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A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England
How do we come to trust our knowledge of the world? What are the means by which we distinguish true from false accounts? Why do we credit one observational statement over another?
In A Social History of Truth , Shapin engages these universal questions through an elegant recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern the social world of gentlemen-philosophers in seventeenth-century England. Steven Shapin paints a vivid picture of the relations between gentlemanly culture and scientific practice. He argues that problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel trust, civility, honor, and integrity. These codes formed, and arguably still form, an important basis for securing reliable knowledge about the natural world.
Shapin uses detailed historical narrative to argue about the establishment of factual knowledge both in science and in everyday practice. Accounts of the mores and manners of gentlemen-philosophers are used to illustrate Shapin's broad claim that trust is imperative for constituting every kind of knowledge. Knowledge-making is always a collective people have to know whom to trust in order to know something about the natural world.
In A Social History of Truth , Shapin engages these universal questions through an elegant recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern the social world of gentlemen-philosophers in seventeenth-century England. Steven Shapin paints a vivid picture of the relations between gentlemanly culture and scientific practice. He argues that problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel trust, civility, honor, and integrity. These codes formed, and arguably still form, an important basis for securing reliable knowledge about the natural world.
Shapin uses detailed historical narrative to argue about the establishment of factual knowledge both in science and in everyday practice. Accounts of the mores and manners of gentlemen-philosophers are used to illustrate Shapin's broad claim that trust is imperative for constituting every kind of knowledge. Knowledge-making is always a collective people have to know whom to trust in order to know something about the natural world.
512 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
23 people are currently reading
563 people want to read
About the author
Steven Shapin
14 books39 followersShapin was trained as a biologist at Reed College and did graduate work in genetics at the University of Wisconsin before taking a Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.
From 1972 to 1989, he was Lecturer, then Reader, at the Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University, and, from 1989 to 2003, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, before taking up an appointment at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. He has taught for brief periods at Columbia University, Tel-Aviv University, and at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. In 2012, he was the S. T. Lee Visiting Professorial Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
He has written broadly on the history and sociology of science. Among his concerns are scientists, their ethical choices, and the basis of scientific credibility. He revisioned the role of experiment by examining where experiments took place and who performed them. He is credited with restructuring the field's approach to “big issues” in science such as truth, trust, scientific identity, and moral authority.
"The practice of science, both conceptually and instrumentally, is seen to be full of social assumptions. Crucial to their work is the idea that science is based on the public's faith in it. This is why it is important to keep explaining how sound knowledge is generated, how the process works, who takes part in the process and how."
His books on 17th-century science include the "classic book" Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985, with Simon Schaffer); his "path-breaking book" A Social History of Truth (1994), The Scientific Revolution (1996, now translated into 18 languages), and, on modern entrepreneurial science, The Scientific Life (2008). A collection of his essays is Never Pure (2010). His current research interests include the history of dietetics and the history and sociology of taste and subjective judgment, especially in relation to food and wine.
He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and he has written for Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker.
From 1972 to 1989, he was Lecturer, then Reader, at the Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University, and, from 1989 to 2003, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, before taking up an appointment at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. He has taught for brief periods at Columbia University, Tel-Aviv University, and at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. In 2012, he was the S. T. Lee Visiting Professorial Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
He has written broadly on the history and sociology of science. Among his concerns are scientists, their ethical choices, and the basis of scientific credibility. He revisioned the role of experiment by examining where experiments took place and who performed them. He is credited with restructuring the field's approach to “big issues” in science such as truth, trust, scientific identity, and moral authority.
"The practice of science, both conceptually and instrumentally, is seen to be full of social assumptions. Crucial to their work is the idea that science is based on the public's faith in it. This is why it is important to keep explaining how sound knowledge is generated, how the process works, who takes part in the process and how."
His books on 17th-century science include the "classic book" Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985, with Simon Schaffer); his "path-breaking book" A Social History of Truth (1994), The Scientific Revolution (1996, now translated into 18 languages), and, on modern entrepreneurial science, The Scientific Life (2008). A collection of his essays is Never Pure (2010). His current research interests include the history of dietetics and the history and sociology of taste and subjective judgment, especially in relation to food and wine.
He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and he has written for Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker.
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January 14, 2018
I am only in the earliest stages of my encounter with the sociology and the history of science. From what I can so far gather, opinions seems often predictably polarised between two visions. The one is an understanding of 'science' as permanently true and independent from social and cultural conditions in which it was produced, this body of knowledge being created/discovered through methods strictly grounded in universal reason, rigour and impersonality. This vision I will call the 'heroic' view of science, heroic inasmuch as it tends to negate the influence of institutions and present instead stories of solitary geniuses.
The social view of science instead insists on studying the necessarily imperfect and self-interested institutions and conditions in which each scientific discovery is achieved, and the unavoidable influence that those structures will have both on orienting the research and in formulating the discoveries. As often the debate takes the form of attacks on the one or the other, while the actual position of scientists and historians alike stand somewhere in between.
I know too little about 'reason', about logic and mathematics, about the links between those and the evolving scientific methodologies, about said methodologies (although I am working on that) to have much of an opinion on the first 'heroic' pole, that insisting on science as disconnected, neutral and objective in the strongest sense. At best I see it in its popular form, as it is peddled by popular science and eulogised by our gadgeto-innovation complex, the Elon Musk and Richard Dawkins of the world. What I do see, however, is that commentators on science throughout the XXth century seem to conduct a concerted effort to deflate the totalizing claims of Victorian science, and that many actual discoveries appear to vouch for their efforts.
Shapin's work is a history of XVIIth century science written from the sociological perspective, meaning it takes the second road mentioned above, focusing on the inescapable biases and conditions embedded in the institutions necessary to the production of scientific knowledge. It is very much toward the 'social' pole, then, and I reckon it might belong to the orbit of what is called the 'strong program' in the sociology of science (he often quotes Bloor), although his reflections are mostly historical in nature and largely skirt around the issue of science as it is practiced today.
Nonetheless, Shapin's work constitutes an attack on the 'heroic' narrative of science because he takes to task one of its sacred cows, namely the Scientific Revolution, or more precisely its later British phase in the second half of the XVIIth century. This period, according to the heroic narrative, saw the birth of modern science, generally depicted as a skeptical rejection of the long established Aristotelian models endorsed by the Church (and by the universities). This skepticism toward tradition opened two paths, the rationalist one of Descartes or Hobbes, and the empiricist one of Bacon, Boyle and others, on whom Shapin focuses in this book.
Specifically he looks at what was then called 'experimental philosophy', the baconian road to knowledge which distinguished itself by rejecting speculation, the dominant Aristotelian method, in favour of collecting knowledge through experiment (induction) and establishing likely laws on the basis of those observations. By first submitting all inherited knowledge to organised skepticism, and then by limiting the validity of their provisional claims and restricting the bases of their generalisations to 'pure' observed facts, the empiricists claimed their comparatively 'modest' doctrine to give a truthful image of the world. There are, of course, many problems with this narrative – not least the fact that observation, in the first place, is conducted by people who bring their own presuppositions to the experiment – however Shapin focuses here on another issue, one particularly suitable to his sociological approach, the question of trust.
His contention is that "Skepticism is always a possible move, but its possibility derives from a system in which we take other relevant knowledge on trust . . . Distrust is something which takes place on the margins of trusting systems" (18). Shapin, himself originally trained in molecular biology, recalls the process by which he once applied skepticism to the statement "DNA contains cytosine" (17): he "extracted DNA from mammalian cells and subjected it to chemical analysis" by mincing rat liver and freezing it in liquid nitrogen, grounded, extracted, centrifuged the sample, and after a number of other processes was satisfied that the resulting, observable substance attested to the presence of cytosine. "A moment's reflection about this experience gives grounds for skepticism about the 'firsthand' character of my knowledge. I knew that a certain outcome of a chemical test stood for the presence of cytosine, just as I knew that the dried precipitate which I held in my hand was DNA. I do not recall that I, or any other worker in that laboratory, expressed skepticism about the nature of the precipitate or the adequacy of the test for cytosine, but of course, I could have . . . It would have been very time-consuming and I would have made myself a nuisance by requiring the appropriate verification, but there was no reason in principle why I could not have done so" (18). The point of this parabole, in Shapin's argument, is to show how much in scientific practice is actually taken on trust. In his anecdote, the nature and quality of the rat liver, the function and accuracy of the technological tools he uses, the provenance and composition of the chemicals he uses in the process, or the non-interference of his colleagues, are all taken on trust. Complete, systematic skepticism, if it were even possible, would make scientific practice fundamentally impossible: in his conclusion he goes on to make the bold claim that what distinguishes scientific practice is how much, rather than how little, it is based on trust.
Shapin unfortunately spares little thought on the subject of the management of trust prior to the scientific revolution, a subject which would have been very interesting: to what extent was it distributed through the Church(es) and how did it circulate from there to the university and political institutions, for example. We can however conjecture that in the European pre-modern paradigm, the religious monopoly on culture, including science, meant that practical knowledge and theological doctrine were intricately intertwined, to the point that the acceptation of the one entailed the acceptation of the other (a particular case of what Gellner calls 'multi-stranded knowledge', if I remember well). In that case, the doctrine was simultaneously naturalised and super-naturalised: revelation, and its trickling down through the initiatory conduits of the Church, was in theory the bountiful source of both knowledge of nature and the divine world. Trust in the Revelation, in the Church's ability to convey it, in the truthfulness of its representatives, was presuposed by any and all knowledge.
In contrast, Shapin tells us that in the early-modern context, "'moderns' celebrate proper science as a culture which has indeed rectified knowledge by rejecting what others tell us and seeking direct individual experience" (xxv). In other words, whereas the ground of knowledge in the pre-modern christian setting was in revelation, in the early-modern context it becomes in individual skepticism. Shapin, however, argues that "no practice has accomplished the rejection of testimony and authority and that no cultural practice recognizable as such could do so." Throughout the book he will be "showing the ineradicable role of what others tell us and of saying how reliance upon testimony achieves invisibility in certain intellectual practices" (xxv).
To this end, he opens the book with a meaty chapter on methodology and conceptual foundations, the main of which is that of trust. He looks at analyses and history of the notion, calling upon a number of social theorists and philosophers, with maybe an emphasis on Niklas Luhmann. His main contention is that the giving or withholding of trust has a moral character, and that it participates in crucial ways in establishing and maintaining the social order: he carefully qualifies his statement in order to avoid the pervasive accusations of relativism levelled against his kith, writing that "the identification of trustworthy agents is necessary to the constitution of any body of knowledge. I do not thereby claim that this is all there is to knowledge-making . . . What we recognize as people-knowledge is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the making of thing-knowledge" – in fact, "what we know as 'social knowledge' and 'natural knowledge' are hybrid entities"(xxvi).
The following two chapters concerns themselves with the mechanics of trust in the specific context of the British XVIIth century, and more particularly of its entanglement with gentlemanly culture. Shapin argues that the truthfulness of various actors, from the standpoint of the English gentry, was assessed in terms of their ability for "free action": being of independent means, and thus not having to subordinate oneself to another by means of salaried work, was taken to the be the crucial pre-condition to being able to speak the truth. Being dependant on anyone, conversely, tended to subsume the opinion of the dependant (worker, woman, child, etc.) into the opinion of the master. The author thus recall for example, how in the 1640s, even the 'left' Levellers, while advocating the extension of the franchise, to include "all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright." He adds: on those grounds, "servants–all those who sold their labor to another–were excluded" (405). In other words, trust was indexed on liberty, and liberty was the condition of the self-reliant man. The system of honour Shapin convincingly show to police and incentivise the maintaining of a functional community of trust within the gentry, inasmuch as 'giving the lye' (accusing someone of lying) was the highest insult and was likely to bring about a duel. Concerning the milieu of experimental philosophers, he adds that "this new culture emerged partly through purposeful relocation of the conventions, codes, and values of gentlemanly conversation into the domain of natural philosophy" (xvii). The high level of trusts needed for the collegial practice of science was thus based on the English gentry's system of honour, which itself promoted consensus around probablistic claims rather than absolute truth.
Chapter four looks at a specific case of scientific and gentlemanly self-fashioning, that of Robert Boyle. Shapin has written elsewhere on the man and is clearly an authority on the subject. He ties Boyle's writings on ethics, conduct and religion, with his commitment to and development of the new scientific methodology. Chapter five deals with skepticism proper in that period, evidence its limits and the process through which the remaining trust was made 'invisible': in other words, how endemic skepticism was disciplined and directed outward of the scientific community. Chapter six examines a number of specific instances, or limit-cases, in which trust within the community was given or withheld, and what were the consequences. Chapter seven focuses on the role of mathematics – exact, non-empirical and apparently necessary to the practice of early-modern, unceasingly mechanistic science. Here Shapin shows that Boyle was not the fore-runner of Newton he is sometimes made out to be, but rather kept his distance of the rationalist claims of mathematicians. Finally chapter is a very interesting and measured analysis of the role of staff and servants in the experimental process, which goes some way to show that the empirical notion of 'observer' and thus of 'observed fact' was fairly more flexible in practice than it is made often made out to be.
All in all this is a long, and sometimes rather dry book, but also a very rewarding read. I would not recommend it as an entry-point into the subject, yet neither is it particularly obscure, and anyone with as vague a knowledge of the period, of the history of science, and of the sociology of knowledge as mine, should be able to read it through. A knowledge of the debates to which Shapin contributes, however, will make the book a lot more enjoyable and engaging, and this can be had I'd imagine with any introduction to the philosophy of science, 'What Is This Thing Called Science?' for example.
The social view of science instead insists on studying the necessarily imperfect and self-interested institutions and conditions in which each scientific discovery is achieved, and the unavoidable influence that those structures will have both on orienting the research and in formulating the discoveries. As often the debate takes the form of attacks on the one or the other, while the actual position of scientists and historians alike stand somewhere in between.
I know too little about 'reason', about logic and mathematics, about the links between those and the evolving scientific methodologies, about said methodologies (although I am working on that) to have much of an opinion on the first 'heroic' pole, that insisting on science as disconnected, neutral and objective in the strongest sense. At best I see it in its popular form, as it is peddled by popular science and eulogised by our gadgeto-innovation complex, the Elon Musk and Richard Dawkins of the world. What I do see, however, is that commentators on science throughout the XXth century seem to conduct a concerted effort to deflate the totalizing claims of Victorian science, and that many actual discoveries appear to vouch for their efforts.
Shapin's work is a history of XVIIth century science written from the sociological perspective, meaning it takes the second road mentioned above, focusing on the inescapable biases and conditions embedded in the institutions necessary to the production of scientific knowledge. It is very much toward the 'social' pole, then, and I reckon it might belong to the orbit of what is called the 'strong program' in the sociology of science (he often quotes Bloor), although his reflections are mostly historical in nature and largely skirt around the issue of science as it is practiced today.
Nonetheless, Shapin's work constitutes an attack on the 'heroic' narrative of science because he takes to task one of its sacred cows, namely the Scientific Revolution, or more precisely its later British phase in the second half of the XVIIth century. This period, according to the heroic narrative, saw the birth of modern science, generally depicted as a skeptical rejection of the long established Aristotelian models endorsed by the Church (and by the universities). This skepticism toward tradition opened two paths, the rationalist one of Descartes or Hobbes, and the empiricist one of Bacon, Boyle and others, on whom Shapin focuses in this book.
Specifically he looks at what was then called 'experimental philosophy', the baconian road to knowledge which distinguished itself by rejecting speculation, the dominant Aristotelian method, in favour of collecting knowledge through experiment (induction) and establishing likely laws on the basis of those observations. By first submitting all inherited knowledge to organised skepticism, and then by limiting the validity of their provisional claims and restricting the bases of their generalisations to 'pure' observed facts, the empiricists claimed their comparatively 'modest' doctrine to give a truthful image of the world. There are, of course, many problems with this narrative – not least the fact that observation, in the first place, is conducted by people who bring their own presuppositions to the experiment – however Shapin focuses here on another issue, one particularly suitable to his sociological approach, the question of trust.
His contention is that "Skepticism is always a possible move, but its possibility derives from a system in which we take other relevant knowledge on trust . . . Distrust is something which takes place on the margins of trusting systems" (18). Shapin, himself originally trained in molecular biology, recalls the process by which he once applied skepticism to the statement "DNA contains cytosine" (17): he "extracted DNA from mammalian cells and subjected it to chemical analysis" by mincing rat liver and freezing it in liquid nitrogen, grounded, extracted, centrifuged the sample, and after a number of other processes was satisfied that the resulting, observable substance attested to the presence of cytosine. "A moment's reflection about this experience gives grounds for skepticism about the 'firsthand' character of my knowledge. I knew that a certain outcome of a chemical test stood for the presence of cytosine, just as I knew that the dried precipitate which I held in my hand was DNA. I do not recall that I, or any other worker in that laboratory, expressed skepticism about the nature of the precipitate or the adequacy of the test for cytosine, but of course, I could have . . . It would have been very time-consuming and I would have made myself a nuisance by requiring the appropriate verification, but there was no reason in principle why I could not have done so" (18). The point of this parabole, in Shapin's argument, is to show how much in scientific practice is actually taken on trust. In his anecdote, the nature and quality of the rat liver, the function and accuracy of the technological tools he uses, the provenance and composition of the chemicals he uses in the process, or the non-interference of his colleagues, are all taken on trust. Complete, systematic skepticism, if it were even possible, would make scientific practice fundamentally impossible: in his conclusion he goes on to make the bold claim that what distinguishes scientific practice is how much, rather than how little, it is based on trust.
Shapin unfortunately spares little thought on the subject of the management of trust prior to the scientific revolution, a subject which would have been very interesting: to what extent was it distributed through the Church(es) and how did it circulate from there to the university and political institutions, for example. We can however conjecture that in the European pre-modern paradigm, the religious monopoly on culture, including science, meant that practical knowledge and theological doctrine were intricately intertwined, to the point that the acceptation of the one entailed the acceptation of the other (a particular case of what Gellner calls 'multi-stranded knowledge', if I remember well). In that case, the doctrine was simultaneously naturalised and super-naturalised: revelation, and its trickling down through the initiatory conduits of the Church, was in theory the bountiful source of both knowledge of nature and the divine world. Trust in the Revelation, in the Church's ability to convey it, in the truthfulness of its representatives, was presuposed by any and all knowledge.
In contrast, Shapin tells us that in the early-modern context, "'moderns' celebrate proper science as a culture which has indeed rectified knowledge by rejecting what others tell us and seeking direct individual experience" (xxv). In other words, whereas the ground of knowledge in the pre-modern christian setting was in revelation, in the early-modern context it becomes in individual skepticism. Shapin, however, argues that "no practice has accomplished the rejection of testimony and authority and that no cultural practice recognizable as such could do so." Throughout the book he will be "showing the ineradicable role of what others tell us and of saying how reliance upon testimony achieves invisibility in certain intellectual practices" (xxv).
To this end, he opens the book with a meaty chapter on methodology and conceptual foundations, the main of which is that of trust. He looks at analyses and history of the notion, calling upon a number of social theorists and philosophers, with maybe an emphasis on Niklas Luhmann. His main contention is that the giving or withholding of trust has a moral character, and that it participates in crucial ways in establishing and maintaining the social order: he carefully qualifies his statement in order to avoid the pervasive accusations of relativism levelled against his kith, writing that "the identification of trustworthy agents is necessary to the constitution of any body of knowledge. I do not thereby claim that this is all there is to knowledge-making . . . What we recognize as people-knowledge is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the making of thing-knowledge" – in fact, "what we know as 'social knowledge' and 'natural knowledge' are hybrid entities"(xxvi).
The following two chapters concerns themselves with the mechanics of trust in the specific context of the British XVIIth century, and more particularly of its entanglement with gentlemanly culture. Shapin argues that the truthfulness of various actors, from the standpoint of the English gentry, was assessed in terms of their ability for "free action": being of independent means, and thus not having to subordinate oneself to another by means of salaried work, was taken to the be the crucial pre-condition to being able to speak the truth. Being dependant on anyone, conversely, tended to subsume the opinion of the dependant (worker, woman, child, etc.) into the opinion of the master. The author thus recall for example, how in the 1640s, even the 'left' Levellers, while advocating the extension of the franchise, to include "all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright." He adds: on those grounds, "servants–all those who sold their labor to another–were excluded" (405). In other words, trust was indexed on liberty, and liberty was the condition of the self-reliant man. The system of honour Shapin convincingly show to police and incentivise the maintaining of a functional community of trust within the gentry, inasmuch as 'giving the lye' (accusing someone of lying) was the highest insult and was likely to bring about a duel. Concerning the milieu of experimental philosophers, he adds that "this new culture emerged partly through purposeful relocation of the conventions, codes, and values of gentlemanly conversation into the domain of natural philosophy" (xvii). The high level of trusts needed for the collegial practice of science was thus based on the English gentry's system of honour, which itself promoted consensus around probablistic claims rather than absolute truth.
Chapter four looks at a specific case of scientific and gentlemanly self-fashioning, that of Robert Boyle. Shapin has written elsewhere on the man and is clearly an authority on the subject. He ties Boyle's writings on ethics, conduct and religion, with his commitment to and development of the new scientific methodology. Chapter five deals with skepticism proper in that period, evidence its limits and the process through which the remaining trust was made 'invisible': in other words, how endemic skepticism was disciplined and directed outward of the scientific community. Chapter six examines a number of specific instances, or limit-cases, in which trust within the community was given or withheld, and what were the consequences. Chapter seven focuses on the role of mathematics – exact, non-empirical and apparently necessary to the practice of early-modern, unceasingly mechanistic science. Here Shapin shows that Boyle was not the fore-runner of Newton he is sometimes made out to be, but rather kept his distance of the rationalist claims of mathematicians. Finally chapter is a very interesting and measured analysis of the role of staff and servants in the experimental process, which goes some way to show that the empirical notion of 'observer' and thus of 'observed fact' was fairly more flexible in practice than it is made often made out to be.
All in all this is a long, and sometimes rather dry book, but also a very rewarding read. I would not recommend it as an entry-point into the subject, yet neither is it particularly obscure, and anyone with as vague a knowledge of the period, of the history of science, and of the sociology of knowledge as mine, should be able to read it through. A knowledge of the debates to which Shapin contributes, however, will make the book a lot more enjoyable and engaging, and this can be had I'd imagine with any introduction to the philosophy of science, 'What Is This Thing Called Science?' for example.
August 24, 2018
In A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, Steven Shapin tries to answer the question, why do we believe something is true? He argues there is a disconnect between how we think knowledge is obtained and how it is actually obtained. Like scientists today, men of learning in the seventeenth century believed direct experience was the only way to obtain factual knowledge, and they rejected the “testimony of others.” However, Shapin argues testimony and authority are the very foundations of knowledge.
Trust, a necessary ingredient for working with others, is indispensable in science. Scientists use trust to sustain the structures that allow them to maintain and build on the body of knowledge they have acquired over the centuries. This social interaction, Shapin argued, contains assumed knowledge about the external world and who is trustworthy in that world. “The identification of trustworthy agents is necessary to the constitution of any body of knowledge.”
What kind of person do we trust to tell the truth? According to Shapin, it is the early modern English gentleman. A gentleman was a person who, because he was self-sufficient and free from economic burden, had no motivation to lie. Therefore, he had both the qualities of free action and virtue. The gentleman was culturally encouraged not to deceive. Virtue was enforced by the ever-present threat of loss of his status as a gentleman, which had far reaching social and political consequences.
The culture of honor guaranteed the gentleman’s place as a truth teller, as well as provided consequences that stemmed from lying. “A man whose word might be constantly credited was a man… upon whom others might rely,” Shapin explained. The trustworthiness of the rich and powerful was always taken over that of the poor, who were considered dishonorable because they were bound by other men for their survival.
Robert Boyle and John Locke were two examples of this ideal experimental practitioner. Robert Boyle used his status as a gentleman to deflect accusations that special interests drove his research. As a free agent, his supporters argued he was above those influences, and as a good Christian gentleman, he was in the perfect position to be trusted to show ‘the way things are.’
John Locke laid the groundwork for what testimony could be relied upon and what testimony could be discarded, which, combined with other texts of the period, constituted the Maxims of Prudence. This text contained seven guidelines for considering testimony. The seventh, as summarized by Shapin, stressed that we should “assent to testimony from sources possessing integrity and disinterestedness.” In other words, a gentleman.
Shapin further argued that in order to preserve civil order in the scientific community, the standards of certainty, accuracy, and exactness had to be lowered to accommodate a wide variety of testimony and keep debates as polite as possible. Robert Boyle’s view of the correct place and expectation of mathematics in experimental natural philosophy showed that civility mattered more than mathematical precision. Boyle was nervous about the place of mathematics in experimentation and skeptical about its supposed certainty. Boyle’s alternative was a conversational style of scientific inquiry, which had mechanisms for determining when a consensus on a matter had been reached.
Shapin concluded A Social History of Truth by arguing that there has been a “fundamental shift in the nature of trust and in the practical means by which the credibility of knowledge is secured.” Persons in the seventeenth century were familiar with scientific authorities and demanded they adhere to a code of conduct to prove their trustworthiness. Today, we place our trust in institutions and other faceless entities, because sustained skepticism of those institutions wouldn’t be practical. We value expertise over virtue.
A Social History of Truth was well argued and supported by a wide variety of sources, however, its overall argument often got lost in the details. Shapin’s focus on a handful of key players also opened him up to accusations of cherry picking examples to support his argument. What about all the natural philosophers who didn’t fit into the gentlemanly ideal?
Furthermore, an analytic philosopher would not agree with Shapin’s claim that truth is a social construct. If a statement is true, its truth should be self-evident by all. (A) does not equal (A) because we trust the person telling us it is. (A) equals (A) because it cannot be otherwise. This truth is independent of any human.
Despite this criticism, Steven Shapin’s philosophical inquiry into truth is compelling and thorough, and his thesis is convincing despite its inadequacies.
Trust, a necessary ingredient for working with others, is indispensable in science. Scientists use trust to sustain the structures that allow them to maintain and build on the body of knowledge they have acquired over the centuries. This social interaction, Shapin argued, contains assumed knowledge about the external world and who is trustworthy in that world. “The identification of trustworthy agents is necessary to the constitution of any body of knowledge.”
What kind of person do we trust to tell the truth? According to Shapin, it is the early modern English gentleman. A gentleman was a person who, because he was self-sufficient and free from economic burden, had no motivation to lie. Therefore, he had both the qualities of free action and virtue. The gentleman was culturally encouraged not to deceive. Virtue was enforced by the ever-present threat of loss of his status as a gentleman, which had far reaching social and political consequences.
The culture of honor guaranteed the gentleman’s place as a truth teller, as well as provided consequences that stemmed from lying. “A man whose word might be constantly credited was a man… upon whom others might rely,” Shapin explained. The trustworthiness of the rich and powerful was always taken over that of the poor, who were considered dishonorable because they were bound by other men for their survival.
Robert Boyle and John Locke were two examples of this ideal experimental practitioner. Robert Boyle used his status as a gentleman to deflect accusations that special interests drove his research. As a free agent, his supporters argued he was above those influences, and as a good Christian gentleman, he was in the perfect position to be trusted to show ‘the way things are.’
John Locke laid the groundwork for what testimony could be relied upon and what testimony could be discarded, which, combined with other texts of the period, constituted the Maxims of Prudence. This text contained seven guidelines for considering testimony. The seventh, as summarized by Shapin, stressed that we should “assent to testimony from sources possessing integrity and disinterestedness.” In other words, a gentleman.
Shapin further argued that in order to preserve civil order in the scientific community, the standards of certainty, accuracy, and exactness had to be lowered to accommodate a wide variety of testimony and keep debates as polite as possible. Robert Boyle’s view of the correct place and expectation of mathematics in experimental natural philosophy showed that civility mattered more than mathematical precision. Boyle was nervous about the place of mathematics in experimentation and skeptical about its supposed certainty. Boyle’s alternative was a conversational style of scientific inquiry, which had mechanisms for determining when a consensus on a matter had been reached.
Shapin concluded A Social History of Truth by arguing that there has been a “fundamental shift in the nature of trust and in the practical means by which the credibility of knowledge is secured.” Persons in the seventeenth century were familiar with scientific authorities and demanded they adhere to a code of conduct to prove their trustworthiness. Today, we place our trust in institutions and other faceless entities, because sustained skepticism of those institutions wouldn’t be practical. We value expertise over virtue.
A Social History of Truth was well argued and supported by a wide variety of sources, however, its overall argument often got lost in the details. Shapin’s focus on a handful of key players also opened him up to accusations of cherry picking examples to support his argument. What about all the natural philosophers who didn’t fit into the gentlemanly ideal?
Furthermore, an analytic philosopher would not agree with Shapin’s claim that truth is a social construct. If a statement is true, its truth should be self-evident by all. (A) does not equal (A) because we trust the person telling us it is. (A) equals (A) because it cannot be otherwise. This truth is independent of any human.
Despite this criticism, Steven Shapin’s philosophical inquiry into truth is compelling and thorough, and his thesis is convincing despite its inadequacies.
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September 24, 2015Shapin deftly argues that the practice of science in seventeenth-century England relied heavily on the reliable word of "experts" in a particular field, as experiments were expensive and laborious to reproduce. Trust emerges as a critical element in the production of scientific knowledge, and Shapin demonstrates that what we assume to be objective in science often rests on this foundation of trust in the scientist (as it does in every academic field).
January 13, 2008
This is a fascinating book, but for every page of actual argument, it engages in three pages of preemptive defense against critiques arising from obscure humanist turf wars. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST SHUT UP ALREADY AND GET TO THE POINT.
June 11, 2023
In A Social History of Truth, Shapin examines how early modern scientists decided what was true. Although they claimed that one's own experiences and empirical evidence were the only basis for knowledge, in practice most of their knowledge came from trusting others, which is true in every society since none of us can test every fact for ourselves. However, while knowledge always involves trust, who is considered trustworthy and the process for determining truth varies across time and cultures. Using several case studies from early modern science mostly focused on Robert Boyle, Shapin argues that "gentle" (upper-class) cultural assumptions largely determined how scientists decided what was true. Gentlemen were perceived as trustworthy because of their financial independence, while their employees who actually conducted the experiments were seen as potentially corrupted due to their wages. When scientists disagreed about evidence or its interpretation, they often prioritized civility over determining what was true. Shapin closes the book by looking at modern scientific trust and argues that although institutional affiliations and expertise play a large role in who we trust, within the scientific community, face-to-face interactions and personal relationships are still influential factors in who is trusted.
Since I come from a history background, I found the more philosophical parts of the book to be a bit of a slog, but the case studies were completely fascinating. If you're interested in the history of science, I would definitely recommend it!
Since I come from a history background, I found the more philosophical parts of the book to be a bit of a slog, but the case studies were completely fascinating. If you're interested in the history of science, I would definitely recommend it!
April 18, 2023
Ever since I did a history of science course in my undergraduate, I have meant to read the classics of Schaffer, Shapin, and Latour. I finally got down to this very adorable scholar of Robert Boyle. The beauty of this department is that it pulls the throne off from the under the feet of 'science' that holy substance and guardian of the truth exposing how much of scientific practice is governed by social rules and in this case, with notions of gentlemanliess of truth-saying; only the gentlemen (a category within elite classes) are to be trusted and not the labouring classes. Boyle too is a case of this at play. The book examines contemporary testimonies of how veracities of claims are to be tested and how indeed these were executed in real life - from trusting ineffective scientific tools of gentlemen to mistrusting truth-telling sailors and divers. Finally there is a wonderful chapter also on the odd position of silencing assistants - all work must be done by assistants but they also not be trusted to be scientific. Science is cast in society and the biases that is clothed in/by.
October 23, 2020
A "social history" of truth???? Nooooooooooo
Incorporating historical research from early modern England as an empirical basis, Shapin shows that trust plays an ineradicable role in the truth-making process. The question is who to trust? Each culture must answer this question. In English gentlemen society, they responded by translating civil rules of discourse to the scientific community. But how do we answer that question, and who does our decision make invisible?
Massive bibliography and extensive footnotes, every historian's dream. But employed to contribute to the philosophical and sociological conversations of epistemologies.
Incorporating historical research from early modern England as an empirical basis, Shapin shows that trust plays an ineradicable role in the truth-making process. The question is who to trust? Each culture must answer this question. In English gentlemen society, they responded by translating civil rules of discourse to the scientific community. But how do we answer that question, and who does our decision make invisible?
Massive bibliography and extensive footnotes, every historian's dream. But employed to contribute to the philosophical and sociological conversations of epistemologies.
December 3, 2017
this book surprised just for the sake that i had anticipated the arguments would be a bit tricky to keep track of... but this was not the case at all. the title might seem a bit daunting but the content was very approachable and interesting
November 20, 2024
intricate but fascinating
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December 27, 2012READ
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March 10, 2013Is an excelent book
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