Collins, Harry (2010) Humans not Instruments. Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, 4 (1). pp. 138-147. ISSN 1913-0465
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Abstract
I argue that it is serious mistake to treat instruments as having parity with humans in the making of scientific knowledge. I try to show why the parity view is misplaced by beginning with the “Extended Mind” thesis which can be seen as an individualistic version of Actor/ant Network Theory, and then move on to instruments. The idea of parity cannot be maintained in the face of close examination of actions as simple as doing a calculation or accepting the reading of an instrument. The key difference is that humans are embedded in language communities—the locus of knowledge-making—and nothing else is.
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