Blind Trust: The Gentlemanly Origins of Experimental Science

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 503-536

  Schuster, John A ^a   Taylor, Alan B H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992828840     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631297027003006     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 5.
2. Dorothy L. Sayers, quoted by Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981), 1.
3. Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3.
4. Alfred Schutz, Reflections on the Problem of Relevance (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 1970)
5. Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life World (London: Heineman, 1974).
6. J.A. Schuster, Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, Program 3: ‘Theory, Fact & Discovery in the New History & Sociology of Science’ (Open Learning Australia SCI 14, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio National), broadcast July 1995, December 1995, March 1996.
7. On the dependence of the hearing of accounts as ‘possibly true’ within the domain of common-sense stocks of actors' knowledge, see Harvey Sacks, ‘On the Analysability of Stories by Children’, in J.J. Gumperz and Del Hymes (eds), Directions in Sociolinguistics (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972), 325–345.
8. For an application of this approach to the issue of scientific experts ‘hearing’ methodologically couched stories as ‘possibly true’ within their stocks of expert knowledge, see J.A. Schuster, ‘Methodologies as Mythic Structures: A Preface to the Future Historiography of Method’, Metascience, Vol. 1/2 (1984), 15–36.
9. J.A. Schuster, ‘The Scientific Revolution’, in Robert Olby et al. (eds), The Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1990), 217–242
10. Schuster and Graeme Watchirs, ‘Natural Philosophy, Experiment and Discourse in the 18th Century: Beyond the Kuhn/Bachelard Problematic’, in Homer LeGrand (ed.), Experimental Inquiries (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 1–48
11. Schuster, ‘Descartes Agonistes: New Tales of Cartesian Natural Philosophy’, Perspectives on Science, Vol. 3 (1995), 99–145.
12. A.B.H. Taylor, The Early Royal Society of London (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Melbourne, 1989).
13. Thomas S. Kuhn, ‘Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century’, Isis, Vol. 43, (1952), 12–36
14. What then of the air pump case? Indeed, looked at closely, the air pump case does display a struggle to constitute it as a discourse-hardware couple in the loosened-up Bachelardian sense mooted earlier, where the discourse comes from the competing natural-philosophical utterances of Boyle and Hobbes, rather than being a case of Boylean ‘matters of fact’ versus Hobbes' old-fashioned natural-philosophical discourse. Shapin makes this point, despite himself. It is entailed in his talk about Boyle on the air pump – when he concedes that for Boyle sometimes the spring of the air is a cause of lower-level reported phenomena, and sometimes it is the moff revealed by the air pump: S. Shapin, ‘Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 14 (1984), 481–520, at 486, 501
15. Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 51, 203. So Shapin admits what our model would predict, that Boyle shifts moffs up and down. Reports about the outputs of theory- or discourse-embodying hardware are themselves theory-loaded and renego-tiable in theory-relevant ways. Certainly Boyle positions himself against Hobbes, making the spring of air a moff, when it suits him. But we must note the grammar of his moves. Only one of Boyle's dupes would take Boyle's rhetoric seriously as unveiling of a true (that is, a really real) moff. That is why the air pump case is interesting – but it certainly is not the ‘Origin of Experimental Science’ where atheoretical moffs are made. It is, as we said, one small case, one small moment in an endemic discourse-hardware dialectic set in train by the experimental imperative in late seventeenth-century mechanistic natural philosophy.
16. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London: For Improving of Natural Knowledge From Its First Rise (4 Vols, London, 1756–57); reprinted (New York, 1968), Vol. iii, 509; Vol. iv, 6.
17. A.B.H. Taylor, ‘An Episode with Maydew’, History of Science, Vol. 32 (1994), 163–184.
18. [H. Oldenburg], The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, edited and translated by A. Rupert Hall and M. Boas Hall (13 Vols; Vols i-ix, Madison & Milwaukee, WI, 1965–73; Vols x-xi, London, 1975–77; Vols xii-xiii, London, 1986), Vol. ii, 474.