Dissemination of Scientific Consensus
New scientific programs were all keen to demonstrate the usefulness of experimental natural philosophy. Yet the public utility of these collective enterprises was far from given. “I overhear,” Thomas Sprat writes, “the whispers, and doubts of many, who demand, what they have done all this while? and what they have produced, that is answerable to these mighty hopes, which endeavor, to make the world conceive of their undertaking?”. Moreover, acquitting the intellectual and practical aims of vast programs such as those envisaged by Bacon or Leibniz was hugely expensive, and patrons had to be convinced about their value.
The place of natural philosophy in society was under constant negotiation: scientific spectacles proliferated; anatomical theatres with public access were built all over; public experiments were conducted at the courts and in the universities, but also in the market place, in coffee shops, and private homes. The strategies adopted by natural philosophers to navigate this new public interface took different forms. “Solomon’s House” in Bacon’s New Atlantis was one frequently adopted model for the organisation of societies, albeit stripped of the secrecy in which it was originally cloaked. Audiences were included as participant observers and public demonstrations of science thus correlated with an epistemology of common experience which was both rooted and opposed to the Aristotelian framework of natural philosophy favoured by the previous century.
Public demonstrations of science had to strike a delicate balance between the wondrous and extraordinary capable of seizing the public imagination, and the common and ordinary more likely to be understood and accepted. Displays of virtuosity and skill, combined with elements of surprise, contributed centrally to the success of public display (investigations into phosphorescence, for example, was a constant object of fascination); Steno dazzled his spectators by his spectacular dexterity and anatomical skills, “causing a sensation” in Paris as Graindorge reported to Huet. At the same time, Boyle cautioned that the deployment of “marvellous” or “wonderful” phenomena should be strictly controlled and valued “by their use, not their strangeness, or prettiness.” The audience contributed to scientific consensus formation not by virtue of their admiration but of their common acquiescence.
Sensitivity to common knowledge, common language, and common notions therefore became a crucial component in successful science communication. Conversely, the separation of natural scientific experimentation from ordinary sense experience and popular know-how rendered results potentially suspect. Tschirnhaus, for example, argued against the “illusionists who force the admiration of simple minds” and explained that the “ordinary and common” notions that one can confirm via simple experiments such as those found in Huygens’s Horologium Oscillatorium, a work on the simple movements of pendulums, were more useful because easily shared and communicated.
NOTCOM argues that the epistemological models of common notions and general consent studied in RT1 can shed light of these strategies of public dissemination of natural science in ways previously overlooked.
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Mogens Lærke (June 8, 2023). Dissemination of Scientific Consensus. NOTCOM. Retrieved June 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12l53