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investigate human inferences and not exclusively scientific languages or apparatus.
A
is always related to ontological assumptions within the
context of a background culture. Putnam has shown that neither concepts nor the
most basic categories are unique, unavoidable or absolute:
phenomenotechnique
'
'
The logical primitives
themselves, and in particular the notions of object and existence, have a multitude
of different uses rather than one absolute “meaning”.
'
(Putnam
1987
, p. 19) We
claim that it is the same situation for allegedly cross-context premises, postulates,
and clauses. With Meyerson (
1921
), we point out the role of ontology in scientific
reasoning; knowing that this ontology depends on a background language. Follow-
ing Quine (
1981
) and the later Wittgenstein, we aim to anthropologize logical and
nomological spheres, but with the specific approach that consists in developing a
distributed epistemology focused on instrumentation and materials.
The “object” targeted by the clause is not a pre-constituted particular with
intrinsic properties, but rather an affordance, in Harr´
'
s sense (
1986
), the constitu-
tion of which depends both on the mode of access and the world. The fact that
affordances can be reified or considered to be a useful and heuristic concept
for studying sciences does not change this conclusion. The object, the meaning,
and the status of the
ceteris paribus
clause are partly dependent on the representa-
tion we share about sciences, language, apparatus, and the world. They also depend
on mereological strategies. To dissociate the complex, the measurement, the body,
the methods, the associated milieu, and the devices, as if their role were under-
standable in isolation, is a fragmentation that echoes the mereological assumption
that the information related to a whole is not lost when the whole is segmented into
parts. If, by contrast, we study all those elements from a holistic standpoint, we
develop a synthetic reasoning which consists in following another mereological
slope. Both approaches are useful and neither is sufficient. It is the articulation
between the two that is required in order to reflect upon the condition of inferences
from comparison. This is the reason why a distributed epistemology focused on
scientific methodology, apparatus, and materials is of importance and remains
complementary to analytical studies of reasoning and languages. Relativism can
be avoided by a
'
distributed
'
epistemology of chemical
'
cantons.
'
Deleuze once
asserted:
'
It is not the variation of truth with the subject, but the condition under
which appears to the subject the truth of a variation
'
(Deleuze
1988
, p. 27).
Both the complex {apparatus-methods-bodies-associated milieu-devices} and
the group of chemists charged with the validation of the result of the sample
analysis co-emerge from the stabilization procedure. The final complex, the quan-
tification itself, the group of chemists guided by these standards, chemical knowl-
edge and know-how can only be defined and described
together
, despite the
presence of standards and formal rules which guide the action rather rigidly from
the outset. It is the whole complex and its associated group of chemists that change
and become a condition of possibility of the study of future variations. Once the
co-stabilization is reached, the truth of the studied variation is validated with a
certain degree of confidence. This story is not about the “dissolution” of the truth
but, by contrast, deals with the “co-constitution” of the subject-object polarity.
'
