AIM Framework glossary
Instrument
Canonical definition
An Instrument is the arrangement by which a quantity is read from somewhere other than the thing carrying it. Because Source Opacity makes the quantity requiring damping unreadable from inside the Individual carrying it, a body that produces its own account of its own performance reproduces that arrangement one scale up, issuing an integrated report with the sources stripped about itself, and good faith does not repair this, because the defect is structural rather than motivational. The Instrument therefore precedes the authority: a structure that cannot be read from outside is not a governor but a high-authority actor whose conduct cannot be checked.
Explanation
A thermometer that is also the patient cannot be trusted. People cannot read their own motives, and an institution reporting on itself has the same blind spot at a larger scale, however honest it is. So the means of reading an institution from outside has to exist before the institution is given power; otherwise the power arrives with nothing able to check it.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.