Schaffer and Shapin 1985

1. Understanding Experiment

"We need to play the stranger" to experimental culture of academia (6)

examine sites of controversy (7)

social context: "We intend to display scientific method as crystallizing forms of social organization and as a means of regulating social interaction within the scientific community." (14)

• Wittgensteinian "language-game" and "form of life"
• "We mean to approach scientific method as integrated into patterns of activity." (15)

"We shall suggest that solutions to the problem of knowledge are embedded within practical solutions to the problem of social order, and that different practical solutions to the problem of social order encapsulate contrasting practical solutions to the problem of knowledge." (15)

reading Hobbes' Leviathan as natural philosophy and epistemology:

"As a treatise in civic philosophy Leviathan was designed to show the practices that would guarantee order in the state. That order could be, and during the Civil War was being, threatened by clerical intellectuals who arrogated to themselves a share of civic authority to which they were not entitled. Their major resources in these acts os usurpation were, according to Hobbes, a false ontology and a false epistemology. Hobbes endeavoured to show the absurdity of an ontology that posited incorporeal substances and immaterial spirits. Thus, he built a plenist ontology, and, in the process, erected a materialistic theory of knowledge in which the foundations of knowledge were notions of causes, and those causes were matter and motino. An enterprise entitled to the name of philosophy was causal in nature. It modelled itself on the demonstrative enterprises of geometry and civic philosophy. And, crucially, it produced assent through it demonstrative character. Assent was to be total and it was to be enforced." (19)

Hobbes wrote before Boyle's experiments; immediately used his writing to attack the experiments

"These attacks ammounted to the assertion that, whatever Boyle's experimental programme was, it was not philosophy. Philosophy was a causal enterprise and, as such, secured a total and irrevocable assent, not the partial assent at which Boyle aimed. Hobbes's assault identified the conventional nature of experimental facts." (20)

2. Seeing and Believing: The Experimental Production of Pneumatic Facts

matters of fact seem solid; "What men make, men may unmake; but what nature makes no man may dispute." (23)

3. Seeing Double: Hobbes's Politics of Plenism before 1660

no incorporeal spirits; "the world is full of body" so there can be no vacuum (99)

• "The arguemtn proving this was not developed within the discourse of natural philosophy that we described earlier in this chapter. Instead, the argument against vacuum was presented within a political context of use. In the cause of securing public peace Hobbes elaborated and deplooyed an ontology which left no space for that which was not matter, whether this was a vacuum or incorporeal substance." (99)

Hobbes: knowledge different from belief; "The methods used in generating knowledge [namely, reason] ensured that it was not private believe. Such private belief could never underwrite the universal assent at which philosophy was aimed." (101)

factual knowledge gathered through sense "did not have an epistemologically privileged position"

• Hobbes called it history (102)

no right for private interpretation of religious belief; would fragment the state (103)

"For Hobbes, the rejection of vacuum was the elimination of a space within which dissension could take place." (109)

7. Natural Philosophy and the Restoration: Interests in Dispute

during Restoration, communities of knowledge "had to be shown how knowledge was connected with public peace; it had to be shown how such knowledge might be produced; and it had to be shown that such communities would not threaten existing authorities such as the clergy or the power of the restored regime." (284)

Boyle et al. argued for toleration of debate within a particular space.community (303)

"If a writer provided no clear experimental warrant for a claim to knowledge, then 'if he be mistaken in his Ratiocination, I am in some danger of erring with him.' But within the rules of the collaborative experimental community, and through the use of the technology of witnessing, it was possible to act freely and yet grant unconditional assent: 'I am left at liberty to benefit myself,' even if the author's opinions were 'never so false.' The rulse of the experimental community offered this solution to the fundamental political problem of liberty and coercion." (304) -- quotes from Power, Experimental Philosophy

"the experimental form of life was presented as a means of winning assent from otherwise unruly subjects. The autonomy of that form of life was necessary for the authority claimed by the experimenters. The godly could use this authority if they respected the integrity of experiment." (314)

"At the Restoration, Hobbes claimed the social reality of experimental philosophy was also that of a confederacy. As such, it could not present itself as an ideal community,. Hobbes had his own ideal commonwealth, and in the realm of learning that was geometry." (320)

for Hobbes, the experimental confederacy was:

• too exclusive
• too open, in that nothing special to experimenters
• "The experimenters were just another conspiratorial group whose interests were in obtaining power over citizens, and whose devious confedearcy sought an illegitimate autonomy from the state." (320)