STS Research Seminar: Kirsten Walsh, Philosophy Lecturer

Situated Cognition in Early Modern Experimentation: The Case of Compelled Assent

The early moderns surely didn’t have an embodied, extended, embedded or enacted conception of the mind, but I aim to show that this perspective can make sense of some of their practices: in particular, how experimental philosophers approached their experiments. Focusing on Newton’s optical experiments, I’ll argue that some aspects of early modern scientific practice turn crucially on how the experimenter is situated towards gaining particular kinds of know-how. My account provides one answer to a long-standing puzzle regarding Newton’s method: namely, his appeal to ‘compelled assent’ as an epistemic standard.