Alexandra Karakas

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) stands as an iconic symbol of scientific exploration, its launch in April 1990 sparking great expectations. However, the initial images were disappointing, revealing blurred starlight and a failure to capture faint sources of light. NASA and optical technicians embarked on immediate troubleshooting, resulting in the discovery of various issues and disparate opinions on their root causes. This shows that defining the boundaries of an instrument’s intended function is complex, raising certain philosophical and practical questions. This chapter applies the philosophy of maintenance, in particular the notion of function and malfunction, to reveal epistemic issues surrounding faulty scientific instruments. The case of the HST highlights some of the epistemic problems concerning the maintenance of scientific instruments, and it also suggests that the relation between function and malfunction should not be seen as binary. Maintenance strategies hinge on implicit or explicit function definitions that are essential for understanding how artifacts operate. However, to delineate an artifact’s intended function, it is also necessary to understand when it is malfunctioning. The conventional view that an artifact is malfunctioning if it fails to fulfill its intended function is therefore insufficient. The case of the HST represents a partial malfunction somewhere between function and malfunction, demonstrating the intricate relation between science, technology, and maintenance. This approach sheds light on epistemic problems arising from flawed scientific instruments.

In contrast to the history of science and to science and technology studies, the value discourse in the philosophy of science has not provided a thorough analysis of the material culture of science. Instruments in science have a special characteristic, namely that they explicitly and clearly emerge from and remain embedded in social contexts, and are thus imbued with values. We argue that the materials (in most cases they are artifacts) used in science are necessarily influenced by both epistemic and non-epistemic considerations. A consequence of this is that a descriptive term cannot give sufficient information whether an artifact is performing in an acceptable way. Instead of the prevailing descriptive approach, we therefore advocate a normative notion of values in the material culture of science. To this end, we connect the material culture of science to the so-called “new demarcation problem”, in order to lay the foundations for a value-sensitive approach to the analysis of instruments. By assessing the five approaches of demarcation concerning value-influences, it will be shown that they break down at various points if the material aspects of science are taken seriously.