Blind Trust: The Gentlemanly Origins of Experimental Science

Abstract

Are we dealing with rupture or continuity in the history of early modem science? Should we be concerned to elucidate origins or process? These are the historical issues at stake in Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth although many readers and reviewers have not realized it, so effective are Shapin's scholarship and his gentle rhetoric of persuasion. Can experimental science (or 'experimental natural philosophy') be defined in its origins and essence in terms of the constitution of codes for relating, handling and accounting reports of 'matters of fact'? Or, do early experimental natural philosophy and the emergent experimental sciences raise much more complex problems of human practice, material and