著者

松村 一志

出版者

東京大学大学院総合文化研究科国際社会科学専攻

雑誌

相関社会科学 = Komaba Studies in Society (ISSN:09159312)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.28, pp.3-16, 2019-03-01

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In this paper, I examine the transformation of rhetorical strategies in experimental reports in the late nineteenth century. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s canonical work Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) has demonstrated that early experimental scientists such as Robert Boyle had to adopt the “rhetoric of trial,” a lost literary technique with which experimental reports were compared to testimony in court, due to the lower status assigned to observation and experiments. While subsequent researchers have analyzed how this sort of rhetoric was used in the seventeenth century, the era of “scientific revolution,” few have focused on the rise and fall of the“ rhetoric of trial” afterward. In response, I try to show when and how this rhetoric disappeared. For this purpose, I focus on a branch of experimental science called psychical research. Though psychical research is now seen to be a typical example of pseudoscience, it attracted many famous scientists in the fin de siècle, inspiring huge debates on the reliability of experimental reports. Psychical researchers frequently used the “rhetoric of trial” to justify their reports. However, this rhetoric began to lose its persuasiveness with the rise of experimental psychology and statistical testing. From this episode, I reconsider the origin of current norms in scientific experiments such as reproducibility.