Thing Knowledge A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments [Hardcover]

Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to read the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself,Thing Knowledgedemands that we take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more.

Davis Baird,Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina, is author ofInductive Logic: Inferring the Unknown(1999) and coeditor ofHeinrich Hertz: Classical Physicist, Modern Philosopher(1997).

Davis Baird'sThing Knowledgeuses instruments to do philosophy. Grappling with a wonderful assortment of objectsfrom antique orreries to modern spectrographshe draws the reader deep into fascinating questions about the nature of knowledge. All too often, the knowledge Baird pursues here has been obscured by accounts that reduce understanding to theory. By contrast, in this rich text Baird shows the myriad of ways that models and devices do work in science: by representing, by manipulating, by measuring, and by calculating. This is a book as lucid on the semantic account of theories as it is on the inner workings of the cyclotron; it is a book that brings the laboratory to philosophers and philosophy into the laboratory. Peter Galison, author ofEinstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empirlˆ