Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon Book

This is a curious book. Enormously influential across multiple disciplines, and often cited as one of the books that started the science wars, the bulk of the text is in fact mostly concerned with a microscopic analysis of the dispute between Hobbes and Boyle over the legitimacy of the experimental approach to natural philosophy promoted by the newly founded Royal Society. In particular, the focus is on the experiments with the air-pump promoted by Boyle and his colleagues as emblematic of a new way of pursuing natural philosophy. For the most part, these detailed analyses are interesting and illuminating, though I strongly recommend reading James Conant's little monograph, Robert Boyle's Experiments in Pneumatics, published as Volume 1 of the Harvard Case Histories In Experimental Science, beforehand.

The curiosity arises from the philosophical work these analyses are supposed to do. The general pattern of the chapters is: i) a grand philosophical claim made in the introduction; ii) reams of historical analysis that bears at best a highly indirect relationship to the claim; and iii) a summary contending that the claim has been established. For example, in Chapter 8 it is announced that "He who has the most, and the most powerful, allies wins" (p. 342). However, for the most part this chapter simply traces the way in which both Boyle and Hobbes portrayed their recommended philosophical methods as uniquely suited to generating peaceful discourse and civil harmony. There is no analysis of which people in particular Boyle and Hobbes had as allies, and no analysis of the structure of power in the society in which they are situated. Most crucially, there is no attempt to show that the consensus that formed around Boyle was produced not by the reasonableness of his arguments but rather by the political connections he had at his disposal. Without evidence of this kind, the claim that the winner was produced by the exercise of political power is completely unsupported.

So while the book contains an enormous amount of extremely interesting first order history'on the early context of the Royal Society, on the particular philosophical arguments of Boyle and Hobbes, on the social context in which they were situated, and on the new forms of rhetoric, professionalisation and institutionalisation associated with the emergence of experimental science'the constructivist claims that are supposed to follow from this history are simply not supported by it.

Moreover, sometimes the grand constructivist conclusions appear to follow as the result of a simple confusion. Both facts and knowledge are often in the book said to be made, constituted or constructed by people or by society. But in nearly all instances, at best what is shown to have been made (in some sense) by the narrative on offer is the beliefs concerning those facts, not the facts themselves. The fact that Boyle required a community of witnesses to be present before he would recognise his experiments to have produced a given result does not show that the result was produced by that community'it just shows that Boyle was carefully protecting the reliability of his observations by having them corroborated by others. It takes much more to establish a social constructivist thesis than to point out the banal truth that scientific inquiry is a collective endeavour.