarily hold for the world beyond the nomological machine. (Cartwright, 1983, 1989, 1999, and also Harré, 2003; additionally, important articles on the role of instruments in scientific practice, are in Radder (ed.), 2003; see also Boon, 2004)
What these examples illustrate is that in scientific practice, theories and instruments are developed in a mutual relationship. Rather than being spectacles on the world, instruments take part in our theoretical knowledge. This has been well expressed by Hacking (1992), who claims that our preserved theories and the world fit together, less because we have found out how the world is, but because we have tailored each to the other. As a laboratory-science matures, it develops a body of types of theories and types of instruments and types of analysis of data that are mutually adjusted to each other. Any test of theory is related to instruments that have evolved in conjunction with it - and in conjunction with modes of data analysis. Conversely, the criteria for the working of the instruments and for the correctness of analyses are precisely the fit with theory. Thus, contrary to the Duhem-Quine thesis that theory is under-determined by data, Hacking argues that the constraints by these interrelated elements, narrows down the degrees of freedom for finding adequate theories.
5. The interwoveness of Science and Technology.
The picture that emerges is that instruments are not passive technological spectacles through which we perceive the object of science, i.e. ‘things’ that are universal, eternal, ungenerated and imperishable. The ontological distinction between the objects of epistême and têchnè becomes blurred once instruments are used in scientific investigations. Much of our empirical knowledge does not result from passive observation by means of instruments, but from interventions with instruments and technological devices. Observation as a source of empirical knowledge is extended by doing, by interacting and intervening with the world through our instruments. This claim of Hacking (1983) pulls down the traditional distinction between science and technology. The spectacle metaphor of instruments is replaced by a metaphor in which instruments and technological devices provide a material playground where we learn a lot; not about the traditional object of science, but about ‘things’ that are local, generated, variable, and perishable, i.e. about the traditional object of têchnè. But in their interventions and interactions with ‘things’, scientist concurrently search for a solid ground, i.e. for those ‘things’ that do not change or that work in a reproducible way, which is the traditional object of epistême.
Thus, New Experimentalists’ focus on scientific practice gives a new perspective on the role of instruments, technological devices, and experiments in modern scientific practice, which also explains the interwoveness of science and technology. For, instruments have an important role in producing reproducible phenomena, and these
phenomena may have technological applications. For instance, the important contribution of the discovery of superconductivity was not that it confirmed a theory about the world; the important contribution was the simultaneous discovery of that phenomenon and how that phenomenon can be technologically produced. The urge for theoretical understanding of the phenomenon and of materials and physical conditions that produce it, is not for the sake of theories about the world, but for the sake of understanding this phenomenon and how it is technologically produced. In many cases theoretical understanding of a phenomenon is in the context of technological applications. This insight also involves a new perspective on the aim of science. The traditional view assumes that science aims at the production and justification of theories. The picture that has emerged from New Experimentalists’ study of scientific practice is that scientific research also aims at creating phenomena by means of instruments and technological devices, as well as at a theoretical understanding of phenomena and of the instruments that create them. This pictures a practice where science and technology, i.e. scientific research and development of technological devices, is interwoven.
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