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)

1. 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)