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SCIENCE STUDIES EVENTS
STM, MODELING AND ALL THAT: HOW NOT TO BE
A REALIST ABOUT MICROSCOPY
Otávio Bueno
Department of Philosophy
University of South Carolina
April 20, 2005
Wednesday, 12:30pm-2:00pm
Sumwalt College, Room 102
The issue of microscopic reality is intriguing and has fascinated
scientists and philosophers alike. Under what conditions are researchers
entitled to know that the images produced by a microscope correspond to
features found in the sample, and are not just artifacts of the instrument?
Ian Hacking has famously articulated some of these conditions, and provided
four arguments in support of them. He concluded that, as long as these
conditions are met, researchers have reason to believe that the entities
detected by microscopes exist (a position called "entity realism"; see
Hacking 1981, 1983). Recently, Paul Humphreys reexamined Hacking's
arguments and, by slightly changing them, concluded that they supported a
different conclusion: we should be realists about the properties that are
measured by the corresponding microscopes (a position called "property
cluster realism"; see Humphreys 2004). In this paper, by examining key
features of scanning tunneling microscopy, I argue that neither in
Hacking's formulation nor in Humphreys' these arguments hold, and I provide
an alternative, more deflationary, understanding of microscopic reality.
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