The purpose of this research is to examine Instrumental Realism by Don Ihde. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas emerging in the work, and then to discuss the means by which Ihde makes his case that a philosophy instrumental realism, which combines philosophies of technology and science, is appropriately anchored in a view that the instrumentation of technology is a separate category of reality that exists and that has substance deserving of philosophical exploration of how we come to know what we know from science.
Ihde begins with a background discussion of various works with philosophical tone or emphasis in scientific fields. In discussing the "Kuhnian model" of science philosophy, based on various books by Thomas Kuhn beginning with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Ihde explains that taking account of "paradigm shifts," or conditions under which new scientific discoveries emerge and how they are perceived by the intellectual community, represented a paradigm shift of its own in the way modern American sensibility thought about science as an intellectual discipline. However, Ihde sees important parallels and consistencies in the more purely philosophical writing of contemporary Europeans such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault with respect to science, as well as in the direct examination of the role of technology in theoretical science by Martin Heidegger.
Having examined the European philosophical take on the nexus of philosophy, science, and instrumentation, Ihde focuses on the technology philosophies of modern American and British commentators, chiefly in regard to technical instrumentation and
on experiment methodology. As a group, Ihde suggests, the Anglo American (and Euro-American, as Ihde calls it) view appears to be that instruments constitute a science-specific technology. Experts cited in this regard include Ackermann, Heeling, Latour, and Ihde himself. Alth...