An Ethnography of NGO Practice in India by Stewart Allen

Author:Stewart Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784992996
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2018-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

Virtual witnesses

In their highly acclaimed book Leviathan and the Airpump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (1985), Shapin and Schaffer set themselves the historical task of exploring how and why the experimental method usurped other knowledge-making practices to become the standard method by which reliable knowledge is produced today. Robert Boyle's seventeenth-century air-pump experiments are widely seen as establishing the basis of the experimental method, the model for scientific research that is still in use today. Hobbes – the foremost opponent of Boyle's experimental method – sought to undermine his claims, arguing that his inquiries could never yield the veracity of knowledge that Boyle claimed. A central constituent of the experimental method was the production of ‘matters of fact’ – consensually agreed knowledge of nature verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement and distinct from causal explanations. However, the authors argue that such methods, while seemingly self-evident today, were the result of an ‘immense amount of labour’ (ibid. 22) that rested upon certain material, social and literary technologies. These technologies in turn helped generate the credibility necessary to establish certain matters of fact through their witnessing by viewing audiences.

Boyle put forth the premise that matters of fact are established and accepted through the collective agreement of individuals witnessing an empirical experience, either in person or by way of mediated encounter. Matters of fact were generated through the process of having an empirical experience, which was sustained and made more robust through the multiplication of witnessing. Thus, the witnessing of even the most rigorously controlled experiment by one person was not adequate to generate a matter of fact. However, if that experience could be extended to many, then its status as fact could be hardened and made more durable and hence more acceptable (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 25). Boyle proposed that matters of fact be established by the aggregation of individuals’ beliefs. Members of an intellectual collective had to assure themselves and others mutually that belief in an empirical experience was warranted. Matters of fact were the outcome of the process of having an empirical experience, warranting it to oneself and assuring others that the grounds for their belief were adequate. In that process, a multiplication of the witnessing experience was fundamental. One man alone witnessing an experience, even of a rigidly controlled experimental performance, was not adequate to make it a matter of fact. If that experience could be extended to many, and in principle to all men, then the result could be constituted as a matter of fact (ibid.).

Shapin and Schaffer (1985: 60) describe virtual witnessing as the production, in an individual's mind, of an image of an experimental scene that precludes the necessity for direct witnessing. In the seventeenth century, Boyle relied on certain linguistic practices, including a functional (yet convoluted) style of writing designed to convey authority in the text, and pictorial representations of the experiments displayed in scientific journals. These literary technologies, in essence, acted to validate the experiments via their witnessing in a virtual space

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