What is the History of Knowledge? (What is History?) by Peter Burke

What is the History of Knowledge? (What is History?) by Peter Burke

Author:Peter Burke [Burke, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-12-28T16:00:00+00:00


Verification

How do we know that our knowledge is reliable? What counts as proof, or as evidence? Each discipline has to face the problem of verification. Like observation and description, methods of verification have a history, the study of which is known as ‘historical epistemology’, concerned with changes in the justifications for belief and in the methods of acquiring knowledge. A pioneer in this field was the historian of philosophy Ernst Cassirer, whose study of the problem of knowledge in early modern Europe was published in 1906–7. In the preface to this work, Cassirer criticized the assumption that the ‘instruments of thought’ (by which he meant fundamental concepts) are timeless. On the contrary, he argued, each epoch has its own. Recent scholars have gone further in this direction, expanding the idea of ‘instruments of thought’ to include scientific instruments such as telescopes, which have become larger, more sophisticated and more powerful over the centuries.36

A vivid example of past practice, reminding us that ‘the past is a foreign country’, comes from Steven Shapin's provocatively entitled Social History of Truth, in which he argued that trust in the word of a gentleman in seventeenth-century England extended to accounts of experiments conducted and witnessed by natural philosophers.37 On the other hand, the increasing importance of systematically repeated experiments as a confirmation of scientific discoveries offers a famous example of change in methods of verification. It has been argued that this trend exemplifies ‘the rise of the methods of the manual workers to the ranks of academically trained scholars at the end of the sixteenth century’.38 Beginning in physics and chemistry, experimental methods were gradually extended to new fields such as medicine, agriculture, biology and psychology.

The rise of the practice of ‘experiment’, a term related to ‘experience’, was part of a wider change that might be described as the increasing importance of empiricism in the academic world. Academics who claimed to be masters of scientia used to look down on mere ‘empirics’ such as the healers or artisans who practised on the basis of experience alone. Francis Bacon, however, argued for the value of a middle way. ‘Those who have handled sciences’, he wrote, ‘have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.’

Another example of change in methods of proof is the medical autopsy, in other words the examination and where necessary the dissection of corpses to determine the cause of death, thus verifying earlier diagnoses that depended on the evidence of symptoms. Autopsy has a long history – it was practised in ancient Egypt – but its place in medicine became increasingly important in the eighteenth century. A third example of major change concerns the law.39



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