A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720

by Barbara J. Shapiro. Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A., 2000. 294 pp., Paper. ISBN: 0-8014-8849-4.

Reviewed by Michael Punt
Leonardo Reviews
Mpunt@easynet.co.uk

Barbara Shapiro’s book on the foundational discourse networks of English science is one of those pieces of scholarship that simply takes one’s breath away. The clarity and precision of the argument, the careful alignment of evidence and the economy of the prose makes it compelling even if the topic is remote from the reader. Better yet the very issue that she tackles strikes at the core of the current ongoing debates about science and knowledge. Her thesis, quite simply, is that science in England drew its definition of fact from the application of the term in law and, as a consequence, imported legal procedures from the courts to test the claims of experimental scientists. And just as the law has become an invisible hand in social affairs, so in science this procedure for the necessary erosion of the distinction between objects and deeds demanded by the courts has influenced the scope of scientific enquiry. Finally in a discussion of the parallel rise of a distinct art form called fiction (fuelled with misleading facts), there is the suggestion that the special place of science is guaranteed by its affiliation and support for legal definitions of truth.

Shapiro’s careful accretion of evidence from scientists, lawyers, government papers, and letters drawn from the earliest manifestations of the English Enlightenment through to its intellectual nadir makes compelling reading. At times her dependence on quotation as evidence seems to resist the flow of the argument as antique idioms and spelling temporarily halt comprehension in the modern reader; but there seems no way out since to transcribe the original material into contemporary English would evade her real point. Which, it seems to me, is that until now the historians of science have all got it wrong. The great twentieth century revisions of whig history all pointed to a social construction of knowledge that reflected the hierarchy of privilege in seventeenth century society. In the courts a nobleman’s word was valued more highly than a mere labourer’s and, consequently it has been convincingly argued , science reiterated this trend in the values it ascribed to hypothesis and the strategies for adjudication between competing claims. Most famously Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin remodelled our understanding of science with their equally well researched demolition of the ‘great man’ history of science showing how social structures and epistemologies were intertwined to such and extent that the assumptions and received histories that shaped our perception of the past conditioned our responses to the present. Shapiro’s distinction from their position may seem a rather fine one and, at times, it does feel as though one has intruded on a domestic scrap as she insists on the error of their ways. Where it counts, however is in our understanding of the precise relationship between science and society. Where the social constructivists find a corespondance between the social order (as an historical process) and the structure of knowledge, Shapiro’s argument firmly establishes science’s intellectual methodology as an alien imposition grounded in the absolute of ‘property’ and consequently ahistorical. This is a fascinating proposition for those artists and scientists whose interest lies in transdisciplinary practices.

If it has a weakness, A Culture of Fact may encourage us to pass too quickly over the work of Schaffer and Shapin, as well as other constructivists such as Bijker, Latour, Law, Pinch,Porter et.al. Their work, no more or less problematic than Shapiro’s, sensitised us to a significant part of the network of discourses that shaped scientific knowledge. Shapiro has convincingly added another powerful vector in the network of science; one which is perhaps best accounted for by interrelationship rather than exclusivity. Given the title of the book, one would not expect her to swerve from a highly focused text, but it is important, however, to recognise that more often than not the way things are is more complex than we can ever articulate in prose. Although a very atomistic study from a specialist historian of law, A Culture of Fact is a most valuable contribution to the Leonardo constituency. In particular it provides additional historical thickness to the notion that the divergence between art and science (in Europe) is not an issue of epistemology but the ‘accidental’ definition ‘fact’ that science acquired from the judiciary some four hundred years ago.