Examining the very public disputes between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle over the value of experimental knowledge and the relationship between knowledge creation and the social sphere, Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump traces the experimental sciences in their infancy, and draws a strikingly modern portrayal over concerns surrounding the manner by which we create facts. Focusing on the experiments of Robert Boyle's air-pump in Restoration England, the book gives free reign to the work of these two and the inter-weaving concerns of politics and science in the nascent Age of Reason.Of crucial importance to philosophers' disagreements was the role of the social sphere and consensus in the creation of facts. Boyle claimed that the consensus of the experimental community occurred in a public, yet controlled, sphere that allowed for witness, replication and healthy debate. It was in this sphere that experiments could be witnessed and nurtured from the tenuous realm of supposition into the world of settled fact. For Hobbes, all knowledge was dependent upon the work put in to garnering it and was inextricably linked to the political and social realms. Any attempt to address problems of knowledge meant addressing problems of the social order, because the Leviathan - ordered society - could not escape the shadow of conflict, which sprang from disagreement. Living in the shadow of an English civil war both men and indeed much of the populace, was aware of concerns surrounding potential areas of conflict, thus, questions of experimental/scientific knowledge, religion and the social order were all of a piece. This made disagreements that much more acrimonious.
Though Boyle's scientific positions seemed to triumph Shapin and Schaffer eventually give Hobbes his due credit. Whereas Boyle believed that, given the proper circumstances, men could witness and dispassionately rule on the natural world, Hobbes saw that any knowledge creation could never be fully separated from the social/political circumstances of its creation or the work required for coming-into-being.
"The form of life in which we make our scientific knowledge will stand or fall with the way we order our affairs in the state." p. 344
