Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments

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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 Knowledge demands 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.

Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments Review

When I saw the title I was excited. I wanted to know how the knowledge captured in instruments could be harnessed. This book gives concrete examples and details on how knowledge is captured in models and instruments. It is rather theoretical and philosophical. I covered chapters 1, 2, 6,and 10. The author brings together a wide array of histories of scientific instruments, as well as some theoretical approach to knowledge. However, none of this effort results in a coherent, useful perspective to deal with scientific knowledge.

For example, he covers MRI technology in detail. He shows that no single segment of the MRI community has all the information. Adjusting anisotropic pixels for time savings resulted in misdiagnoses by doctors. If anything, this shows that the knowledge captured in the MRI machines is either incomplete or hard to access. I would argue that inaccessible knowledge is no knowledge at all. This "thing knowledge" idea was interesting but disappointing. (If I'm mistaken and there's utility in this book, please show me how; I would be delighted to find out that the past hour of my life was spent usefully). The main message seems to be that if you want to tweak the machine, check the other stakeholders to make sure you're not screwing something up in the process. Or at least tweak it back after you're done.

The author also seems to like to talk about gift economies vs commodity economies. Basically, "gift economies good, commodity economies bad." He goes to some lengths to talk about this, so there may be merit in this. However, I skipped it because I didn't see how this was relevant to my honing my skills to be a better scientist.

If you want to read up on scientific instrumentations and bring this stuff up in a dinner conversation with your fellow scientists, then it would make for interesting talk. If you want to understand how to harness all that wonderful thing knowledge in your HPLC, you should read the HPLC manual.

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