Spectrometers as Analogues of Nature

Abstract

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.