Notes on Scientific "Experiments" and "Experimentation"

Abstract: I provide some brief reflections on the nature of scientific “experiment” and its existential relation to an individual’s “belief.”

When one conducts an experiment, one works not so much on reality, but on oneself,[1] both in material and mental terms—materially, as a member of a professional community and scientific culture, as the potential discoverer of new find and the winner of a Nobel,[2] as the benefactor of economic opportunities, etc.; mentally, as one who undergoes a spiritual/intellectual conversion, who comes to see the world differently. That is, to make knowledge out of non-knowledge[3] is really to make someone into something they are not[4]: here we encounter the intersection of pragmatism and theories of paideia. Relatedly, the problem of the expert/non-expert, and the latter identity’s appreciation of, and respect for, the former’s authority. I am reminded here of Aristotle, (Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a, lines 23-24): that there is an inborn democracy to the unknown.[5]

Another way to look at it: how do we differentiate the “experiment” and “experimentation” from other sorts and categories of actions?—here it is not just the nature of expectation, but the attitude/disposition with which one engages doubt and certainty.[6] What does the agent self-purge, self-suspend and hold in abeyance, so to speak, in order to legitimately command the scientific method? This method is not reducible to a mere procedure, but a type of self-control and attentive distancing from the self. To this end, experimentation, as an act, is related to the type of artistic self-erasure I have explored elsewhere, and in relation primarily to Woolf. To participate in a scientific experiment is to participate in a certain regime of discipline—to participate in a certain technology of self-control.[7]

In this manner, science is merely: prophecy continuously fulfilled; faith in prophecy satisfied. It is a type of active, living action-belief structure.[8] The question is therefore as to the rate by which miracles are produced: to this end, Johns Hopkins medical is the world’s preeminent center for the production of human miracles, if we take “miracle” as not something outside the realm of evidence/fact per se, but as fact’s ultimate fulfillment in light of a particular mythology. We might then ask: is a fact a form of prophecy?

Yet another perspective: what is the difference between a belief in magic and a belief in a “proof”?[9] Don’t both systems require some mediating force/deity/entity, some ritualistic performance aimed at invoking the service of some invisible ministry? Don’t both assume a consistently given outcome based on the performance of certain rights/duties/rituals/gestures? I wave my wand, sprinkle some dust, and conjure an eldritch wraith; I fill my vile, subterfuge my cylinder, freeze the sample and preserve the embryo. Is the difference here merely that of the a priori vs. a posteriori? Is it a matter of the exposure of the observable-experimental—e.g. the pragmatic—against the machinations of an externalized individualism?

A holy triumvirate might emerge as: Hume’s notion of the “necessary connexion” between cause and effect; Wittgenstein’s notion of the conventional basis of scientific proof (see also how Bruno Latour takes this to its theoretical limit, suggesting that all natural-scientific research may be reduced to a category of the social-scientific, or at least that our understanding of the natural emerges from the assumptions/structures of the social); and Eamon Duffy (The Stripping of the Altars) and Keith Thomas’s (Religion and the Decline of Magic) work on magic in medieval England—especially the emergent Protestant critique of Catholic ritual, scrutinized as a form of superstition, magic—and hence blasphemy.

[1] I have in mind here Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Wittgenstein.

[2] See Randal Collins.

[3] One of the fundamental problems I draw from Peirce.

[4] One of the fundamental problems I draw from Plato, Kierkegaard.

[5] Kuhn and Popper are here relevant; see, also, Sophia Rosenfeld and Clifford Geertz on the political and anthropological/existential dimensions of “common sense.” Hofstadter on American anti-intellectualism.

[6] See William Connolly; Anscombe and Searle on the problem of intention. Latour’s ANT theory and general scientific constructivism is also here instructive.

[7] See Weber, Canguilhem and Foucault.

[8] James and the basis of pragmatic scientism.

[9] See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic; David Hume, Enquiry; Wittgenstein.