Experimental Systems - continued

The epistemic and technical aspect of experimental systems shall now be described in its general outline. It is anchored in four basic features. First, such systems are the smallest integral working units of research. Within them, scientific objects – “epistemic things” – and technical objects – the technical conditions of their production – are inextricably linked with each other in a given experimental unit. The first entity, the scientific object, is that badly defined something to be addressed as the target of the whole experimental endeavor. Paradoxically speaking, it embodies in an experimentally manipulable manner what one does not yet exactly know. The scientific object is therefore mandatorily underdetermined; it is blurred by definition. The technical objects, in contrast, are characteristically determined. They are the instruments, apparatus, and devices which bound and confine the assessment of the epistemic things. They are necessary in order to keep the vagueness of the scientific objects in a hypocritical condition. Within a particular research process, epistemic things can eventually be turned into technical things and become incorporated into the technical conditions of the system. And parts of the technical system can acquire epistemic status and thus turn into research objects. The dialectics between epistemicity and technicity is at the inner core of an experimental system; it is its driving force. Thus, experimental systems are a kind of dynamic research bodies that convey material shape to the scientific objects formed within them, and at the same time, determine the boundaries of their conceptual apprehension.