Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations, Citations, and Translations
- Introduction
- Part I Historiographical Preliminaries
- Part II Method, Order, and Certainty
- Part III Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature
- Part IV Larger Visions
- 13 Descartes, or the Cultivation of the Intellect
- 14 Experiment, Community, and the Constitution of Nature in the Seventeenth Century
- Sources
- Index
14 - Experiment, Community, and the Constitution of Nature in the Seventeenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations, Citations, and Translations
- Introduction
- Part I Historiographical Preliminaries
- Part II Method, Order, and Certainty
- Part III Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature
- Part IV Larger Visions
- 13 Descartes, or the Cultivation of the Intellect
- 14 Experiment, Community, and the Constitution of Nature in the Seventeenth Century
- Sources
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In his important and influential book, How Experiments End, Peter Galison discusses how it is that scientists decide when a given experiment is finished and when the supposed fact that it purports to establish can be accepted as fact and not a mistaken reading of the apparatus, not a result of a malfunctioning piece of equipment, not a misinterpretation of a given observation, and so on. This epistemological question – the transition between individual observations, individual runs of a complex experiment, and the experimental fact that they are supposed to establish – is a matter of some discussion in the recent literature in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. It is this question that Galison (and others) have called attention to that I would like to explore in this article.
What strikes me as interesting here is that the very question under scrutiny has a history; while, in a sense, the question has been with us as long as people turned to experience to try to figure out how the world is, people were not always interested in or aware of the question, and when they were, the answers that they suggested were not always the ones that we find most comfortable now. That is what will interest me here, the history of the notion of an experimental fact, if you will, or, as Lorraine Daston has dramatically dubbed it, the “prehistory of objectivity.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Descartes EmbodiedReading Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science, pp. 296 - 328Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000