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Article ID: CBB323045277

The Pharmakon of ‘If’: Working with Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth (2019)

British Journal for the History of Science
Volume: 52
Issue: 3
Pages: 487-514

DOI: 10.1017/S0007087419000414

URI: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-for-the-history-of-science/article/pharmakon-of-if-working-with-steven-shapins-a-social-history-of-truth/1CC8DDB64218A09A469BE0457DBA12CE

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Experimental method Natural philosophy Historiography History of science, as a discipline Science and religion Science and gender Science and society Truth Social history 17th century England Boyle, Robert Shapin, Steven B.

Whilst the ‘local culture’ of experimental natural philosophy in seventeenth-century England drew on ‘resources’ supplied by the gentlemanly identity of men like Robert Boyle, this culture found much of its distinctiveness in a series of exclusions having to do with faith, gender and class. My concern in this essay is less with these exclusions, and the distinctions they enabled, than with their surreptitious returns. Following from this, as a heuristic strategy, I will try to understand how Boyle and Co. used and reacted to, repressed and cathected, that which they sought to exclude. By charting the movements of exile and return across the contested frontiers of class, gender and faith, truth and lies, authenticity and performance, we can, I believe, fruitfully complicate our understandings of both the social history of truth, and the social history of our ‘post-truth’ predicament.

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