Skip to main content
Philosophy

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

2
  • 2
    Yes, according to constructive empiricists like van Fraassen, see SEP:"as a constructive empiricist would use the terminology, one only observes something when the observation is unaided. One does not see cells through a microscope; instead one sees an image, an image which the scientific gnostic understands one way but the scientific agnostic understands a different way." Husserl can be read to hold a similar view, but it was before current discussions and he used different phrasing ("immediately given", etc.)
    – Conifold
    Commented Jun 14 at 22:05
  • 3
    It seems to me there comes a point where common sense should prevail and obsessing over exact definitions serves no useful purpose. All perceptions are subject to uncertainties, so from an epistemological sense there is no real distinction between "observable by eye" and "observable with a microscope", just some additional sources of uncertainty/assumptions - but it isn't as if "observable by eye" is without uncertainty or assumptions. For me pretty much anything more than a couple of feet away is likely to be unobservable for me without my glasses - where do you draw the line?
    – Dikran Marsupial
    Commented Jun 16 at 14:00