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.
内容記述
一般論文
雑誌名
相関社会科学 = Komaba Studies in Society
巻
28
ページ
3 - 16
発行年
2019-03-01
ISSN
09159312
書誌レコードID
AN10181474
著者版フラグ
publisher
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
出版者別名
Department of Advanced Social and International Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
実験報告の修辞学 : 19世紀後半の心霊研究と「裁判のレトリック」
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