Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 14, Issue 4, 1984, Pages 481-520

  Shapin, Steven ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84972629921     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: 14603659     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631284014004001     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. R. Boyle, ‘New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, touching the Spring of the Air…’, in Boyle, Works, ed. T. Birch, 6 Vols. (London, 1772), Vol. I, 1-117. (All subsequent references to Boyle's writings are to this edition and will be cited as RBW.)
2. I. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), esp. Chapters 3-5; B.J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. Chapter 2.
3. Optical Controversies: A Study in the Grammar of Scientific Dissent’, in Y. Elkana (ed.), The Interaction between Science and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1974), 115-42.
4. This is especially evident in historians’ treatment (or lack thereof) of criticisms of seventeenth-century experimentalism by philosophers who denied both the central role of experimental procedures and the foundational status of the matter of fact. For example, insofar as Thomas Hobbes's criticisms of Boyle's experimental programme have been discussed, historians have preferred to conclude that he ‘misunderstood’ Boyle, or that he ‘failed to appreciate’ the power of experimental methods: see, among others, F. Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’ Mechanical Conception of Nature (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1928), 377-78; M.B. Hall, ‘Boyle, Robert’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970), 379; L.T. More, The Life and Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), 97, 239. Hobbes's antiexperimentalism is fully treated in S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the AirPump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
5. The use of the word ‘technology’ in reference to the ‘software’ of literary practices and social relations may appear jarring, but it is in fact etymologically justified, as Carl Mitcham nicely shows: C. Mitcham, ‘Philosophy and the History of Technology’, in G. Bugliarello and D.B. Doner (eds), The History and Philosophy of Technology (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 163-201, esp. 172 ff. The Greek techne has behind it the Indo-European stem tekhn, probably meaning ‘woodwork’ or ‘carpentry’. However, in early Plato techne was also conceived as a kind of knowledge. In Gorgias Socrates distinguishes two types of techne: one which consists mainly of physical work and another which is closely associated with speech. By using ‘technology’ to refer to social and literary practices, as well as to hardware, I wish to stress that all three are knowledgeproducing tools.
6. See, for example, Boyle, ‘An Examen of Mr. T. Hobbes his Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aëris…’, in RBW, Vol. I, 186-242, at 241 (orig. publ. 1662); Boyle, ‘Animadversions upon Mr. Hobbes's Problemata de Vacuo’, in RBW, Vol. IV, 104-28, at 105 (orig. publ. 1674). The explication of the behaviour of liquids in the gardener's pot was a set-piece in the mid-seventeenth-century contest between rival physical systems; see T. Hobbes, ‘Concerning Body’, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 Vols. (London, 1839-1845), Vol. I, 414-15 (orig. publ. 1656); compare Boyle, ‘Examen of Hobbes’, 191-93.
7. the best accounts of the original pump and subsequent designs is still G. Wilson, ‘On the Early History of the Air-Pump in England’, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, Vol. 46 (1849), 330-54; see also R.G. Frank, Jr, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: A Study of Scientific Ideas (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1980), 128-30.
8. De motu’, Studies in the Renaissance, Vol. 16 (1969), 80-137.
9. T. Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), 100.
10. One of the ways by which Hobbes attacked the experimental programme was to insinuate that the Royal Society was not a public place: not everyone could come to witness experimental displays; see T. Hobbes, ‘Dialogus physicus de natura aeris…’, in Hobbes, Opera philosophica, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 5 Vols. (London, 1839-45), Vol. IV, 233-96, at 240 (orig. publ. 1661): ‘Cannot anyone who wishes come, since as I suppose they meet in a public place, and give his opinion on the experiments which are seen as well as they? Not at all… the place where they meet is not public.’ (Translation by Simon Schaffer.) Thomas Birch praised Boyle because ‘his laboratory was constantly open to the curious’ see RBW, Vol. I, cxlv.
11. R. Hooke, Philosophical Experiments and Observations (London, 1726), 27-28.
12. 662-778, at 633 (orig. publ. 1663). Cf. 664, where certain ‘easy and recreative experiments, which require but little time, or charge, or trouble in the making’ were recommended to be tried by ladies. Richard Jones was the ‘Pyrophilus’ to whom other essays were addressed.
13. Boyle, ‘A Continuation of New Experiments, Physico-Mechanical… The Second Part’, in RBW, Vol. IV, 505-93, at 505, 507 (orig. publ. 1680).
14. Hooke to Boyle, 25 August and 8 September 1664, in RBW, Vol. VI, 487-90, and R.E.W. Maddison, ‘The Portraiture of the Honourable Robert Boyle, FRS’, Annals of Science, Vol. 15 (1959), 141-214.
15. There is probably a connection between Boyle's justification for circumstantial reporting and Bacon's argument in favour of ‘initiative’ (as opposed to ‘magistral’) methods of communication in science: see, for example, D.L.
16. Hodges, ‘Anatomy as Science’, Assays, Vol. 1 (1981), 73-89, esp. 83-84; L. Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 174-78; K.R. Wallace, Francis Bacon on Communication & Rhetoric (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1943), 18-19. The magistral method, as Bacon said, ‘requires that what is told should be believed; the initiative that it should be examined.’ Initiative methods display the processes by which conclusions were reached; magistral methods mask those processes. Although Boyle's inspiration may, plausibly, have been Baconian, the ‘influence’ of Bacon is sometimes much exaggerated (for example, Wallace, 225-27). It is useful to remember that it was Boyle, not Bacon, who actually developed the literary forms of experimental communication; it is hard to imagine two more different forms than Bacon's aphorisms and Boyle's experimental narratives. See also a marvellous speculative paper on the Cartesian roots of contrasting styles of scientific exposition: J.W.N. Watkins, ‘Confession is Good for Ideas’, in D. Edge (ed.), Experiment: A Series of Scientific Case Histories (London: BBC, 1964), 64-70, and the better-known paper in the same collection by P.B. Medawar, ‘Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?’ (7-12).
17. The best source for Boyle's social situation and temperament is J.R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution: A Study in Social and Intellectual Change (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), Chapters 1-2.
18. Shadwell's play was performed in 1676. There is some evidence that Hooke believed he was the model for Gimcrack; see R.S. Westfall, ‘Hooke, Robert’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. VI, 481-88, at 483. Charles II, the Royal Society's patron, was also said to have found the weighing of the air rather funny.
19. These problems were structurally similar to those afflicting Newton later in the century. Newton said that he wished to speak of gravitation as a mathematical regularity, without venturing an account of its physical cause. Newton's allies and enemies alike found it difficult to accept such mathematical statements as the endproduct of physical inquiry; see A. Koyré, Newtonian Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 115-63, 273-82.
20. See R.P. Multhauf, ‘Some Nonexistent Chemists of the Seventeenth Century: Remarks on the Use of the Dialogue in Scientific Writing’, in A.G. Debus and Multhauf, Alchemy and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Los Angeles, Calif.: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1966), 31-50.
21. B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979), Chapter 2; and, for a fine study of the role of instruments in scientific observation reports, see T.J. Pinch, ‘Towards an Analysis of Scientific Observation: The Externality and Evidential Significance of Observational Reports in Physics’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 15 (1985), in press.
22. See especially the work of Collins whose metaphor of completed and consensual scientific knowledge as ‘the ship in the bottle’ nicely crystallizes this point: for example, H.M. Collins, ‘The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics’, Sociology, Vol. 9 (1975), 205-24; Collins, ‘Son of Seven Sexes: The Social Destruction of a Physical
23. L. Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. F. Bradley and T.J. Trenn, eds Trenn and R.K. Merton (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 103, 105 (orig. publ, in German, 1935).
24. Steven Shapin lectures in the social history of science at the Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University. His book (written with Simon Schaffer), Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, will be published by Princeton University Press in 1 985. Author's address: Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University, 34 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9JT, Scotland, UK.