Abou-Nemeh, Catherine (Author)
This essay explores seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century programs of natural inquiry where conjecture—an uncertain category of knowledge—played a vital role in the advancement of the sciences. It shows how early modern investigators used conjectures as a bridge between knowledge and ignorance and the process of conjecturing as a way to expand the mental state of inquiry. In publishing their conjectures, they were heeding Francis Bacon’s call to inspire hope and urge fellow experimenters to continue researching complex natural phenomena. Fellow investigators could help to test, verify, revise, invalidate, or propose new inferences in a dialectical, collaborative process. The author argues that, by the eighteenth century, public conjecturing marked a particular kind of broad-minded experimental philosopher. This essay situates conjectures within agnotology—the study of culturally produced ignorance—and Baconian communication of knowledge and ignorance. It explores the philosophical and moral tensions investigators navigated when specifying nature’s unknowns.
...More
Book
Janet Kourany;
Martin Carrier;
(2020)
Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted
(/isis/citation/CBB000606278/)
Book
Andrea Strazzoni;
(2019)
Burchard de Volder and the Age of the Scientific Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB530504995/)
Book
Maria Teresa Monti;
(2011)
La tradizione galileiana e lo sperimentalismo naturalistico d'età moderna
(/isis/citation/CBB803453847/)
Article
Pyle, Andrew;
(2002)
Boyle on Science and the Mechanical Philosophy: A Reply to Chalmers
(/isis/citation/CBB000201214/)
Article
Anstey, Peter R.;
(2002)
Robert Boyle and the Heuristic Value of Mechanism
(/isis/citation/CBB000201213/)
Article
Chalmers, Alan;
(2002)
Experiment versus mechanical philosophy in the work of Robert Boyle: A reply to Anstey and Pyle
(/isis/citation/CBB000201215/)
Article
Girten, Kristin M.;
(2010)
Unsexed Souls: Natural Philosophy as Transformation in Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator
(/isis/citation/CBB001030332/)
Article
Arianna Borrelli;
(2020)
Giovan Battista Della Porta's Construction of Pneumatic Phenomena and His Use of Recipes as Heuristic Tools
(/isis/citation/CBB375390325/)
Book
Anstey, Peter R.;
(2011)
John Locke and Natural Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB001033683/)
Article
Cesare Pastorino;
(2020)
Beyond Recipes: The Baconian Natural and Experimental Histories as an Epistemic Genre
(/isis/citation/CBB889974189/)
Article
Yeo, Richard;
(2007)
Between Memory and Paperbooks: Baconianism and Natural History in Seventeenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB000771563/)
Chapter
Müller-Wille, Staffan;
(2008)
History Redoubled: The Synthesis of Facts in Linnaean Natural History
(/isis/citation/CBB000952620/)
Book
Alexander Wragge-Morley;
(2020)
Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720
(/isis/citation/CBB757195097/)
Book
Cohen, H. Floris;
(2010)
How Modern Science Came Into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough
(/isis/citation/CBB001200539/)
Book
Francesco G. Sacco;
(2020)
Real, Mechanical, Experimental: Robert Hooke's Natural Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB579430656/)
Book
Dario Generali;
(2016)
Le Radici della Razionalità Critica: Saperi, Pratiche, Teleologie. Studi offerti a Fabio Minazzi
(/isis/citation/CBB605863308/)
Chapter
Arabatzis, Theodore;
(2012)
Hidden Entities and Experimental Practice: Renewing the Dialogue Between History and Philosophy of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001500247/)
Chapter
Daston, Lorraine;
(2010)
The Empire of Observation, 1600--1800
(/isis/citation/CBB001221449/)
Book
A. J. Angulo;
(2016)
Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad
(/isis/citation/CBB875684613/)
Article
Hartley, Beryl;
(2010)
Exploring and Communicating Knowledge of Trees in the Early Royal Society
(/isis/citation/CBB001022709/)
Be the first to comment!