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Hobbes pointed out that the material technology leaked; that the literary technology, at least in repect of the testimony of witnesses, had no force; and that the social technology misconstructed the nature of knowledge. By making the matter of fact, and not the underlying principle, the mian object of investigation, one forfeits the chance at truth and certainty and has no reliable way to exclude serious and dangerous error.
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Their claim that, because Boyle and his followers advocated applications of the results of their investigations to the support of religion, "their laboratories acquired a sacred status", should also be put down to over-enthusiasm. The enthusiasts provide much information of value even to whose who may doubt the reach of their anology between politics and natural philosophy. Their concept of literary and social technologies in the practice of experimental science deserves refinement and extension. Their account of the difficulties Boyle's contemporaries experienced in reproducing his experiments and even in making air-pumps deserves study by all historians of science. Assent to new experimental findings requires their application, or at least a belief in the practicability of replication; but repetition and confirmation, always problematic to some degree, become suspect where the technology involved is new or exotic, or when only a single machine capable of producing the new effects exists, or when copies of the competent machine can only be made to work by people who had practised on the original. These problems were not peculiar to the seventeenth century: the difficulties of replication, the unique machine and the need for immediate experience with it to reproduce it, recur in moder particle physics. ...
On the debit side, Leviathan has swollen so large that, as is usual with books on British natural philosophy, it has no room for relevant parallels from Europe. That is a pity. The Society's policy against conjecturing about causes, which Hooke wished to raise to the status of a by-law, also informed the practice of the Florentine Accademia del Cimento; and Boyle's second technology, the witnessing of experiements by trustworthy observers, was common procedure in Florence, at Athanasius Kircher's "musuem" at the Collegio Romano in Rome, in the various groups that anticipated the Paris Academy of Sciences, and elsewhere. This is not to impugn the reasons Shapin and Shaffer bring to explain the practices of the Royal Society of London, but to suggest that what was peculiar to the British case can only be discovered by comparing it with parallel happenings on the Continent.
Review by J.L. Heilbron
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