Goethe's ‘Protestant Reformation’ as a Textual Demonstration: Comment on Jackson

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 1994, Pages 703-724

  Bjelic, Dusan ^a   Lynch, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84972623169     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: 14603659     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631279402400404     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. M. Jackson, ‘A Spectrum of Belief: Goethe's ‘Republic’ versus Newtonian ‘Despotism’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 24, No. 4 (August 1994), 673-701.
2. Such demands are by no means unique to Newton, as Harry Collins has shown in several studies of the role of replication in scientific controversies. A selection of those studies is presented in H. M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London & Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1985).
3. For a discussion of Newton's arguments about the design of prisms, see S. Schaffer, ‘Glass Works: Newton's Prisms and the Uses of Experiment’, in D. Gooding, T. Pinch and S. Schaffer (eds), The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 67-104. Similar issues are raised about Robert Boyle's demands about competent experimental performance in S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
4. D. Bjelic and M. Lynch, ‘The Work of a (Scientific) Demonstration: Respecifying Newton's and Goethe's Theories of Prismatic Color’, in G. Watson and R. Seiler (eds), Text in Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology (London: Sage, 1992), 52-78. Our understanding of ‘respecification’ is taken from Garfinkel, who in a brief and characteristically dense proposal argues that ethnomethodology's agenda is to respecify ‘classic’ (or ‘formal analytic’) sociology's interest in the objective reality of social facts by investigating just how it is that such facts arise as ‘every society's locally, endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely, members’ work, with no time out, and no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postponement, or buy-outs’: H. Garfinkel, ‘Respecification: Evidence for locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order, logic, reason, meaning, method, etc. in and as of the essential haecceity of immortal ordinary society: (I) - an announcement of studies’, in G. Button (ed.), Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 10-19, at 11.
5. Readers may choose to ‘convert’ if they like, although for analytic purposes ‘alternation’ may be preferable: see P. Berger, Invitation to Sociology (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1963); H. M. Collins and S. Yearley, ‘Epistemological Chicken’, in A. Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 301-26, esp. 301.
6. See, for example, M. Moerman, ‘The Preference for Self-Correction in a Thai Conversational Corpus’, Language, Vol. 53, No. 4 (1977), 872-82; and D. Boden, ‘Talk International: Turn-Taking and Related Phenomena in Seven Indo-European Languages’, paper presented at the 78th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (Detroit, 1983).
7. The ‘local historicity’ of scientific work is discussed in H. Garfinkel, M. Lynch and E. Livingston, The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 11 (1981), 131-58.
8. The idea of performing ethnomethodological investigations of historical experiments began with a series of unpublished studies of Galileo's inclined plane experiments by Harold Garfinkel, Albert B. Robillard, John Seiler and Perry Taka, at UCLA in the late 1980s. The immediate context for reflecting on the issues presented in this paper was an international workshop, entitled ‘Replications of Historical Experiments in Physics, their Function in History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science and in Science Teaching’, which was held at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany (24-28 August 1992).
9. Collins addresses a similar set of problems in his discussion of replicating historical experiments: H. M. Collins, ‘Reproducing the Past: Three Methods for Assembling a Cultural Inventory’, paper presented at the workshop on ‘Replications of Historical Experiments in Physics’, see note 10.
10. See A. Brannigan, The Social Basis of Scientific Discoveries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
11. Although they are viewed as unconventional, Goethe's naturalistic investigations are not completely disregarded or discredited by present-day natural scientists.
12. Goethe, Theory of Colours (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970[1840]), §194, 80.
13. Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (New York: Dover, 1952[1730]), 161.
14. One can try the method Newton describes, rather obscurely, or take license with his description and use cut out squares of construction paper that fit exactly into the outlined sectors of Figure 2. Colouring the figure with felt-tipped pens can work also. Note that any method for colouring the squares and performing the observation will raise innumerable questions about whether one is ‘really’ reproducing the original experiment. In our view, the puzzles and ambiguities occasioned by the exercise should be viewed as part of the demonstration, rather than as practical and historical contingencies that get in the way of it.
15. We beg the indulgence of our readers at this point. Our language in the above passage is thick with ‘problematic’ assertions and instructions. For example, an astute historian should want to challenge our assertions that a replication of Newton's experiment can be set up with the ‘card’ we have constructed, along with the methods a contemporary reader uses to colour the sectors of the card and a plastic prism purchased at The Nature Company. This is not even to speak of the irreducible gulf between what the experiment might have meant to a Newtonian, and what it can mean to us today. Nevertheless, if a lesson from so-called relativist studies of experimental replication is that such unbreachable differences between materials, methods and historical understandings are typical and indeed irremediable properties of replication, then the procedures we recommend here, with all of their attendant problems, do not disqualify the status of this demonstration from being a ‘replication’.
16. Michael Polanyi's discussion of personal knowledge suggests that scientists make use of unexplicated private knowledge when conducting experiments: M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). In our discussion of Goethe's and Newton's optical experiments, we are not interested in an ineffable basis for insight and understanding. Rather, we prefer to think of a kind of ‘knowledge’ that is no less public than a formal account of an experiment and its findings, but which is produced, recognized, and sometimes communicated in a situated (but not ephemeral) way. For an admirably clear discussion of the issue see L. Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
17. In this highly specific and non-metaphysical sense, Goethe's demonstrations can be described as radical-feminist achievements. The remote Mother Nature, which is placed on a pedestal while being penetrated by Newtonian theory, is respecified by Goethe in the context of a prototypically ‘female’ intimacy with phenomenological experience: see D. Smith, ‘Sociology from Women's Experience: A Reaffirmation’, Sociological Theory, Vol. 10 (1992), 88-98. Mother Nature is subsumed to Mom nature.
18. Goethe draws categorical distinctions that limit the fields in which his theory of ‘physical colours’ applies. The chemical colours and physiological colours are generated under different laws, though thematically related to an overall naturalistic philosophy.
19. ‘Phenomenal field’ is a term Garfinkel adapts from Aron Gurwitsch to describe the contingent assemblage of equipment, sequential operations and visible phenomena that embody and express the competent realization of an experiment: see A. Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1964).