Humans not Instruments

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.