Timeline for Should entities only percievable through microscopes be considered unobservables?

6 events

when toggle format	what		by	license	comment
Jun 17 at 16:59	vote	accept	edelex
Jun 16 at 18:40	answer	added	SystemTheory		timeline score: 0
Jun 16 at 14:00	comment	added	Dikran Marsupial		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?
Jun 16 at 6:27	answer	added	niels nielsen		timeline score: 1
Jun 14 at 22:05	comment	added	Conifold		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.)
Jun 14 at 20:48	history	asked	edelex	CC BY-SA 4.0