J utta S chickore . About Method

Jutta Schickore’s About Method is a dense volume and at times difficult to read. It starts with the author’s premise that the “experimental turn” allegedly experienced by the history of science at large over the last two decades has failed to consistently address narratives about method offered by the scientists themselves. The historiography on the subject of experimentation in early modern England, Schickore explains, has been mostly concerned, for instance, with the role and social quality of witnesses, or the elaboration of a “literary technology” and rhetoric purported to convey assent. It is suggested that closer attention should be paid to the actors’ views on how experiments should be conducted, what kind of difficulties needed to be foreseen and overcome, and how to circumvent the possible action of factors that were not discernible or easily identified. The set of statements concerning these matters, offered in varying degrees of explicitness by the experimenters, is called “method discourse.”

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