This dissertation aims to explore the role of technology in the emergence of experimental culture in seventeenth century England. Whereas scholarship in HPS has traditionally emphasized the more scientific aspects of the epistemology of early experimentalism, this project attends directly to technology; understood here not only in terms of mechanical devices but also forms of practice and practical knowledge. By focusing on the way in which the goals promoted by experimental societies, such as the Royal Society of London, were often concerned primarily with technology and innovation, my project aims to elucidate aspects of the relationship between science and technology in early modern England that have been overlooked by traditional forms of scholarship.

    A central focus of this study is the relationship between craft practices and the development of an experimental scientific methodology; a theme which has long formed a dominant concern in the historiography of the scientific revolution. Beginning with the work of Edgar Zilsel in the early twentieth century, it has been common to claim that artisanal culture influenced the development of experimentalism by providing a template for empirical methods and values. Yet despite the enduring popularity of the idea that various aspects of the methodology of modern science find their origin in craft traditions, this study seeks to outline the limitations of this notion by exploring the intersections between epistemology and social history. For taking technology, rather than science, as the central focus of this study underscores the extent to which epistemic and social concerns underlying the new experimental philosophy were often deeply intertwined.

    In the western tradition, philosophical discourse surrounding technology has long been informed by social issues. Even as far back as classical antiquity, the low social status that was ascribed to artisans was reflected in the accounts of technology proposed by Plato and Aristotle, both of which emphasized the moral and epistemological inferiority of technical practices. Accounts of technology in classical society also reflect anxieties stemming from the recognition that the knowledge and skill of the craftsman possessed an autonomy that prevented its control by the ruling elite. The fact that craft knowledge resisted codification and was acquired exclusively through extended periods of practice meant that members of the lowest social classes were commonly understood to possess exclusive forms of expertise that could not be submitted to external assessment or verification. For this reason, the skills of the craftsman were often considered both as threatening established forms of social order and subverting traditional notions of knowledge and rationality.

    This project aims to detail how conceptions of technology in early modern England can be understood as continuous with those of classical antiquity in various ways. For not only did craftwork continue to be regarded as socially and epistemologically inferior to competing forms of natural inquiry, but the anxieties which had surrounded the moral status of craft knowledge and the forms of knowledge upon which it depended in classical antiquity also continued to persist. These social tensions surrounding technology created a host of problems for experimental philosophers of the seventeenth century, who practiced and promoted forms of technological practice, such as experimentation, which had previously been considered the exclusive purview of the artisan. Eager to preserve differences in social status between the gentleman and the artisan, experimental philosophers drew upon existing cultural resources, in particular classical philosophical ideas, to argue for the intellectual and moral superiority of their practices over that of the artisan.

    The overall goal of this project is to demonstrate how social tensions surrounding technological practice can be understood to have influenced the way in which experimentalism was both practiced and conceived by early modern natural philosophers. Together, the various papers in this project identify a number of historiographical and philosophical misunderstandings concerning the relation between science and technology in the early modern period that I argue can be traced back to an underlying tendency to understand experimentalism in isolation of the social contexts from which it emerged.