Experience and Experiment

Catalog description

This course will examine the role of sensory knowledge relative to the creation of scientific knowledge, and to the creation of "scientific knowledge" as a category of knowledge. We will consider the entangled histories of proof, trial, and observation in conjunction with histories of particular and accumulated experience. How can singular phenomena be understood as illustrative of a universal law? How do experience and experiment fit into hierarchies or taxonomies of knowledge at different times, and in different cosmologies? Whose experience or experimentation is authoritative, and what makes it so? Readings will include theoretical and historical perspectives, as well as such topics as medieval and early modern optics and astral science, artisanal knowledge, and exploration.