Probability and Certainty in 17th Century England. A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature

"As you can see from the subtitle, it connects so many different topics. It is also part of this historiographic trend—published in 1983, so this is actually the oldest book on this list—bringing in other phenomena from outside the box that we usually think of as science in order to understand fundamental changes in science. Barbara Shapiro wrote several other books and articles on this topic, and this is just one of them. It speaks to two really fundamental realizations about the change that took place in the making of modern science. One is, as I mentioned before, the rejection of this dream of being able to have absolute truth, and the embracing of probability. Because the truly scientific mentality, if you’re an experimental scientist, is that your theory could be wrong. You do this experiment 100 times, but maybe the 101st time you realize you are wrong, and you have to be open to throwing out your theory and embracing an entirely new one. And so that is a shift towards a search for a probabilistic level of certainty. That is the huge shift that took place in the meaning of science. ‘ Scientia’ (science) before the modern period, and what Hobbes was fighting for, meant absolute truth, it meant universally true, no exceptions, no monsters, nothing troubling it, you can totally rely on this. And you can prove it beyond any doubt. “It is a fundamental truth about facts that they’re not about fundamental truths” But what shifted was the acceptance of the idea that we’re never going to get there and that we have to live with science being probabilistic. We can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, but there are still going to be some doubts. What Barbara Shapiro did is show how that idea about that level of proof comes from legal concepts, such as proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Now we think of facts coming from science, that science is the mother of all facts. Shapiro showed that science, including in the work of figures like Boyle and the Royal Society, borrowed the language of fact from law, that it was in the law court that you’re trying to prove fact. The whole point of fact is that it is something that is done by humans. That’s what fact means (from the Latin word for something ‘done’). You try to prove it according to human testimony, which is never going to be 100% believable. But you try to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s what science still aims at doing right now. That is not only a fundamental change in early modernity, but it is a change that is very different from the popular conception of what the scientific revolution entailed. It is a fundamental truth about facts that they’re not about fundamental truths. That, I think, is really pressing for the public to be aware of, because one thing that happens when we think of science as producing objective truth that can never be doubted is that when we get an inside peek into how science works, as we just did during the pandemic, and we realize that theories get thrown out all the time and that this is not a perfect process, then we can have a knee-jerk reaction against science. That entirely reverses if we had been educated from elementary school to the understanding that the scientific revolution is not about perfect truth. It’s not about absolute certainty. It’s like justice in the law courts, getting great evidence, putting forward great arguments and trying to get as close as we can. If people understood that, we might not have the same kind of rejection of science. That’s a very active realm of research right now (called physico-theology). Going back to Shapin and Schaffer’s book, that was part of their argument about why these Restoration Royal Society gentleman philosophers wanted to present themselves in this kind of tentative manner and not make dogmatic statements. They argue that gentlemen philosophers limited themselves to natural philosophy and avoided delving into religious and political issues in part as a response to the violence and social uproar that had just occurred during the Interregnum, when there had been so much dogmatic religious fighting. They’re creating a space for science, which is about getting together and looking at matters of fact, in this experimental setting, and putting aside these contentious issues where you had to have a position (or be a heretic). They wanted to occupy a new terrain of knowledge where they could agree to disagree sometimes and do it in a civil way."