Ch3, reporting the experiment

 Ch3, reporting the experiment

In this chapter, Bazerman analyzes over a hundred years of (1665-1800) journal articles in the Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society of London in order to show how the genre emerged into what it is. 

His account is indebted to three critics: 

• Fleck, 
• Miller, and 
• Popper.

Fleck:

As developed here, the concept of accountabilities is closely related to Ludwik Fleck’s definition of a fact as a “stylized signal of resistance in thinking” within a thought collective (98). That is, following the thought style (including styles of perception, cognition, and representation) of a group of people engaged in intellectual interchange, certain statements limit what can be appropriately said and thought within the collective. Certain of the constraints are what Fleck calls active elements, actively produced by the thought style; others are passive, where the discourse system so to speak bumps into objects outside itself, which by the thought style must be respected by the thought collective. Facts are per- ceived and represented through the actively constructed thought style, but reflect the passive constraint imposed by external conditions. (A more complete discussion of Fleck's analysis of facts is presented in chapter 11.)

These facts accepted by the community form the basis for the account- ability, as I use the term. These facts, outside the immediate active ele- ments of discourse, must be brought into the discourse and accounted for. The process of holding the text accountable to these facts serves to shape the discourse, The mechanisms of accountability permeate the creation, reception, and textual form of statements in the collectives holding themselves accountable in this way. 

Miller:

...the formation of a genre reveals the forces to which textual features respond. A genre consists of something be- yond simple similarity of formal characteristics among a number of texts. A genre is a socially recognized, repeated strategy for achieving similar goals in situations socially perceived as being similar (Miller). A genre provides a writer with a way of formulating responses in certain circumstances and a reader a way of recognizing the kind of message being transmitted. A genre is a social construct that regularizes commu- nication, interaction, and relations. Thus t-he formal features that are shared by the corpus of texts in a genre and by which we usually recog- nize a text’s inclusion in a genre, are the linguistic/symbolic solution to a problem in social interaction.

That a well-established, successful genre is usually realized in relatively static formal features should not hide the social meaning and dynamics of a genre, no more than the active reality of a performed Beethoven quartet should be obscured by the sheet music. By examining the emergence of a genre we can identify the kinds of problems the genre was attempting to solve and how it went about solving them. The history of the experimental report shows how a certain kind of detailed picture of a laboratory event became the standard and how particular information became essential to a successful telling. We can also see forming, as the genre takes shape, a particular literary community with certain critical expectations.

Popper:

In this process we find the beginnings of something like Karl Popper’s third world of claims, separate from both nature and the individuals who perceive it. 

• The earliest reports-accounts of what happened, as witnessed by many-recognize only the first world of nature. 

• Conten- tion draws attention to the second world of human perception and con- sciousness, throwing the authors back on to their own experience and thought (although hedged with the proper respect for nature and em- pirical methods) as the essence of their reports. 

• Finally the claim or con- clusion-Poppers third world-becomes the central item to be con- structed within the article, to be supported by empirical evidence from the first world and proper method and reasoning from the second world. 

Bazerman's method is as follows. Specifically, he did a search of the journal, looking for articles that used the word "experiment," then excluding all secondary accounts, which left with "about" 100 articles to read. He reads them with the tools of literary criticism, he says, though he says nothing about reading them with the expanded rhetorical triangle from Kinneavy (see chapter 2). Rather, he says he reads the articles with these questions in mind: 

1. To what kind of event does the term “experiment” refer?

2. How fully and in what manner are experimental events described?

3. How fully are apparatus and methodology described? How fully and in what way are methodological concerns discussed?

4. How precisely and completely are results presented? What criteria of selectivity are used? How much and what kind of discussion and interpretation are present?

5. Is the experiment presented as a single event or as part of a series of experiments? In a series, what is the principle of continuity? 

6. How is the account of the experiment organized? How are series of experiments organized? Where does the account of experiment or experiments fit within the organization of the entire article?

7. What is the rhetorical function of the experiment within the article? 

Bazerman finds that in the early days of the journal, there was virtually no attention to method. However, in the early days, too (though I think this was before the formation of the journal), doing experiments was a public affair. So there were witnesses. The witness verified the accounts. Then, at some point, I think when people were doing their experiments in their homes (in the privacy of their own homes, which is key: think public versus private, but also how the lab is kind of a private space [Latour]), they needed to bring in witness. Conflicts emerges, where people in different labs would't agree, and they'd both have reputable witnesses. Eventually, the reader him or herself becomes the witness, giving rise to the phrase "vicarious surrogate" (72) or "vicarious witness" (74) (Bazerman). 

When finally the structure of the series of experiments turns from a representative personal journey to a retrospective guided tour of con- clusions and experimental evidence, the account of the experiment has come, at least for the time being, to stand as the proof. In the long run, the experiment or series of experiments may be replicated, but in the persuasive experience of the reading of the argument, the story of the experiment must serve as a surrogate for the actual experiment. By this time papers were read to the Royal Society, but experiments were conducted in private, simply to be reported on. 

Bazerman doesn't use the phrase "immutable mobile" (Latour), but that's essentially what he's saying. The writer has to write such that the reader can bear witness to the experiment without actually being there. I don't know how to make this connection per se, but at this point there's also a rise in method, theory, proof, conflict and persuasion. 

Note the connection with Boltanski here:

With the journal serving as a forum, contention grows. This contention pushes the individual author into recognizing that he is not simply reporting the self-evident truth of events, but rather is telling a story that can be questioned and that has a meaning which itself can be mooted. The most significant task becomes to present that meaning and persuade others of it. Persuasion of claims then lies in a story of personal discovery, supported by good reasons and careful work. Since all people, however, have good reasons, the persuasive story must shift to more universal grounds: the proof of a claim transcending the particulars of an investigation. 

This is important because it entials that you're doing something differnet than Bazerman, that is, if you are indeed going to do this history thing. 

This chapter focuses entirely on the internal development of the genre. Although the genre of experimental article has origins in essay, epistolary, and journalistic writing of the seventeenth century (Frank; Houghton; Kronick; Paradis; Sutherland), the internal dynamics of sci- entific communication within a journal forum reshape the initial sources to create a new communicative form, powerful enough to in- fluence other forms of communication and the social structure of the community which uses it. Chapter 4 will begin to explore the relations between the existing book publication of scientific arguments and the newly emerging journal article. Chapter 5 will consider the kind of so- cial structure out of which journal publication arose and the power of journal communication to transform the social structure of science. 

But why is Bazerman doing this? who cares? I guess it goes back to the fact that he's trying to teach people how to write better. 

Again, B did it differently than you.

Because of the changing character of the writing in the articles and because of the individual character of each separate article no quantitative comparisons appeared useful, so I resorted to the traditional method of literary criticism, descriptive analysis of each of the separate articles. This method did allow me to explore the varying features of writing as they presented themselves. However, such individual de- scriptiun makes generalization difficult.

You did it quantitatively, yet the decks you analyzed each had a more or less "individual character." 

Thought about this chapter so more, esp in reference to the so what? question, and I think the point of this chapter is to show that the form is an achievement, and that the genre itself is a character in the story. Or, the genre is a response to a problem rather than just an innocent form. The problem is, as I think B says at one point, the problem of empiricism, which is also the problem of persuasive evidence in rhetoric, and the problem of representation in literary theory (62). 

What is the problem though? is the problem that they're so spread out and that they can't do it publicly in person anymore? or that readers are resistant? or that there is a resistant reader AND a resistant reality? both of which have to be accounted for? Remember too that the constitutive rule (not in B, in Swidler) is not to deepen reality by means of a subjective experience (see the Wordsworth critic) but rather to ... hmmm. 

Other types of communities may have other fundamental accounta- bilities and means of enforcing and elaborating these accountabilities. Sacred texts, for example, provide the constant ground, pattern, and reference point for communication in some religious communities; all discourse is held accountable to the sacred text by means of discourse style, conceptual assumptions, overt quotation and paraphrase, psy- chological rewards of certainty, social rewards for piety, and ostracism for blasphemy. Legal discourse is held accountable on one hand to a hierarchically arranged series of court decisions, laws, and constitu- tions, and on the other to evidence gathered through procedures de- fined by the system and represented in a manner established by tradi- tion and explicit rule. In certain types of literary critical discourse, as exemplified by one text examined in the last chapter, the fundamental reference point is a subjective experience of the text; Hartman’s article mobilizes many mechanisms to identify that experience and transfer it to the reader. The whole enterprise rests on that experience and is elaborated through the socially recognized means of developing such accounts. 

That's helpful context, but not quite what I want. 

Fleck goes on to characterize the thought style of contemporary sci- ence as actively seeking to include a maximum of passive elements de- spite their tendency to disrupt other accepted active elements. Put more simply, the fundamental commitment is to empirical experience. Scientific discourse, therefore, is built on accountability to empirical fact (as of course characterized within the thought style of science) over all other possible accountabilities (such as to ancient texts, theory, social net- works, grant-giving agencies), and must subordinate other forms of accountability (that is, those other forms of accountability which do form part of the scientific thought style) to the empirical accountability. 

The problem can't be that they want everybody to have the same experience or bear witness to the same thing. 

B's job is to show that writing matters. 

Maybe the point is that science itself develop through writing, that science needs writing in order to develop. Take, for instance, the fact the journal editor, Olderberg?, was, at the very beginning of the journal, just relaying accounts. Basically hearsay. But then, not until relatively late (and things picked up in the 19th century) did the modern concept of control emerge--but the point is it emerged out of interaction with and as necessitated by discourse. 

In the first issues most of the information passes through the voice of the editor who simply reports on things he has found out about from a variety of sources. Typically, Oldenburg announces that, “The Inge- nious Mr. Hook, did, some months since, intimate to a friend of his, that he had. . .” (1:3). By the end of the first volume authored articles appear, with much the format that would maintain through volume 25. The arti- cle opens with a short statement of what was done, followed by a nar- rative of results.  (75)

William Herschel, in his experiments on the distinction between the visible and radiant spectrum, takes his measurements in several differ- ent configurations to prove that his results are caused by the principle he is trying to prove. Not only that, he rotates the position of the thermo- meters to ensure the results are not artifacts of faulty measuring devices. In such duplication and varying of measurements to ensure validity of results and to eliminate all other possible variables, Herschel presents his work in a way that approaches the modern concept of controls (90:255-326).

Indeed, throughout the period, the increasingly expressed awareness of possible variables seems to reach toward an unexpressed concept of controls. In recognizing differences of conditions or execution of the experiment that might affect results, the reports started comparing re- sults from different situations. As more experiments report multiple tri- als with only slight variation of experiment, crucial factors are isolated+ Then, as we have seen, multiple trials are explicitly designed to establish distinctions between two sets of conditions. The practice of experimen- tal controls-running an experiment twice, identically except for an iso- lated crucial variable-is only the next step in argumentative clarity through the representation of method. (71) 

Also, and I just thought of this, science itself is kind of childlike. 

As with method, results of the experiments are re- ported with increasing detail, care, and quantitativeness as the experi- ment bears more and more weight of argument, persuasion, and then proof. Early results are described vaguely and qualitatively, as though the phenomena of nature were robust, uniform, and self-evident. As disputes arise over reported results, writers become more careful about reporting what they see, and measurement takes a greater role. With the proliferation of quantitatively comparable results, experimenters begin puzzling over subtle variations in results; detailed results become a means of figuring out exactly what is going on. Finally, detailed quan- titative experimental results, fitting quantitative theoretical results, form the empirical proof of general hypotheses.

In the early volumes, those experiments that provide directions for achieving certain wondrous effects have no explicit results at all, for it is simply assumed that following the recipe will lead to the desired effect. Where result-s are given they are in the form of general qualitative obser- vations, such as in the example of luminous mackerel broth: “As soon as the Cooks hand was thrust into the water, it began to have a glimmering,

. . . they who look’d on it at some distance, from the further end of another room, thought verily, it was the shining of the Moon through a Window upon a Vessel of Milk; and by brisker Circulation it seem’d to flame” (1:227). Even where quantification of results seems a rather sim- ple matter, as in two experiments in volume 5 concerning expansion of a freezing solution and the timing of respiration, the results were given in purely qualitative terms. 

I think that's the best thought yet. Science develops through writing, but it begins in the first world (Popper), and by the time it gets to the third world, it's certainly an achievement. Certainly throws into relief the desire to correct students' writing within the span of a single semester.