Epistemology has always been affected by technologies like the telescope and the microscope, things that have created a radical shift in how we sense physical reality.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Telescopes and microscopes bring to our view the otherwise unseen and unknown.
But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?
We are now able to put our minds in other places in the universe with the use of telescopes. That is very exciting.
Any device in science is a window on to nature, and each new window contributes to the breadth of our view.
Much of contemporary science is really the length and shadow of the technology we apply.
Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality.
Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to discover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me.
To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.