Shapin and Schaffer argue that the establishment of matters of fact in Boyle's experimental programme utilized three technologies:
and
Despite the utility of distinguishing the three technologies employed in fact-making, the impression should not be given that we are dealing with distinct categories: each embedded the others. As we shall see, experimental practices employing the material technology of the air-pump crystallized specific forms of social organization; these valued social forms were dramatized in the literary exposition of experimental findings; the literary reporting of air-pump performances extended an experience that was regarded as essential to the propagation of' the material technology or even as a valid substitute for direct witness of experimental displays. If we wish to understand how Boyle worked to construct pneumatic facts, we must consider how each of the three technologies was used and how each bore upon the others.
Problems in the production of scientific facts by witnessing:
The technology of virtual witnessing involves the production in a reader's mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication. Through virtual witnessing the multiplication of witnesses could be, in principle, unlimited. It was therefore the most powerful technology for constituting matters of fact. The validation of experiments, and the crediting of their outcomes as matters of fact, necessarily entailed their realization in the laboratory of the mind and the mind's eye. What was required was a technology of trust and assurance that the things had been done and done in the way claimed.
The technology of virtual witnessing was not different in kind to that used to facilitate actual replication. One could deploy the same linguistic resources in order to encourage the physical replication of experiments or to trigger in the reader's mind a naturalistic image of the experimental scene. Of course, actual replication was to be preferred, for this eliminated reliance upon testimony altogether. Yet, because of natural and legitimate suspicion among those who were neither direct witnesses nor replicators, a greater degree of assurance was required to produce assent in virtual witnesses. Boyle's literary technology was crafted to secure this assent.
In order to understand how Boyle deployed the literary technology of virtual witnessing, we have to reorient some of our common ideas about the scientific text. We usually think of an experimental report as a narration of some prior visual experience: it points to sensory experiences that lie behind the text. This is correct. However, we should also appreciate that the text itself constitutes a visual source. It is our task here to see how Boyle's texts were constructed so as to provide a source of virtual witness that was agreed to be reliable. The best way to fasten upon the notion of the text as this kind of source might be to start by looking at some of the pictures that Boyle provided alongside his prose.
Since knowledge is only probable, a modesty of speech was required. Such speech portrays the author as a disinterested observer andhis accounts as unclouded and undistorted mirrors of nature. Such an author gave the signs of a man whose testimony was reliable. Hence, his texts could be credited and the number of witnesses to his experimental narratives could be multiplied indefinitely.
Three Technologies and the Nature of Assent
We have argued that three technologies were involved in the production and validation of matters of fact: material, literary, and social. We have also stressed that the three technologies are not distinct and that the workings of each depends upon the others. We can now briefly develop that point by showing how each of Boyle's technologies contributes to a common strategy for the constitution of the matter of fact. In the first section of this chapter we argued that the matter of fact can serve as the foundation of knowledge and secure assent insofar as it is not regarded as man-made. Each of Boyle's three technologies worked to achieve the appearance of matters of fact as given items. That is to say, each technology functioned as an objectifying resource.
Take, for example, the role of the air-pump in the production of matters of fact. Pneumatic facts, as we have noted, were machine-made. One of the significant features of a scientific machine is that it stands between the perceptual competences of a human being and natural reality itself. A "bad" observation taken from a machine need not be ascribed to faults in the human being, nor is a "good" observation his personal product: it is this impersonal device, the machine, that has produced the finding. In chapter 6 we shall see a striking instance of this usage. When, in the 1660s, Christiaan Huygens offered a matter of fact that appeared to conflict with one of Boyle's explanatory resources, Boyle did not impugn the perceptual or cognitive competences of his fellow experimentalist. Rather, he was able to suggest that the machine was responsible for the conflict: "[I] question not [his] Ratiocination, but only the stanchness of his pump."116 The machine constitutes a resource that may be used to factor out human agency in the product: as if it were said "it is not I who says this; it is the machine"; "it is not your fault; it is the machine's."
The role of Boyle's literary technology was to create an experimental community, to bound its discourse internally and externally, and to provide the forms and conventions of social relations within it. The literary technology of virtual witnessing extended the public space of the laboratory in offering a valid witnessing experience to all readers of the text. The boundaries stipulated by Boyle's linguistic practices acted to keep that community from fragmenting and to protect items of knowledge to which one might expect universal assent from items of knowledge that historically generated divisiveness. Similarly, his stipulations concerning proper manners in dispute worked to guarantee that social solidarity that produced assent to matters of fact and to rule out of order those imputations that would undermine the moral integrity of the experimental form of life. The objectivity of the experimental matter of fact was an artifact of certain forms of discourse and certain modes of social solidarity.
Boyle's social technology constituted an objectifying resource by making the production of knowledge visible as a collective enterprise: "It is not I who says this; it is all of us." As Sprat insisted, collective performance and collective witness served to correct the natural working of the "idols": the faultiness, the idiosyncrasy, or the bias of any individual's judgment and observational ability. The Royal Society advertised itself as a "union of eyes, and hands"; the space in which it produced its experimental knowledge was stipulated to be a public space. It was public in a very precisely defined and very rigorously policed sense: not everybody could come in; not everybody's testimony was of equal worth; not everybody was equally able to influence the institutional consensus. Nevertheless, what Boyle was proposing, and what the Royal Society was endorsing, was a crucially important move towards the public constitution and validation of knowledge. The contrast was, on the one hand, with the private work of the alchemists, and, on the other, with the individual dictates of the systematical philosopher.
In the official formulation of the Royal Society, the production of experimental knowledge commenced with individuals' acts of seeing and believing, and was completed when all individuals voluntarily agreed with one another about what had been seen and ought to be believed. This freedom to speak had to be protected by a special sort of discipline. Radical individualism-the state in which each individual set himself up as the ultimate judge of knowledge-would destroy the conventional basis of proper knowledge, while the disciplined collective social structure of the experimental form of life would create and sustain that factual basis. Thus the experimentalists were on guard against "dogmatists" and "tyrants" in philosophy, just as they abominated "secretists" who produced their knowledge-claims in a private and undisciplined space. No one man was to have the right to lay down what was to count as knowledge. Legitimate knowledge was warranted as objective insofar as it was produced by the collective, and agreed to voluntarily by those who comprised the collective. The objectification of knowledge proceeded through displays of the communal basis of its generation and evaluation. Human coercion was to have no visible place in the experimental form of life.
If the obligation to assent to items of knowledge was not to come from human coercion, where did it come from? It was to be nature, not man, that enforced assent. One was to believe, and to say one believed, in matters of fact because they reflected the structure of natural reality. We have described the technologies that Boyle deployed to generate matters of fact and the conventions that regulated the knowledge-production of the ideal experimental community. Yet the transposition onto nature of experimental knowledge depended upon the routinization of these technologies and conventions. The naturalization of experimental knowledge depended upon the institutionalization of experimental conventions. It follows from this that any attack upon the validity and objectivity of experimental knowledge-production could proceed by way of a display of its conventional basis: showing the work of production involved and exhibiting the lack of obligation to credit experimental knowledge. It might also exhibit an alternative form of life by which assent might more effectively be achieved, one which would yield a superior sort of obligation to assent. In his criticisms of Boyle's programme, Hobbes endeavoured to do just this. Hobbes maintained that the experimental form of life could not produce effective assent: it was not philosophy.