Abstract

The success of chemistry is directly credited to the capacity of instruments to provide human contact to the structures of physical reality. Empiricist philosophers have given scant attention to instruments as a separate topic of inquiry on the grounds that reliability of instruments is reducible to the epistemology of common sense experience. I argue that the reliability of many modern instruments is based on their design as analogical replication of natural systems. Scientists designed absorption spectrometers as artificial technological replicas of familiar physical systems. Such designs are generated by analogical projections of theoretical insights from known physical systems to unknown terrain. Instrumentation enables scientists to extend theoretical understanding to previously hidden domains. After exploring this analogical function of instruments, the nature of instrumental data is discussed, followed by an explicit rejection of both skepticism and naive realism. In the end I argue for an experimental realism which lacks any theory-neutral access to the fundamental analogies of nature.