Monday, September 24, 2012

Peter Dear’s “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature”


In his 1990 article “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature,” Peter Dear expands on the discussion previously propagated by Robert Merton and Thomas Kuhn dividing scientific methodology in early Modern Europe between Catholic and Protestant countries. According to the standard narrative, during early seventeenth century, scientific practices split between mathematical and experimental traditions. Though there was some overlap with figures like Newton, scientists from a Protestant, particularly English tradition practiced “experimental philosophy,” where scientists on the continent instead focused their attention on mathematical traditions. Dear argues that the behaviors associated with handling miracles in French life, absent in the Protestant belief in the cession of miracles, valued the same inferential practices of universalized experiences found in mathematical sciences ahead of the singular experiences found in English experimental philosophy.
According to Dear, the dominant theory of natural knowledge in the early seventeenth century involved the assumption that true knowledge was sharable through common experience rather than coming from a contrived situation. Therefore when mathematical practitioners such as Pascal performed experimental practices, they discussed them in terms of behavior that happened routinely. For example, when Pascal carried a partially inflated bladder up Puy de Dome, rather than referring to the results as a single experiment contrived by him on that particular volcano, he referred to it generally as a universalized knowledge true on any “five hundred fathom”[1] mountain. The English experimental tradition, in contrast, usually involved recorded experiments in the first person, the circumstances under which it was performed and who witnessed it. For English Protestants, since nothing occurred “outside the laws of nature,” anything thing could be observed in a contrived experiment. However, this was not the case for their Catholic contemporaries. According to a traditional theory of miracles, a miracle was a singular event which occurred outside of “the laws of nature.” It could only occur via divine mandate and life English experiments, in order to be validated, required many witnesses and specific details.
Dear’s account of English experiments and French miracles in seventeenth century Europe shows how religious and cultural attitudes towards miracles shaped scientific dialogue and methodology. In the English tradition, where miracles were non-existent, the most valued form of science was based on a singular artificial experience with several witnesses. In the French tradition, where miracles were regular occurrences of events unexplainable by science, the most valuable scientific truth was that which was universal and shared by any person. His explanation successfully shows how cultural perception of certain phenomena changed scientific practice and theory for French and English scientists in Early Modern Europe.


[1] Dear, 678

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