Volume 12, Issue 2, Spring 2008
Postphenomenology: Historical and Contemporary Horizons
Val Dusek
Pages 105-109
Ihde’s Instrumental Realism and the Marxist Account of Technology in Experimental Science
Edgar Zilsel offers a Marxist account of the rise of experimental science avoiding both crude determinism and the anti-scientific bias of much “Western Marxism.” This account supplements Don Ihde’s instrumental realism with a social account of the systematic extension of perception by instrumentation. The social contact of non-literate craftspeople with purely intellectual scholars forged the social basis of what became technoscience.