William Shakespeare was the son of a glovemaker and approached his work as a craft. To him, writing plays was a form of making, the ancient word for which, curiously, is poiein, which gave us poet. Yes, any product worth its salt is both stock and exercise, meaning both knowledge acquisition and knowledge application. Despite our culture's tendency to separate the two, thinking and doing go together: One cannot make anything at all without first observing, imitating, correcting, adjusting, judging, discriminating, evaluating. That process is the essence of education—of learning and producing something new.What was true for the bard is true for the lab rat. Doing experimental molecular biology, this book informs us, is just as much about grasping the principles of cell dynamics as it is about grasping a pipette. Although little if any “making” finds its way into biology education or textbooks, how we come to learn by using our hands and eyes and bodies is inseparable from the craft of doing science. Indeed, that learning is the craft itself.Laboratory Epistemologies, as its author, a historian of knowledge, tells us, is “a manual for making the manual more explicit in experimental life sciences.” Read carefully: Fill a beaker with Milli-Q water. Put an empty plastic medicine cup on the analytical balance and set to zero. Set the pipette to 2 μl, draw water with the pipette, and pipette the volume into the plastic cup. Record the weight. Set the balance back to zero. Such instructions are technical but are not mere protocol. They become all the more important when evincing the kind of subcellular understanding that cannot be observed by the senses. Only by carefully following them, carefully bringing hand and eye and brain together, can what we call knowledge come to pass.In a sense, the two seem orthogonal, the first so bounded, so grounded, so utterly apart from the heights one must climb to reach discovery. Yet Stravinsky had it right when he ordained that “the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.” The din of mechanical repetition and the ping of untethered insight are both parts of one bodily “enskillment,” with the rapture of abstract perception hopelessly entwined and dependent. Mind, hand, instrument, material—none can be separated from the others without penalty. Once again, the sciences and the arts and crafts seem to converge in ways that contradict modern sensibilities. And, as usual, the arrow of blame is aimed at Descartes.Still, in this new offering Boulboullé does something surprising. In aiming to write researchers’ hands and bodies back into the sciences of life, she returns to Descartes to show that he has been understood all wrong. Radically rereading the famous “wax argument” in Meditations on First Philosophy with the help of the twentieth-century philosopher Edmund Husserl, she argues against Descartes's pervasive reception as a “thinker without hands.” Indeed, she claims that he places hands-on experiences (and aesthetic reflection) at the heart of his modern epistemology. Whether or not one finds this interpretation convincing, Laboratory Epistemologies joins a wave that began at the turn of the twenty-first century, whereby philosophers, historians of science, and social scientists reconceptualized knowing as an activity of the body rather than as a faculty of the mind. Even the cognitive sciences have taken a turn toward explaining thinking as embodied. And the more that machines replace humans with their calculations, the more such an approach becomes relevant.Boulboullé is adamant that ethnography is not enough for reflecting on knowledge-making. Quoting Ludwig Fleck, she claims “there can be no epistemology without history.” Still, in a way, it makes little difference on what side of Descartes one falls. Whether or not he was an embodied anatomist or a strict rationalist, it really is the case that the cell's secrets, as practitioners from Swammerdam to McClintock all knew, do not reveal themselves readily to a bright mind in the blink of an eye. It takes years of hands-on fidgeting, observing, calibrating and recalibrating, seeing and unseeing and then observing and seeing again, to gain intimate powers of discernment. There is little sense in striving to become an uninvolved observer in biology, as time- and culture-bound mores instruct us. Our bodies are forever a part of the process.In the final analysis, Boulboullé is right: Procedure and practice count, and they should be made more explicit in theories of knowledge. But second-order-thinking processes count, too, and they often take place far away from microscopes and pipettes. There is room in the halls of knowledge for different kinds of processes. As with all things human, not one is accomplished bodiless. “Our bodies are our gardens to which our wills are gardeners,” Shakespeare has Iago say in Othello, and the playwright could just as well have substituted thoughts for wills. By whatever circuitous route, we have come to believe that our bodies are here to serve our brains, rather than the other way around. When it comes to experimental sciences, and to thinking itself, the ideal of the disembodied observer can be safely laid to rest.
Oren Harman (Mon,) studied this question.