In 'Physics and Philosophy' Jeans makes a radical claim without backing it up; he asserts that “The modern physicist can trust his instruments to give him absolutely unbiased information”. The context is that the ancients (such as Plato) had the problem of how to trust the senses and how to get unbiased information, and the fruitless attempts to solve it through philosophy.
Don't get me wrong, but how do instruments bypass human interpretation? The instrument itself is built on the basis of interpretation, so the instrument has a structure that is imbued with human interpretation; we have a theory for how the world works, and we build the instrument on that basis; just because the instrument is more precise, in a sense that is based on theories that we have about or physical attributes and about how the world works, does not mean it is less bias or more objective. I am not talking about Subjectivism, I am talking about a simple humility in regard to our instruments. They cannot bypass our senses, they can only make them more precise from theoretical assumptions of what accounts for being more precise. If the assertion can be demonstrated, then I will gladly concede that through our instruments we have some kind of unbiased source of information.
If it is argued that we are talking about the information before it gets interpreted by humans, then we could just as easily say that the eyes give absolutely unbiased information, before that information is passed to the brain and interpreted.
If then it is argued that the eye is shaped in a certain way and wired into the brain in a certain way, this will not help your case, because that claim holds for any instrument; because the instrument itself is shaped in a certain way (in accordance with our best theories at the time) and was the product of the human brain, and so can be said to “wired” to the brain in a certain way (because we have to interpret the information).
Don't get me wrong, but how do instruments bypass human interpretation? The instrument itself is built on the basis of interpretation, so the instrument has a structure that is imbued with human interpretation; we have a theory for how the world works, and we build the instrument on that basis; just because the instrument is more precise, in a sense that is based on theories that we have about or physical attributes and about how the world works, does not mean it is less bias or more objective. I am not talking about Subjectivism, I am talking about a simple humility in regard to our instruments. They cannot bypass our senses, they can only make them more precise from theoretical assumptions of what accounts for being more precise. If the assertion can be demonstrated, then I will gladly concede that through our instruments we have some kind of unbiased source of information.
If it is argued that we are talking about the information before it gets interpreted by humans, then we could just as easily say that the eyes give absolutely unbiased information, before that information is passed to the brain and interpreted.
If then it is argued that the eye is shaped in a certain way and wired into the brain in a certain way, this will not help your case, because that claim holds for any instrument; because the instrument itself is shaped in a certain way (in accordance with our best theories at the time) and was the product of the human brain, and so can be said to “wired” to the brain in a certain way (because we have to interpret the information).
