A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England

This book has been brought to publication with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, and both author and publisher acknowledge this support with thanks.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

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© 1994 by The University of Chicago Press

All rights reserved. Published 1994

Paperback edition 1995

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75018-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75019-4 (paper)

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ISBN-10: 0-226-75019-1 (paper)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shapin, Steven.

A social history of truth : civility and science in seventeenth-century England / Steven Shapin.

    p.    cm. — (Science and its conceptual foundations)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Science—Social aspects—England—History—17th century.   2. Science—Moral and ethical aspects—England—History—17th century.   I. Title.   II. Series.

Q175.52.G7S48   1994

306.4'5'094109032—dc20

93-41950

CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

STEVEN SHAPIN

A Social History of Truth

Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Science and Its Conceptual Foundations

David L. Hull, Editor

For T. L. Martin, Gent.

Sayest thou this of thyself, or did others tell it thee . . . ?

—John 18:34

It is a fundamental belief of all aristocrats that the common people are untruthful. We truthful ones—the nobility in ancient Greece called themselves.

It is obvious that everywhere the designations of moral value were at first applied to men, and were only derivatively and at a later period applied to actions.

—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Notes on Genres, Disciplines, and Conventions

The Argument Summarized

ONE. The Great Civility: Trust, Truth, and Moral Order

TWO. Who Was Then a Gentleman? Integrity and Gentle Identity in Early Modern England

THREE. A Social History of Truth-Telling: Knowledge, Social Practice, and the Credibility of Gentlemen

FOUR. Who Was Robert Boyle? The Creation and Presentation of an Experimental Identity

FIVE. Epistemological Decorum: The Practical Management of Factual Testimony

SIX. Knowing about People and Knowing about Things: A Moral History of Scientific Credibility

SEVEN. Certainty and Civility: Mathematics and Boyle’s Experimental Conversation

EIGHT. Invisible Technicians: Masters, Servants, and the Making of Experimental Knowledge

Epilogue: The Way We Live Now

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1. Portrait of Robert Boyle

2. Barents’s encounter with floating ice

3. Table of cometary positions (Hevelius)

4. Plots of cometary paths (Hevelius)

5. Title page vignette from Hevelius, Prodromus Cometicus

6. Appearance of cometary heads (Hevelius)

7. Projection of cometary motion (Hevelius)

8. Table of the compression of air (Boyle’s law)

9. Schematic representation of Boyle’s law

10. Depiction of hydrostatic experiment (Pascal)

11. Portrait of Denis Papin

12. Oath, probably to be taken by Boyle’s technicians

Table

1. Excerpt from table of specific gravities (Boyle)

Acknowledgments

A book so long in the making acquires many intellectual debts. Most of these obligations are acknowledged in formal citations, but I fear that some are not, or are, at best, inadequately recognized. Versions of some of the material presented here were inflicted on a great many tolerant audiences over the past eight years or so. These include seminars at the universities of Cambridge, California at Berkeley, California at Los Angeles, Chicago, Cornell, Griffith, Harvard, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins, London (University College), Manchester, Melbourne, New South Wales, Notre Dame, Oxford, Pittsburgh, Princeton, Tel-Aviv, and Wollongong. Members of all these audiences must have assisted this project in more ways than I can readily recall.

Individuals who have offered valuable information, criticisms, or comments are, again, too numerous for properly inclusive enumeration, but they include J. A. Bennett, Mario Biagioli, Jeffrey Brown, H. M. Collins, Lorraine J. Daston, Michael Aaron Dennis, Yaron Ezrahi, Mordechai Feingold, Daniel Garber, J. V. Golinski, Rob Hagendijk, Willem Halffman, Hans Harbers, John Henry, Michael Hunter, Robert Iliffe, Adrian Johns, Robert Kohler, Bruno Latour, John Law, Julian Martin, David Philip Miller, Iwan Rhys Morus, Andrew Pickering, Trevor Pinch, Theodore Porter, Jacques Revel, John Schuster, Susan Leigh Star, Sharon Traweek, Jay Tribby, and Andrew Wayne. I have discussed some of the ideas in this book with Peter Dear and Simon Schaffer over so many years, and in so many places, that I cannot confidently estimate the extent of my debt to them. A series of friendly arguments with my colleague Philip Kitcher over the past several years has considerably sharpened an exercise which he will still, no doubt, regard as lamentably fuzzy and philosophically naive. I hope he will not object to being thanked in this connection. At an early stage of writing, portions of the manuscript were read by David Bloor and Michael Lynch, each of whom offered detailed and enormously constructive criticisms at a time when I was most able to benefit from them. Charles Rosenberg, Andrew Scull, and Philip Kitcher kindly read over much of the completed manuscript and made a number of penetrating criticisms, some of which only pressure of time made me decline to take up. My friend Christopher Martyn is a scientist who has (at times unwittingly) taught me some common sense about the moral economy of modern science which I was happy to dress up in fancy language and present as my own.

I owe far more than the usual debt to three very diligent and very competent readers for the University of Chicago Press. My editor Susan Abrams has been a continuing and much-valued source of support, encouragement, and sound advice. It has been a pleasure and a moral education working with her. My copy editor Michael Koplow has my gratitude for caring as much about getting it right as I do.

Interlibrary loan staff at my own university were extremely helpful: without their assistance this book would have taken very much longer to complete. I also thank staff at the University Library of Cambridge University, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at Cambridge University, the National Library of Scotland, and the Royal Society of London. I thank the Fellows and Council of the Royal Society for permission to use and quote from the Boyle Papers and other manuscripts in their possession.

A slightly different version of Chapter 4—Who Was Robert Boyle?—was presented to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, conference on Civility, Court Society, and Scientific Discourse on 23 November 1991, and to the Stalbridge Boyle Symposium on 14 December 1991. I am grateful to the organizers—Mario Biagioli and Michael Hunter respectively—for allowing me to publish this material for the first time here. Chapter 7 is a greatly revised version of Robert Boyle and Mathematics: Reality, Representation, and Experimental Practice, Science in Context 2 (1988), 23–58. I thank Cambridge University Press for permission to use some of that material here.

This book was largely written during academic leave from the University of California, San Diego, in 1991–1992, supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the University of California President’s Initiative in the Humanities. Small summer research grants from the University of California, San Diego Academic Senate, supported an early stage of this work. I am honored to acknowledge a very special debt to Mr. Gerry Martin and the Renaissance Trust.

September 1992

Lochinver, Sutherland

Notes on Genres, Disciplines, and Conventions

What Kind of Book?

A Social History of Truth is concerned with questions about the grounds of scientific knowledge which have traditionally been the preserve of philosophers; it uses evidence and techniques customarily owned by historians; and the conclusions it arrives at are broadly sociological in form and substance. For all that, it was not initiated with any special intent to celebrate interdisciplinarity or deliberately to mix, merge, or mangle disciplinary procedures. Rather, it is the upshot of years of engagement with questions whose exploration has taken me at some angle from the trajectories of colleagues more comfortable in their disciplinary identities. I have followed the questions, and the resources for addressing them, wherever they happened to be in the academic culture. My purpose is not to blur the genres of history, sociology, and philosophy of science, but to assist in the reconstitution of what might count as historical practice, and to make a theoretically driven detailed historical narrative the sort of thing which engages the attention of philosophers and sociologists because they recognize it as a significant way of dealing with their problems. There seems no good reason why practitioners, including myself, writing about the past should not be called ‘historians,’ but I cannot insist on that honor.

I wanted to explore the bases upon which factual scientific knowledge is held. It was natural that I should do so in relation to a setting I knew relatively well, and that lends the book its historical character. It is ‘about’ a particular past setting. Unlike some postmodernist and reflexivist friends, I write in the confident conviction that I am less interesting than the subjects I write ‘about,’ and, accordingly, much of this book can be read in the mode of old-fashioned historical realism. Yet the resources to conduct an inquiry about the grounds of credibility do not presently belong to any one academic discipline, and my efforts to explore and assess these resources lend the book its apparently sociological and, to a lesser extent, philosophical character. I do not doubt that many historians reading this book will be irritated by the generalities of the first chapter. I hope, nevertheless, that they will give it a go, and I argue below why they ought to try. However, failure to tolerate this chapter is not terminal, and the book may, if absolutely necessary, be read from chapter 2, with only intermittent intrusions of sociological theory. Chapter 1 may then, if desired, be taken on after ‘properly historical’ sensibilities have been addressed. Conversely, many philosophers and sociologists, their interest perhaps whetted by the first chapter, will no doubt be exasperated by the detailed historical treatments that constitute the bulk of the book. I will also give arguments why they ought to persist, but, alas, there is no way of reading this book as an abstract exercise, nor are chapters 2 to 8 to be regarded simply as the testing of some theory about knowledge and order which can subsist independently of the detailed narratives which make it visible.

Members of audiences exposed to early versions of the material in this book posed questions which at first I had difficulty in understanding but which I now realize merit concise and clear responses. I was asked why, if my enterprise was, as I said, historical in form, I continually referred to modern microsociological studies of the forms of interaction in the Los Angeles, Philadelphia, or Shetland Islands of the twentieth century. Was I claiming that the aspects of the modern condition addressed by present-day microsociologists were ‘brought into being’ in seventeenth-century England? And, if so, how could I switch back and forth between widely separated temporal settings without any significant attention to the successive transformations of the longue durée? Furthermore, how could I justify such close attention to the English setting unless I was claiming that the English were unique or that English practices were totally insulated from Continental counterparts?

These are good questions, the first very penetrating indeed, and the last perhaps not quite so telling. I respond in reverse order. My concern here is to open a historicist window upon the practices by which types of scientific knowledge were made and their credibility secured in early modern England, to show how this was done in as much detail as I felt the subject merited and the general reader could be expected to bear.¹ A historical ethnography is, strictly speaking, an impossibility, but this is inter alia an attempt at one. Obviously, the gentle and learned worlds with which I am concerned interacted significantly across national boundaries, and many of their attributed characteristics were common to several national settings. I use evidence deriving from non-English cultures when such sources importantly circulated in England, whether in translation or not. Where there is evidence that English patterns significantly diverged from those obtaining elsewhere, or that the English accounted themselves different in relevant respects, I draw attention to such evidence. I make no claim of the sort that the English were ‘wholly unique’ or that every national culture was ‘essentially the same,’ although I am happy that, so far as its historical dimension is concerned, this book should be taken substantially to support accumulating evidence of the relative ‘peculiarities of the English.’² I offer no special justification for focusing upon the English context and upon the probabilistic empirical and experimental practices which were characteristic of that setting. Historians of early modern England will need no such justification. Searchers after the ‘origins of modernity’ have in recent years found much of interest in seventeenth-century English science and allied cultural practices, and, for that reason, their attention may be engaged by my story about the relationship between science and gentlemanly conduct. What happened in England was, by any standards, ‘important’ for scientific change. I am well aware that, in significant ways, matters were arranged differently in other European settings, and that these too were ‘important’ for the development of science.

Indeed, this book does not contain a great deal about knowledge-making practices obtaining in early modern France or Italy or Norway. Nor does it address the career of these practices in England into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My relative ignorance of these cultural settings and periods is culpable, but not, I hope, fatal to the inquiry I have framed here. My apology for this restriction requires some comment about how the arguments and narratives in this book stand with respect to the interests and conventions of various academic disciplines.

One argument contained here has some chance of being visible as straightforwardly historical. It is a claim about the origins of the practice known as English experimental philosophy. I say that this new culture emerged partly through the purposeful relocation of the conventions, codes, and values of gentlemanly conversation into the domain of natural philosophy. I show how this relocation was formulated and assisted by the gentlemanly identities of such key advocates as Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle. Scholarship of a certain sort might be made suitable for early modern gentlemen through a reformulation of the very idea of philosophy such that it became recognizable as a form of gentlemanly conversation. I display the local advantages accruing from this move for practical solutions to endemic problems of credibility. Accordingly, insofar as history is taken to be defined by ‘origins stories,’ I offer this one. It is about the gentlemanly origins of seventeenth-century English experimental and observational natural philosophy. If one wants to read this book as a story about the ‘gentlemanly origins of modern science,’ I cannot prevent that reading, although I need to insist that we still know relatively little about the complex processes through which seventeenth-century practices were successively transformed into those of the present day. Any such version of this ‘origins story’ ought, therefore, to be argued with due modesty.

Other arguments (and, in my view, by far the most interesting ones) are not at all about specific historical origins or transformations. Rather, they draw attention to (what, fearful of pretentiousness, I suppose I must call) ‘the human condition.’ I mean to open a window on the historical past in order to show what modern scientists and everyday actors share with it. No doubt, we share practices with the early modern English because we are its particular cultural legatees. Yet part of my concern is to argue—and, if necessary, freely to speculate—that all people living and working in a collective state are obliged to address and practically to solve a range of problems about the relations between self and others, subjects and objects, knowledge and the moral order. What are the cognitive and moral conditions for intersubjectivity? What social conditions have to be satisfied for the collective good called knowledge to exist? That is the framework within which I offer a synthetic account of relevant bits of philosophy and sociological theory as chapter 1, and require the historical reader to suffer intermittent eruptions of such concerns throughout the narrative. I do so not because I wish specially to intrude the theorizing of these disciplines into historical narrative, but because I conceive of history as one of the human sciences. History can provide materials to discern the possibly universal as well as to illuminate the possibly particular.

The speculative dimension of this book is meant to stimulate reaction, critical or otherwise, from scholars knowledgeable about other cultural and temporal settings. It is a depressing view of historical inquiry that would define its goal as the ceaseless identification of particularities. Yet the very possibility that history can contribute to the general understanding of human behavior arises from the depth of detail it can dredge up from the past. If there are cultural universals arising from the human condition, then only a series of detailed accounts can display the temporal and cultural diversity with which such universal predicaments have been addressed and resolved, and, accordingly, identify pattern among particulars. Universals can be discerned only by pressing the historical study of particularities as far as it can practically go. If I claim that this exercise remains a work of history, it is in the hope that a space can be created for the conception of history as a human science represented here. And, after all, such a conception need not be created de novo; it can be creatively reconstituted from the most constructive features of historical traditions dominant in past centuries.

As I have indicated, loose usage often distinguishes historical from philosophical or sociological inquiry in respect of the greater concern with particularities and detail represented in historical writing and the greater abstractness of the schemes proffered by philosophy and sociology. There is a further reason why such a distinction is increasingly unfortunate. Many strands of modern philosophy and social theory, including those I find most appealing, argue that epistemic judgment depends upon local contexts of use, and that it is ‘embedded in streams of practical activity.’ In one way or another, such sensibilities characterize American pragmatist philosophy of science and its symbolic interactionist sociological heirs, much Continental phenomenology, some variants of English idealism, the late writings of Wittgenstein, many strands of cultural anthropology, and ethnomethodology.

Knowledge, it is rightly said, does not stand outside of practical activity: it is made and sustained through situated practical activity. Yet, despite the chorus of modern voices commending detailed study of the particularities by which knowledge is made, protected, and transmitted, advocacy largely remains at a programmatic and abstract level. A view about knowledge and practical activity which seems to demand the historian’s finest microscope is largely fobbed off with traditional philosophers’ toy-examples and social theorists’ impenetrably airy generalities. This is both odd and deeply unsatisfactory. Michael Oakeshott’s account of the conditions for learning a tradition of behaviour is apt in this connection: [K]nowledge of it is unavoidably knowledge of its detail: to know only the gist is to know nothing. What has to be learned is not an abstract idea, or a set of tricks, not even a ritual, but a concrete, coherent manner of living in all its intricateness.³ I offer this book as my appreciation of one way those committed to the view that ‘knowledge is embedded in streams of practical activity’ might consider making that case.

Notes on Sources and Their Interpretation

In my efforts to retrieve some understanding of early modern modes of gentlemanly interaction I have made much use of the so-called ‘courtesy literature.’ This was a corpus of practical ethical texts—in its most mundane form ‘books of manners’—describing how gentlemen ought to behave and intended in the main to represent how authentic gentlemen did behave. The general nature of this literature is detailed in chapter 3, and there is no need here to preview that account.⁴ Nevertheless, reaction to early versions of that chapter has convinced me that I ought to say a few words about how I use such material and how I conceive of the relationship between actual past behavior and historical texts describing and enjoining behavior.

Certainly, I do not make the mistake of simply assuming that early modern English gentlemen behaved as they were ideally supposed to do. Courtesy texts did indeed represent an ideal, and we are all thoroughly familiar with gaps between normatively stipulated and actually occurring behavior in the present day. Accordingly, a literature specifying ideal behaviors cannot be expected to serve in itself, and untheorized, as an adequate account of real behavior. However, just because such literature represents a reiterated stock of norms, it may (together with other evidence) be taken as a more or less reliable indication of the cultural forms actually used by early modern gentlemen to call each other to account, to extend praise or blame.⁵ These uses are entirely consistent with evidence of transgressions, and it is likely that reiterated insistence upon the rightness of certain forms of behavior is a sign that there is a problem with the observance of that behavior. For these reasons, I triangulate the ideals contained in courtesy texts with as many other sources of information as possible—letters, diaries, dramatic and poetic works, ethical glosses in philosophical and historical tracts, and so on. What I mean to retrieve from the courtesy literature, and related texts, is the general shape of a culture, a set of repertoires of what was accounted good and bad, decorous and indecorous, in gentlemanly conversation.⁶ To that end, at times I quote densely from such texts, not, as is often the case in historical writing, to display unusual, or unusually revealing, formulations, but to help build up in the reader’s mind a sense of what was conventional.

I draw particular attention to the role of truthfulness and mendacity in this culture. The relevant literature indicates a special relationship between the idea of a gentleman and the idea of truth-telling. To acquire the reputation of a liar was to endanger membership in gentlemanly society. Note, however, that I do not make any claim of the sort that early modern English gentlemen were more truthful—told fewer lies—than any other sector of their society, or people in other times and in other places. I would have no way of knowing whether this was so or not, and I very much doubt that any other historian or sociologist would be better placed to acquire such knowledge. As I characterize the lie, and, indeed, as many early modern actors regarded it, a culpably uttered untruth must proceed from an awareness that the matter was untrue and from an intention to deceive. My historical practice avoids claiming reliable access to individual states of mind. Therefore, while I cannot say whether English gentlemen were statistically more honest than Italian courtiers or English merchants, I can seek to display the shape of a culture which valued truthfulness very highly and whose members were apparently prepared and able to identify veracity and mendacity in the context of practical action.⁷ Moreover, similar empirical methods serve to display the differential social cost in that culture of impugning the veracity of various speakers. The culture was characterized not only by members’ knowledge of what counted as truth and untruth in specific contexts of action but also by members’ knowledge of the likely consequences of offering or withholding assent to the relations of different sorts of people. Those kinds of knowledge are, I argue, endemically employed in practical social relations. Normative repertoires are, therefore, not simply to be set against ‘real behavior’; properly established and theorized, they can be viewed as a constitutive feature of ‘real behavior.’ They were the resources used to evaluate action and to make action visible as action-of-a-certain-sort.⁸

This is a story about the gentlemanly constitution of scientific truth. I concentrate upon the role of gentle cultural practices in the making of factual knowledge. I argue that preexisting gentlemanly practices provided working solutions to problems of credibility and trust which presented themselves at the core of the new empirical science of seventeenth-century England. To the extent that I focus on the society of gentlemen, this is a story told ‘from their point of view.’ I am not so confident (nor, perhaps, so foolish) a historian as to suppose that mine is a story that early modern gentlemen ‘could be brought to accept as correct,’ not least because subjecting the art of gentility to analysis is the sort of thing done by the vulgar and the pedantic.⁹

I am both well aware of, and deeply sympathetic towards, the new cultural history of the disenfranchised and the voiceless. That much ought to be apparent from my treatment of support personnel in chapter 8 and of women intermittently. Nevertheless, if my basic claim about the significance of the gentle in the formal culture of science is correct, then there need be no apologies for the fact that this is a book about a small group of powerful and vocal actors; that is, as the current sneer has it, about Dead White European Males. Given the nature of the cultural practice in question, if there are past voices—of women, of servants, of savages—in the practice to be attended to and made audible, then there is every reason why historians should, if they choose, concern themselves with them. However, if there are no such voices, or if they are almost inaudible, then the same sensibility should induce historians to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon. These practices will, by definition, be those implemented and enforced by those who have put their mark upon the cultural form one proposes to interpret. Nor is there any reason to dismiss as ‘politically incorrect’ the possibility that the legitimacy of gentlemanly practices was locally conceded beyond the bounds of gentlemanly society. If that was so—and it is a matter for inquiry to determine—then historians can also, if they want, ask what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended. I draw attention to some evidence that gentlemanly conclusions, if not codes, were rejected by others, while I am provisionally satisfied that gentlemanly forms were quite widely regarded as legitimate outwith the bounds of gentlemanly recognitions.

Deciding that question is, fortunately, not a task I need to take up here. I am, however, very much concerned in this connection to establish a basic point about historical genres: there is no necessary opposition between writing the history of elites and of the masses. Furthermore, since I argue that formal scientific knowledge is made through mundane processes of social interaction, there is no necessary opposition between the study of ‘high’ (even the ‘highest’) forms of elite culture and the study of the everyday modes in which people deal with each other. Extraordinarily highly valued forms of knowledge are made by and through ordinary courses of social interaction. I hope inter alia that this book will be taken as an exercise in establishing these generic possibilities. Indeed, the desire to signal this view about genres is one reason for my perhaps overly ambitious title. Just as we have social histories of eating, dying, breeding, and getting and spending, so too we can have a social history of truth-making.

A Note on ‘Belief’

This book deals with questions of assent to factual knowledge-claims. Common or garden English usage—in the seventeenth as in the late twentieth century—refers to such assent as ‘belief,’ and so, occasionally, shall I. To ‘believe,’ from this book’s point of view, is to ‘profess belief’ or to ‘act as if one believed.’ I see no great harm in using such locutions as ‘belief’ and ‘assent’ more or less interchangeably. Nevertheless, as I have already indicated, I make no claims as to the psychological states of historical actors, and nothing here depends upon such diagnoses.

A Note on Referencing

This book uses an economical footnoting and referencing convention identical to that employed in Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump and similar to that of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Bibliographic information is kept to a minimum in notes, apart from the occasional addition of publication dates where that information is germane and is not indicated in the accompanying text. Full titles and publication details are provided in the bibliography. Complete details of unpublished manuscript sources and early modern periodical articles are, however, given in the notes and not repeated in the bibliography.

A Note on Dating

During the period with which this book is concerned, the British Isles employed a calendar different from that used in most Continental countries, especially Catholic ones. The former used the Julian (old style) calendar, which was ten days behind the Gregorian (new style) calendar used on the Continent. In addition, the British new year was reckoned to begin on 25 March, so that dates between 1 January and 24 March were commonly given as, for example, 2 February 1666/67. I have not bothered with reconciling such usages, save in one long section of chapter 6 where the timing of astronomical communications between England, France, Italy, and Danzig was significant for the actors. In that context alone, I give relevant dates in both new- and old-style form, adjusting years to correspond with a new year commencing 1 January. Thus, the English 2 February 1666/67 is here rendered 2/12 February 1667, and the French 15 August 1670 is given as 5/15 August 1670.

The Argument Summarized

Chapter One

The book is loosely structured as a series of explorations of central arguments about the grounds of factual knowledge which are systematically presented in the first chapter. There is a massive mismatch between dominant characterizations of the sources of our factual knowledge and the ways in which we actually secure that knowledge. Both seventeenth-century and present-day ‘moderns’ widely advertise direct experience as the surest grounds for factual knowledge, just as they identify reliance upon the testimony of others as an insecure warrant for such knowledge. Similarly, both sets of ‘moderns’ celebrate proper science as a culture which has indeed rectified knowledge by rejecting what others tell us and seeking direct individual experience. In contrast, I argue that no practice has accomplished the rejection of testimony and authority and that no cultural practice recognizable as such could do so. I set myself the dual task of showing the ineradicable role of what others tell us and of saying how reliance upon testimony achieves invisibility in certain intellectual practices.

Knowledge is a collective good. In securing our knowledge we rely upon others, and we cannot dispense with that reliance. That means that the relations in which we have and hold our knowledge have a moral character, and the word I use to indicate that moral relation is trust. I offer a critical synthesis of well-established appreciations of trust in the building and maintaining of social order, and I introduce less well-known traditions in philosophy and social science which identify the role of trust in building and maintaining cognitive order. These traditions suggest that the fabric of our social relations is made of knowledge—not just knowledge of other people, but also knowledge of what the world is like—and, similarly, that our knowledge of what the world is like draws on knowledge about other people—what they are like as sources of testimony, whether and in what circumstances they may be trusted. Accordingly, the making of knowledge in general takes place on a moral field and mobilizes particular appreciations of the virtues and characteristics of types of people. I review some phenomenological and ethnomethodological appreciations of the ways in which knowledge of the world and knowledge of other people are drawn together in social interaction, paying special attention to the processes of mundane reason, in which presuppositions about the nature of an objective external world are embedded within ordinary social interaction and within practices inquiring about that world.

Whom to trust? I argue 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. Here and elsewhere in the book, I argue that absolutely everything which individuals know about the world—natural and social—is potentially relevant to their assessments of new knowledge-claims. I draw attention to the ineradicable role of people-knowledge in the making of thing-knowledge just because the stabilization of the latter pervasively involves rendering the former invisible. What we recognize as people-knowledge is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the making of thing-knowledge. It follows therefore that what we call ‘social knowledge’ and ‘natural knowledge’ are hybrid entities: what we know of comets, icebergs, and neutrinos irreducibly contains what we know of those people who speak for and about these things, just as what we know about the virtues of people is informed by their speech about things that exist in the world.

Chapter Two

The end of chapter 1 introduces the importance of conceptions of free action and virtue as quite general indicators of reliable truth-tellers and knowledge-sources. While the role of trust and social knowledge in the building up of natural knowledge is treated as a general matter, this book seeks to show how that global problem was particularly solved in the scientific culture of early modern England. To this end, chapter 2 introduces the gentleman, that culture’s paradigm of the type of individual one could trust to speak truth. This chapter is recognizably written in the idiom of economic and social history—describing the relevant concrete ‘facts of the matter’ about early modern English gentlemen—but is best read as a survey of the sorts of things that gentlemen wanted to know in order to ‘place’ each other. Contemporary culture was importantly shaped by the exercise of identifying the gentleman in social and economic frames. How much money did one have to have to be a gentleman? How much discretionary action? How much breeding and how might that breeding be made visible and audible in cultural practice? What was the presumed and proper relationship between one’s ascribed standing and one’s deportment?

Here I critically summarize social-historical literature establishing the role of birth and material circumstances in making the English gentleman, and I sketch features of the culture in which birth, wealth, and behavior were described, defined, and made manifest. I draw particular attention to the transformation of free action from a presumption about persons specially placed in the social and economic system to a symbolic cultural display of such placement. I show how those circumstances were available to be read as guarantees of the truth of what the gentleman avowed. He was accounted to be such a man as had no inducement to misrepresent the case, no forces working on him that would shift his utterances out of correspondence with reality.

Chapter Three

While the circumstances of the early modern English gentleman may be spoken about as economic and social facts, it was a matter of interpretative cultural practice to read those facts as warrants for truth. This chapter, accordingly, offers a detailed account of the cultural practices by which the gentleman was recognized as, and enjoined to be, a truth-teller, as well as the practices which massively costed imputations that he might not be. I situate the recognition of truthfulness within a traditional culture of honor, and I indicate how the practices of an honor culture stood in relation to alternative ways of specifying gentle identity, with special reference to Christian and humanist patterns. This chapter begins the move from social history to practical epistemology. What was it about the placement of English gentlemen that was adduced to explain and enjoin truthfulness? What guarantees were there for the veracity of the gentleman’s word, and what sanctions were available if his relations were gainsaid? I describe how an honor culture stressed the significance of gentlemanly truthfulness and identified the imputation of lying as incompatible with membership in civil society. Lying was understood to proceed from constrained circumstances; hence he who lied revealed himself to be base, ignoble, and unfree. The same culture which explained why one might rely upon a gentleman’s word and build one’s sense of the world upon that word also provided a picture of the social order and its distinctions of rank. Practical epistemology was embedded within practical social theory.

This chapter paints a picture of the discursive culture which was elaborated by the general desire to prevent dissent from provoking disaster. I show how broadly probabilistic discursive practices were institutionalized in English gentle society before they appeared in empirical scientific culture, and I argue that the perceived standing and worth of these practices made them available for importation into new cultural practices—such as experimental natural philosophy—whose members required solutions to the problems of managing credibility. I describe how the cultural practices attending the English gentleman fit him for the role of being a reliable spokesman for reality. A relatively well-working solution to problems of order in one uniquely authoritative domain was purposefully transferred to the new domain of experimental philosophy, where it was constituted as a solution to problems of order in special scholarly practice.

Chapter Four

This chapter traces a connection between biography and practical epistemology. It explores the personal identity of a major English scientific practitioner and the ways in which that identity figured in solutions to endemic problems of credibility. Chapters 1 to 3 argue that assent to factual testimony mobilizes local knowledge of trustworthy sources: what sorts of people count as reliable truth-tellers? Here I draw attention to perhaps the greatest seventeenth-century master of scientific credibility, and, by offering a detailed picture of his local identity and the cultural materials out of which it was put together, I show personal identity at epistemological work.

Who was Robert Boyle? In general terms, what was the ideal identity of the new experimental practitioner and how did that identity figure in the production and warranting of scientific truth? I indicate how Boyle, with others’ assistance, constructed a usable new identity out of existing cultural materials, employing the understood facts of his birth and standing, and the understood characters of gentlemen, Christians, and scholars, to fashion a new and valued character for the experimental philosopher. I lay particular stress upon the use of gentle identity to protect against the damage that attribution of professional special interest might do to the credibility of testimony. The physician, the chemist, the schoolman, the priest, and the professional author might all be presumed to speak out of trade or mercenary interest, while Boyle and his associates repeatedly pointed to his gentlemanly status as an argument against imputing any such interest to him. I construe the identity of the Christian Virtuoso as a purposeful assemblage of cultural elements warranting truth-telling, and I show how Boyle’s acknowledged identity as Christian gentleman and Christian scholar meant that he was one whose experimental relations might be relied upon with security, who could speak for empirical realities inaccessible to other practitioners, and whose representations might be accepted as corresponding to things themselves.

Chapter Five

English ‘moderns’ repeatedly insisted upon the epistemic inadequacy of testimony and authority. Truth could be guaranteed by going on individual direct experience and individual reason; reliance upon others’ testimony was a sure way to error. That much is well known, and that much is what allows present-day ‘moderns’ to speak about seventeenth-century individualistic empiricists as the ‘founders of modernity.’ This chapter seeks to specify in just what ways English seventeenth-century scientific practitioners and their allies proposed to jettison authority and in what ways their concrete knowledge-making practices utterly depended upon testimony. I introduce the problems posed for those practices by the ontological opening represented in the ‘modern’ critique of ancient authority. I describe practitioners’ recognition that prudence sat poised between skepticism and credulity, and I show how they came to terms with a central and legitimate role for testimony in the constitution of that culture’s most valued forms of knowledge, including empirical natural science and religion. Some forms of trust and authority were rendered invisible as such, and I argue that these were the forms which were effectively transported from gentlemanly culture into the domains of scientific knowledge-making.

I give an account of John Locke’s philosophical reflections upon the management of testimony as the articulation of widely distributed maxims of prudence. I show how the recommended assessment of testimony according to its multiplicity, plausibility, directness, knowledgeability, and the like was the systematization of prudential wisdom circulating in gentlemanly culture. I display the skill-like character of gentlemen’s undoubted ability to sort out reliable and unreliable testimonial sources, and I indicate how the interpretative circle created by Locke’s rules for assessing testimony was effectively closed by members’ ability to recognize disinterested, trustworthy sources. The notion of epistemological decorum is here introduced to indicate the expectation that knowledge will be evaluated according to its appropriate place in practical cultural and social action, and I show how the skill of doing the proper thing in the proper setting informed the assessment of knowledge-claims as well as the evaluation of social conduct.

Chapter Six

Here I offer a moral history of scientific credibility by following a series of factual knowledge-claims through their short- to medium-term careers. I show how the constitution of knowledge of things and their properties mobilized knowledge of people and their virtues. I work through cases having to do with the practice of natural history, hydrostatics, and cometary astronomy. In the last case, I revert to discussions of ‘mundane reason’ introduced in chapter 1, arguing that the establishment of the identity, number, and trajectories of comets proceeded on a moral field. The nature of discrepantly testified physical objects was decided through consideration of the skill and veracity of testifying sources and the likely consequences of impugning skill and veracity. I relate various actors’ credibility troubles to nongentle identity, and I return to the career of Robert Boyle to show how mastery of credibility functioned in day-to-day scientific practice. I draw attention to the epistemic significance of face-to-face interaction, and I discuss the civil significance of various means of avoiding the deliberative assessment of the truth or falsity of testimony.

Chapter Seven

At several points in the book I invite consideration of the modes of gentlemanly interaction as conversation. Chapter 3, for example, argues that forms of probabilistic discourse were institutionalized in gentlemanly civil conversation before the emergence of the new experimental science. Gentlemanly society greatly valued the means to dissent without disaster and just those institutionalized means were, I argue, purposefully transferred to a reformed philosophical practice where they constituted solutions to problems of epistemic and moral order. I lay special stress upon gentlemanly rejections of notions of truth, certainty, rigor, and precision which were judged to be suitable for scholarly inquiry but out of place in civil conversation. In chapter 7, I proceed to show how such conversational sensibilities and practices were put to work even in those areas of experimental natural philosophy that appeared to pose the greatest obstacles to civil conversation and decorum. Here I explore some objections to the place of mathematics in strands of experimental natural philosophy, and especially to the confidence of mathematicians’ claims and the certainty with which those claims were made. I document and interpret Robert Boyle’s unease about mathematical confidence and certainty. I argue that Boyle’s proffered alternative to forms of mathematical practice linked epistemology, ontology, and civility. If the world was constituted in a specific way, then specific ways of interrogating it were indicated, specific types of confidence were to be expected, and specific modes in which members of a community might converse and collaborate were to be morally preferred. Manners, mores, and mundane ontology were implicated together in a moral economy of truth. I examine the practices by which hypothetical expectations about the behavior of nature were juxtaposed to experimental findings, and I show how adequate and reasonable agreement between theory and findings was constituted as experimental conversation.

Chapter Eight

Chapter 4 introduces the power of gentlemanly personal identity as a solution to endemic problems of credibility within experimental practice. Here I return to issues concerning authorial identity and the making of natural knowledge. Chapter 8 describes the human agents for whom experimentalists like Boyle spoke. I display the seventeenth-century laboratory as a collective workplace, but one in which one human agent spoke for others. This chapter studies technicians and other support personnel, documenting what they did in the making of experimental knowledge, the grounds on which their work and relations might be trusted or distrusted, the circumstances which licensed others speaking on their behalf, and the continuing culture which renders their work invisible, subsumed in that of their masters. I show how the moral economy of the laboratory embedded practical social theory as well as practical epistemology. Mastery and servitude are categories in the understanding of society and its power relations; I show that the same categories also figured in resolutions of practical problems in the constitution and validation of knowledge.

Epilogue

A Social History of Truth concludes with some speculations about longue durée change and stability in the means used to assess the truth of what we are told about the world. Is modernity distinguished from the seventeenth century by a qualitatively different way we now accord trust? Do we now trust faceless institutions rather than familiar persons whom we look in the face? Insofar as individuals’ capacities are pointed to as justifications of trust, have the gentleman’s integrity and virtue been replaced by the specialist’s expertise? What vouches for the truthfulness of modern knowledge-sources? I suggest that trust in familiar persons continues to be important in the making of modern scientific knowledge while vigilance has supplanted virtue in lay understanding of what guarantees scientific truthfulness.

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF TRUTH

CHAPTER ONE

The Great Civility: Trust, Truth, and Moral Order

Suppose men imagined there was no obligation to veracity, and acted accordingly; speaking as often against their own opinion as according to it; would not all pleasure of conversation be destroyed, and all confidence in narration?

—Francis Hutcheson, System of Moral Philosophy

A social history of truth is not supposed to be possible. When people refer to some statement or belief as ‘true,’ they customarily mean that it ‘corresponds’ to ‘the facts of the matter,’ to how ‘things really are.’ In that sense, within our own scheme of things, ‘truth,’ ‘knowledge,’ and ‘the facts’ indicate similar judgments, enabling us to sort out, and differentially to evaluate, a range of beliefs and statements. In all probability, every community needs some such sorting mechanism, and usages of this kind may even be universal, despite the fact that what is locally meant by ‘correspondence’ may be vague and varying.

That same sorting function can embed a distinction between what is ‘true’ and what is merely taken to be so, by some people at some time. Indeed, there is a special community of language-users called ‘academic philosophers’ who insist very vigorously on such a distinction. The body of locally credible knowledge—what is taken to be true—cannot be the same as ‘truth,’ since truth is one and what people have taken to be true is known to be many. Whatever changes over time, whatever varies from one community to another, cannot be truth and honored as such: If truth has many faces, then not one of them deserves trust and respect.¹

This is a restrictive notion of truth and nothing in this book counts as an argument against its legitimacy. The restrictive sensibility, after all, performs an enormously important sorting function. However, restrictive sensibilities carry with them considerable costs, and those costs become more visible as one’s purpose moves from sorting and evaluating on the one hand to understanding and interpreting an array of beliefs on the other. I want to preserve from the restrictive sensibility the loose equation between truth, knowledge, and the facts of the matter, while defending the practical interest and legitimacy of a more liberal notion of truth, a notion in which there is indeed a social-historical story to be told about truth.

Communities making truth-judgments mean to distinguish statements or beliefs which correspond to reality from those which do not, and as they do so they create an automatic bias in favor of their own stock of current knowledge. We assume that all people live in a common external world and that this world has a determinate structure. So the notion of truth can point to ‘what the world is like’ and therefore to the culture that corresponds to it. Accordingly, this ‘materialist’ sense of truth grants correspondence to the beliefs we have attached to the world and may withhold correspondence from those that others have attached. This illiberality is no fault of such judgments, since sorting and differential evaluation are often just what is intended. Yet the same illiberality blocks curiosity about how it is that, if truth is one and the same, it has so many, and so various, claimants, how it is that truth comes always to be on ‘our side,’ whoever ‘we’ are.²