2001/01/01 by René Sigrist · 1 citation
Medicine · Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical and Scientific Studies #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Historical and Literary Studies #Rhetoric #Aside #Philosophy #Trait #Narrative #Ideal (ethics) #Epistemology #Literature #Humanities #Theology #Art #Linguistics #Computer science
paper · doi:10.3406/rhs.2001.2133
openalex publication_date 2001/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
SUMMARY. — Stevin Shapin, Christian Licoppe and others have revealed strategies of conviction as an important component of the scientific method. This study of Charles Bonnet's Traité d'insectologie (1745) shows how the experimental demonstration of curious phenomena like parthenogenesis in aphids, and regeneration in freshwater worms shaped the « rhetoric of proof » of a mid-18th century natura- list, and how that rhetoric in turn shaped a practice of experimentation based on « series of observations ». To make his demonstrations more convincing, Bonnet developed a circumstantial and detailed narrative of his observations that included figures and tables from his laboratory notebooks. This « rhetoric of transparency », based on a reader acting as a « virtual witness » of the experiments, is characteristic of a new scientific standard, that was to supersede the traditional mecanist epistemology in the middle of the 18th century. Leaving aside the Baconian ideal of a unique experimentum crucis, this practice of serial experiment associates a main experiment to establish a «fact » with a series of repetitions and variations aimed at establishing the stability and potential extension of the phenomena under investigation.