Article ID: CBB790322018

Nature as Spectacle; Experience and Empiricism in Early Modern Experimental Practice (2017)

unapi

This article aims to challenge the thesis of the craft origins of scientific empiricism by demonstrating how the empirical practices of early experimentalism differed in significant ways from the activities of artisans. Through a phenomenological analysis of instrumental observation and experimental demonstrations, I aim to show how experimentalism privileged modes of experience that were foreign to craft traditions and which facilitated a newfound estrangement of human subjects from the objects of their knowledge. Firstly, we will review concerns surrounding the promotion of optical instruments by early experimentalists to reveal how these technologies were understood not only to amplify the senses but also to obscure contextual and relative qualities available to unaided visual perception. Secondly, we will examine the experimental practices of the early Royal Society, to see how experimental demonstrations were deliberately structured to facilitate experiences of the natural world that were divorced from practical and personal contexts. It is here that the divergence from artisanal epistemology is rendered most apparent. For in contrast to craft practices, which favored forms of experience which were personal and engaged, I will argue that the new scientific practices of the 17th century played a central role in effecting the researcher's transformation into a new kind of epistemological subject – the spectator.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB790322018/

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Authors & Contributors
Rankin, Alisha
Manzo, Silvia A.
Giglioni, Guido Maria
Fix, Adam
Robinson, Benedict
Lee, Daniel D.
Concepts
Experiments and experimentation
Experience; witness
Empiricism
Science and entertainment; science and spectacle
Observation
Crafts and craftspeople
Time Periods
Early modern
19th century
18th century
17th century
Modern
Renaissance
Places
France
Europe
England
United States
Germany
Great Britain
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