Speaking from this point of view, the decisive consideration as
between instrumentalism and analytic realism is whether the operation
of experimentation is or is not necessary to knowledge. The
instrumental theory holds that it is; analytic realism holds that even
though it were essential in _getting_ knowledge (or in learning), it
has nothing to do with knowledge itself, and hence nothing to do with
the known object: that it makes a change only in the knower, not in
what is to be known. And for precisely the same reason,
instrumentalism holds that an object as a knowledge-object is never a
whole; that it is surrounded with and inclosed by things which are
quite other than objects of knowledge, so that knowledge cannot be
understood in isolation or when taken as mere beholding or grasping of
objects. That is to say, while it is making the sick man better or
worse (or leaving him just the same) which determines the
knowledge-value of certain findings of fact and certain conceptions as
to mode of treatment (so that by the treatment they become definitely
knowledge-objects), yet improvement or deterioration of the patient is
other than an object of cognitive apprehension. Its knowledge-object
phase is a selection in reference to prior reflections. So the
laboratory experiment of a chemist which brings to a head a long
reflective inquiry and settles the intellectual status of its findings
and theorizings (thereby making them into cognitive concerns or terms
and propositions) is itself much more than a knowledge of terms and
propositions, and only by virtue of this surplusage is it even
contemplative knowledge. He knows, say, tin, when he has made tin into
an outcome of his investigating procedures, but tin is much more than
a term of knowledge.
Putting the matter in a slightly different way, logical (as distinct
from naïve) realism confuses means of knowledge with objects of
knowledge. The means are twofold: they are (_a_) the data of a
particular inquiry so far as they are significant because of prior
experimental inquiries; and (_b_) they are the meanings which have
been settled in consequence of prior intellectual undertakings: on the
one hand, particular things or qualities as signs; on the other,
general meanings as possibilities of what is signified by given data.
Our physician has in advance a technique for telling that certain
particular traits, if he finds them, are symptoms, signs; and he has a
store of diseases and remedies in mind which may possibly be meant in
any given case. From prior reflective experiments he has learned to
look for temperature, for rate of heartbeats, for sore spots in
certain places; to take specimens of blood, sputum, of membrane, and
subject them to cultures, microscopic examination, etc. He has
acquired certain habits, in other words, in virtue of which certain
physical qualities and events are more than physical, in virtue of
which they are signs or indications of something else.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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