This book challenges the accepted view of the early Royal Society of London that holds that its fellows did not seriously attempt to implement Francis Bacon’s program for the methodological reform of the sciences. Instead, the book shows that Bacon’s program shaped the Society’s earliest work in important, if often contradictory, ways as fellows wedded Bacon’s ideas to their various interests and problem areas. Developing Bacon’s program in different directions resulted in a richer understanding of his method than the undirected empiricism often associated with his name.
The author demonstrates that Bacon’s call for a focus on “things themselves” was built upon three distinct images of objects of knowledge, in opposition to recent accounts that focus on the collective witnessing of matters of fact. He identifies at the core of Bacon’s method a threefold metaphorical ontology of objects of knowledge and corresponding objectivities.
The book reveals a picture of the Royal Society as more sophisticated and unified than previously depicted, while simultaneously demonstrating how the fellows’ development of Bacon’s legacy ultimately pulled in different directions. Specular objects of knowledge privileged passive observation and justified an empiricist objectivity. Manipulated objects of art or manual objects emphasized an engaged, constructivist objectivity in which knowing is doing. And, a vision of underlying forms as generative objects of knowledge, which could be combined like letters of the alphabet to produce phenomena at will, defined a theoretical concept of objectivity.
These components of Bacon’s method inform in varying ways the early publications of the Royal Society by John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, John Wilkins, Thomas Sprat, and John Graunt, which are examined in detail to demonstrate the collective negotiation of an ambitious inductive program employing hypotheses, active powers, and the disciplined use of analogy. Examining the Royal Society’s activity in the areas of horticulture, experimentation, language reform, cultural criticism, and political arithmetic, the author synthesizes philosophical and sociological approaches to science in developing a new understanding of the Royal Society and its legacy for science, culture, and politics.

William T. Lynch is an Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program of Wayne State University

Solomon's Child New Edition

METHOD IN THE EARLY ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDONBy William T. Lynch

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3291-8

Contents

Abbreviations...................................................................................................................................xv1 Varieties of Things: Objects of Knowledge and Baconian Method in the Early Royal Society of London............................................12 Text, Skill, and Experience in John Evelyn's Sylva............................................................................................343 Similitudes and Congruities: The Mechanical Philosophy, Practical Mechanics, and Baconian Analogy in Hooke's Micrographia.....................704 A Language of Things: John Wilkins' Philosophical Language and Operative Forms................................................................1165 Disarming Words for a Land of Experimental Knowledge: Sprat's History of the Royal Society....................................................1576 Preserving the Subject in Peace and Plenty: John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality......................197Conclusion......................................................................................................................................233Bibliography....................................................................................................................................251Index...........................................................................................................................................287

Chapter One

Varieties of Things

Objects of Knowledge and Baconian Method in the Early Royal Society of London

The founding of the Royal Society of London has long been seen as a crucial step in the development of modern science. Following the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England, natural philosophers including Robert Boyle, William Petty, John Wilkins, Jonathan Goddard, Sir Robert Moray, and Christopher Wren met to establish an organization to promote a new approach to the study of nature. Seeking to permanently establish earlier, more informal meetings of natural philosophers critical of the still-dominant scholastic philosophy of the universities, they saw an opportunity to gain Royal support. In 1662, Charles granted them a charter and an impressive program of empirical and experimental work was carried out.

And yet historians have always shown a certain ambivalence about the work of the early Royal Society. The historiography of the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has long focused on the transition to a Copernican worldview and its attendant effects in astronomy and physics. According to this narrative framework, Isaac Newton added the final synthesis of previously incompatible elements, demonstrating how Copernican astronomy could be reconciled with the new mathematical physics of Galileo. While Newton famously declared that he did not employ hypotheses and his eighteenth-century followers codified a Baconian reading of his accomplishments, modern commentators have remained unconvinced. When compared to the early Society's emphasis on matters of fact and aversion to speculation, Newton appeared to have advanced by rejecting their Baconian method.

The changing historiographical fortunes of the early Royal Society reflect the waxing and waning of the reputation of Francis Bacon as a philosopher of science. Where inductivism held sway as an account of the success of science, historians could take for granted that Bacon's rules for arriving at true knowledge were applied directly by the Royal Society. Bacon's significance for the history of science was attributed to his discovery of a method capable of application to any field. The experiments and observations of the self-professed Baconian organization, typified by the air-pump and the microscope, extended the range of human sensory experience and subjected our view of nature to the discipline of observation, rather than the authority of Aristotle.

With the development of varieties of hypothetico-deductivism and neo-Kantian epistemologies in the twentieth century, Bacon's stature as a philosopher of science receded, and with it, the cognitive significance of the Royal Society. The process had its roots in the nineteenth century, where reaction against utilitarianism prompted the attack on Bacon. Additionally, professionalized research, with its commitment to overcoming individual and group differences between researchers, led to an emphasis on the communicability and testability of knowledge that belied any need for a logic of discovery. In Britain, Newton's biographer David Brewster drove a wedge between Newton's science and the Baconian method canonically associated with it. Formulating an early version of the context of discovery/context of justification distinction, Brewster preserved Newton's heroic status by rejecting the need for scientists to conform to an inductive process of discovery. Increasingly, Bacon began to be seen more as a prophet of science than as a methodologist even among defenders of inductivism.

Contemporary historical research has further questioned the significance of Bacon's method even for the self-proclaimed Baconians of the early Royal Society. Michael Hunter's exhaustive accounts of the Royal Society emphasize its methodological eclecticism, seeing Bacon's ideas as a set of general commitments rather than a directed research program. As far as its self-professed goals of implementing a new instauration for natural knowledge, he deems it a relative failure, its practice failing to keep pace with its promise. Charles Webster and Paul Wood suggest that Baconian commitments obscure significant internal disagreements within the Royal Society, serving more to legitimize their enterprise than shape research.

A new generation of scholars has taken the point further, suggesting that no abstract methodological doctrines are likely to direct actual natural philosophical practice, which has its own locally produced order. For them, methodological doctrines are best seen as species of strategic rhetoric, good for justifying new approaches in the face of criticism but useless as actual guides for research. This skeptical trend has been countered by more contextually sensitive varieties of scientific realism, but the import has been the same: scientific method emerges from practice rather than practice from method. The overall thrust of this turn to practice has been salutary. The relative significance of courtly culture, codes of gentility, scholastic learning, artisanal practice, or printing culture for the shape of science are the new arenas of dispute.

Lost in the shuffle has been the significance of the social movement for the reform of knowledge itself. While this reform movement needs to be situated with respect to social class, religion, and politics, it cannot be identified with any single group or dogma. In England, however, the critique of scholastic learning came to be associated with a single name, that of Francis Bacon. To understand the significance that Bacon's philosophy of science held for the generation before and after the Restoration, we need to pay attention to the heterogeneous nature of the reform constituency coalescing around his name and their ability nonetheless to recognize each other as part of a common enterprise.

The Historiography of...