Instrumental progress cannot explain scientific advance across fields

Evidence

But in the science of geology no instruments except a hammer are used and the technical progress in hammers is in no way comparable with progress in geology. If the history of sciences can be reduced, as the Manual claims, to the history of their particular instruments, how can one produce a history of geology? — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1619

Categorization

• CANDY: The geology refutation is delightfully simple: one field’s entire toolkit is a hammer, whose progress bears no relation to the science’s evolution.
• SEED: The ‘mente et malleo’ motto and the single-instrument science offer a crisp rhetorical example for any essay on why tools cannot explain knowledge.