MDMD2: 'Twas so sincere ...

[Dave Monroe]

"Mason in turn confesses to having nearly thrown the Letter away, having 
noted its origin in County Durham, and assumed it to be but more of the free 
provincial advice that it was one of his Tasks to read thro' in the 
Astronomer Royal's behalf, and respond to.  'Yet, 'twas so sincere,-- I 
instantly felt sham'd,-- unworthy,-- that this honest Country soul believ'd 
me wise.-- Ahhrr! bitter Deception....'" (M&D, Ch. 2, p. 13)

>From Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in 
Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994), Ch. 3, "A 
Social History of Truth-Telling," pp. 65-125 ...

"The courtesy literature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England 
offered gentlemen rules, recommndations, and repertoires for conducting 
decorous conversation--how to keep conversation going, how to adapt it to 
setting and purpose, how to avoid or manage dissent ...." (p. 114)

"In general, the practice of opposition was recognized as a serious threat 
to the good order of civil conversation." (p. 116)

"Civil conversation demanded that claims be made in the due forms of 
imprecision, presented with modety, argued with circumspection, and 
proferred with due allowance for natural variation in men's wits and 
interets." (p. 118)

"Moreover, it was widely recognized that civil conversation was highly 
vulnerable to forms of discourse which were demanding of technical 
competence or which bore upon men's passions and interests." (p. 118)

"The practice which emerged with the Interregnum work of [Robert] Boyle 
[1627-91] and his Oxford associates, and which was institutionalized at the 
Restoration in the Royal Society of London [1660-present], was strongly 
marked by its rejection of the quest for absolutely certain knowledge, by 
its suspicion of logical methods and demonstrative models for natural 
science, and by its tolerant posture towards the character of truth." (p. 
121)

"Later chapters will offer detailed accounts of truth-making and 
truth-warranting practices in seventeenth-century English science.  Here is 
a sketch of some central features of that enterprise ....  First, the 
English scientific enterprise centered upon the Royal society of London was 
itself predominantly gentlemanly in its membership.... the interlocked 
institutions of family, education, and religion ensured that few women or 
nongentle men would ever present themselves as possible participants.  To be 
sure, the early society produced much rhetoric arguing the relative openness 
of this form of culture ...." (p. 122)

"Overwhelmingly, the fellows of the Royal society possessed the 
circumstances, education, expectations, cultural heritage, and moral 
equipment of early modern English gentlemen.  In insisting upon their 
individul freedom, integrity, and equality in the world of science, they 
mobilized the culture which stipulated the normative freedom, integrity, and 
equality of English gentlemen.  What was understood of gentlemen generally, 
and what was routine an expected in their social relations, might 
effectively be appropriated to pattern and justify social relations within 
the new practice of empirical and experimental science.  the Royal society's 
'modern' rejection of authority in scientific matters quite specifically 
mobilized codes of presumed equality operative in early modern gentle 
society.  Just as each knowledge-claim was to make its way in the world 
without hep or favoritism, so all participants played on a level field, no 
man lording it over another with respect to his ability to assist the 
transition from belief to knowledge.  Authority--so recognized--was 
identified as both morally odious and epistemically dangerous.... the Royal 
society insisted upon egalitarian codes operative in gentlemanly 
conversation.  Conversation was, thus, not only a mark of epistemic 
efficiency, it was also a civil end in itself.  No conception of truth could 
be legitimate if pursuing and maintaining it put civil conversation at 
risk." (p. 123)

This follows, by the way, a discussion of ...

Luhmann, Niklas.  "The Differentiation of Advances in
   Knowledge: The Genesis of Science."  Society and Knowledge:
   Contemporary Perspectives in the Sociology of Knowledge.
   Ed. Nico Stehr and Volker Meja.  New Brunswick, NJ:
   Transaction Press, 1984.  103-48.

In which Shapin points out that Luhmann's notion of conversation "not viewed 
as the means to an end, rather its pleasurable continuance is the end to 
which artful human endeavor strives" (Shapin's paraphrase, p. 119; cf. 
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton, NJ: Princeton 
UP, 1979]), rather than being set aside as a "condition for the emergence of 
authentically scientific inquiry" (p. 120), as perhaps it was in the 
continental, Cartesian tradition Luhmann apparently writes of, was, as 
above, embraced by early modern English scientists (or, rather, to avoid 
anachronism myself, natural philosphers; see Raymond Williams, Keywords 
[rev. ed., New York: Oxford UP, 1983], "Science," pp. 276-80), esp. those, 
like Mason, of the RS (Shapin pp. 120-1), to the point that ...

   "Second, I will note the relative rarity of episodes in the Royal Society 
setting in which natural-historical or experimental reports were negated.  
It would be facile to say ... that this was because of the 'credulity' of 
early modern practitioners, since they were quite able to express vigorous 
skepticism ....  Factual testimony from gentleman-philosophers ... was 
almost never gainsaid in the public forums of seventeenth-century English 
science.  Gentility powerfully assisted credibility.  The Royal society was 
a place whose inhabitants had learnt to accomplish the assessment and 
modification of the great majority of knowledge-claims without doing 
anything visible as negation.
   "Third, the Royal Society's (and leading fellows') rejection of logical 
methods, pedantry, and esoteric language appropriated widespread gentle 
suspicion of, and contempt for, traditional scholarly modes of discourse. 
While the schools wrangled and disputed in the name of truth, the modern 
critique of Scholasticism construed such contention as a mean and ignoble 
quest for fame, unworthy of gentle ambition.  Experimental truth, by 
contrast, was to be sought by selfless selves, seeking not celebrity or 
private advantage but the civic good ....
   "Most important, the practice of English empirical and experimental 
science institutionalized epistemic boundaries and evaluations which worked 
to solve problems of both knowledge and social order....  practitioners 
assured themselves that they could be 'morally certain' about the veridical 
status of fact-claims, even [when] they were not themselves direct 
witnesses.  By contrast, the correct posture vis-a-vis theoretical items 
which might count, for example, as causes of such facts was probabilistic.  
Facts might be made manifest or accesible through the morally adequate means 
gentlemanly actors used to assure themselves of matters-that-were-the-case, 
while theoretical items lacked equivalent vehicles for their conceptual 
establishment.
   "Gentlemanly society well understood the risks of disputing members' 
fact-relations.  To say that a man's relation of empirical experience was 
faulty was to say that he was a liar, perceptually damaged, or 
incompetent....  Accordingly, a characteristic mark of the English 
natural-philosophical enterprise was its vigilant protection of the factual 
domain combined with injunctions to speak modesty, diffidently, and 
doubtingly about the domain of the theoretical....  for the English 
scientific community, as for touchstone and the society of early modern 
gentleman, there was 'much virtue in If.'" (pp. 123-5)

Sincerity, civility, truth ...

And see also, e.g., ...

Vickers, Brian and Nancy S. Struever.
   Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change
   in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.  LA:
   William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985.

For the Royal Society, see ...

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/royalsoc/index.html

http://www.scholarly-societies.org/history/1660rs.html

As well as Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667) ...

http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/sprat.html

http://www.towson.edu/~tinkler/prose/sprat.html

http://www.princeton.edu/~his291/Sprat.html

By the way, while combing through the Philosophical Transactions of the 
Royal Society, I couldn't help but notice that virtually every letter 
thereto was signed with some variation (albeit unabbreviated) of "Your 
humble and obedient servant."  Nevil Maskelyne, the future (at this point in 
the narrative) fifth Astroomer royal, was (perhaps not unexpcetedly) 
particularly brown-nosed ...

I am, Sir,
   Your moft obedient,
          Humble fervant,
             Nevil Maskelyne.

St. Helena, Jan.
   26, 1762.


My Lord,
   Your Lordfhip's
        moft obedient
            and devoted
               humble fervant,
                Nevil Maskelyne.

  St. Helena,
July 30, 1761.

Talk about false modesty ...

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