[The problem of the objectivity of scientific knowledge – from empiricism to instrumental realism]

Kvasz, L. Veda, spoločnosť, hodnoty. Bratislava: Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave, 2019 – (Szapuová, M.; Nuhlíček, M.; Chabada, M.), pp. 115–127. ISBN 978-80-223-4749-5

According to empiricism, knowledge is anchored in experience that is seen as immediate sensory perception. But this introduces into science a trait of psychologism. Thus as basis for scientific knowledge, we suggest taking not sensory perception, understood as a mental event, but measurement, sen as an intersubjective fact constituted in the instrumental practice of science. Features of instrumentally anchored facts include: 1. measurement is an event in the physical world. 2. measurement is quantified, it introduces a scale, a unit and a zero. 3. measurement results are linguistically represented. 4. a quantity can be measured by different kinds of instruments. 5. it can be measured on its entire scale. 6. measurement gives a complete system of quantities to represent the state of the studied system. A mental event does not have any of these properties.