Why may it not be possible to use the method of experiments and observation in historical research
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In the early modern period, “experimental history” (historia experimentalis) was a collective style of experimentation in addition to experimental philosophy. The “experimental history” as institutionalized in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century chemistry was a tradition of experimenting, writing, and teaching that evolved around the multiplicity of chemical substances. Like natural history, experimental history collected, described, and ordered facts relating to the perceptible dimension of particular objects and processes. But whereas natural history was concerned with the observation and collection of things “given by nature,” experimental history reported phenomena procured by intervention into nature, both in the arts and crafts and academic laboratories.
An explicit program of “experimental history” first arose in the early seventeenth century when Francis Bacon (1561–1626) became its most prominent spokesman. Bacon outlined his ideas of an experimental history (historia experimentalis) in a text entitled Preparative Towards a Natural and Experimental History, which was published in 1620 in the same volume with the Novum Organon. Experimental history in Bacon’s original sense was, first of all, a collection and description of existing factual knowledge developed in the arts and crafts. It was an inventory of artisanal operations and experiments in the broadest sense, which complemented natural history. Robert Boyle (1627–91), a keen follower of Bacon, also argued that learned men must collect as many facts as possible from craftsmen and merchants.
Robert Boyle, in particular, made efforts to demarcate “experimental history” from its philosophical counterpart “experimental philosophy.” For example, in his Experimental History of Colours (1664), Boyle asserted that his present work will excite its readers by the delivery of “matters of facts,” free from any speculation and explanation. He further added remarks about the method and the literary style of experimental history, which served to further distinguish it from experimental philosophy. Experimental history did not require a structured presentation of facts. If the experimenter was not, or not yet, able to create order among the experimental facts and to discover regularities, he may present them as they came to mind and hand, that is, by “declining a methodical way.” Furthermore, as experimental history in its most rudimentary stage was a mere collection of phenomena engendered by experiments, the extension of experiments must be possible with the greatest “liberty” of action; the experimenter may add new experiments and thereby collect new facts without knowing where the journey will go. Unlike experimental philosophy, experimental history abstained from reduction, conceptual unity, and inquiry into hidden movements and causes.
Boyle’s emphasis on the absence of any speculation and preconceived methods in experimental history, his insistence on the collection of phenomena without any intellectual and methodical constraints, resonated with another broad cultural movement: the historia tradition. The historia tradition had gained momentum in the Renaissance, when physicians and other learned men revalued the empirical description of objects of nature and of human action vis à vis speculation about causes. As Pomata and Siraisi pointed out recently, “historia” offered thorough descriptions of “how things are” without explaining why they are so. It sought to base knowledge on sense perception and aimed at knowledge of particulars.
Furthermore, Bacon’s and Boyle’s emphasis on the importance of technical artifacts and operations was embedded in an ongoing cultural movement that revalued the role played by the methods and accomplishments of artisans for the acquisition of natural knowledge. The technological treatises of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on architecture, machines, shipbuilding, and navigation, military instruments, and ballistics, the art of fortification, mining, and metallurgy, alchemy, the art of distillation and so on gave voice to this new attitude, which questioned the Scholastic divide between manual labor and theory, nature and art, certain knowledge (episteme) and technology (techne). Both the historia tradition and Baconian