Matters of Fact

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Volume 14 | Issue 2 Article 5 January 2002 Matters of Fact Catherine Gallagher Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh Part of the History Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Catherine Gallagher, Matters of Fact, 14 Yale J.L. & Human. (2002). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol14/iss2/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities by an authorized editor of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . Gallagher: Matters of Fact Book Reviews Matters of Fact Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact.-Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xxv, 419. $49. Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact. England, 1550-1720. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. x, 284. $42.50. Catherine Gallagher One would expect Mary Poovey's A History of the Modern Fact.Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society' and Barbara Shapiro's A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-17202 to cover roughly similar ground. After all, they both locate the origins of the 1. MARY POOVEY, A HISTORY OF THE MODERN FACT: PROBLEMS OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE SCIENCES OF WEALTH AND SOCIETY (1998). 2. BARBARA SHAPIRO, A CULTURE OF FACT: ENGLAND, 1550-1720 (2000). Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 2002 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 14, Iss. 2 [2002], Art. 5 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 14:441 modern concept of "fact" in early modern England and chronicle its migration across numerous discourses and disciplines by the eighteenth century. Both, moreover, note the frequently made distinction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between "fact," denoting a free-standing particular, and a cluster of terms designating the context into which facts might be integrated as evidence: "theory," "law," "conjecture," or "hypothesis." And they draw on many of the same earlier scholars, especially Lorraine Daston, Peter Dear, Simon Schaffer, and Steven Shapin,3 while both also mount significant refutations of the latter's characterization of the ethos and methods of the Royal Society. Finally, neither undertakes a new causal explanation of the rise of the fact; while referring to the general context of exploration and colonization, religious dispute and civil war, they stay within the confines of discursive history. But despite these similarities the authors offer us almost totally unrelated methods and narratives. With little methodological selfconsciousness, Shapiro primarily traces the word "fact" from one domain to another, noting when it appears, what assumptions it imports into the discourse, and how its usage changes in the period. Her analyses are spare, and her evidence is reported with a crisp, nononsense efficiency that lends itself easily to the summaries that appear at the ends of the chapters. Hers is a history of the fact that Sergeant Friday himself might have written. In contrast, Poovey is methodologically garrulous, devoting both an introduction and a first chapter to the elaboration of her assumptions and procedures, and to the justification of the discourses and texts she will treat. She pays little attention to the appearance of the term "fact" as she proceeds, and she chooses her texts not for their representativeness or even for the importance of their contributions to the sciences of wealth and society, but for their own epistemological self-scrutiny. The two authors' narratives are similarly disconnected from each other. Shapiro claims that the modern fact first appeared in the English legal distinction between matters of fact, which juries were asked 3. See, e.g., LORRAINE DASTON, CLASSICAL PROBABILITY IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT (1988); Lorraine Daston, Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe, in RETHINKING OBJECTIVITY (Allan Megill ed., 1994); Lorraine Daston, Strange Facts, Plain Facts, and the Texture of Scientiic Experience in the Enlightenment, in PROOF AND PERSUASION: ESSAYS ON AUTHORITY, OBJECTIVITY, AND EVIDENCE (Suzanne L. Marchand et al. eds., 1996); LORRAINE DASTON & KATHERINE PARK, WONDERS AND THE ORDER OF NATURE, 1650-1750 (1997); PETER DEAR, DISCIPLINE AND EXPERIENCE: THE MATHEMATICAL WAY IN THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION (1995); Peter Dear, Miracles, Experi- ments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature, 81 ISIS 663 (1990); PETER DEAR, REVOLUTIONIZING THE SCIENCES: EUROPEAN KNOWLEDGE AND ITS AMBITIONS, 1500-1700 (2001); STEVEN SHAPIN, A SOCIAL HISTORY OF TRUTH: CIVILITY AND SCIENCE IN SEVENTEENTHCENTURY ENGLAND (1994); STEVEN SHAPIN & SIMON SCHAFFER, LEVIATHAN AND THE AIR-PUMP: HOBBES, BOYLE, AND THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE (1985). https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol14/iss2/5 2 Gallagher: Matters of Fact 2002] Gallagher to decide, and matters of law, which judges alone could determine. Dating back to medieval times and closely bound to the development of the jury system, the legal distinction viewed the "facts" of the case as the particular acts of persons that might be at issue: For example, did a defendant commit a particular act? When, where, and how was it done, and what was the evidence that would prove the fact? Without any knowledge of the law, it was thought, a panel of respectable and competent men, confronted with sufficient evidence, could ascertain with reasonable certainty the truth about such disputed acts. Hence, according to Shapiro, the concept of a particular datum, floating free of any controlling system of knowledge, came into being with the rise of juries and then migrated to other discourses: history, travel reporting, journalism, natural history and natural philosophy, religion, and the novel. The story Shapiro tells is one of diffusion from a widely experienced but nevertheless quite specific legal domain to virtually all other forms of knowledge. Poovey also begins with a practice: double-entry bookkeeping, which, she claims, gives the impression that discrete bits of data exist independently of the accounting record and are merely being objectively ordered on a page. But Poovey does not claim that doubleentry bookkeeping is a source of the fact; for her it is merely an early instance, and she makes very few references back to it in later chapters. For Poovey, whose disciplinary focus on the forerunners to political economy is tighter than Shapiro's but whose chronological span is longer, the spread of the modern fact is less the narrative of a concept radiating out from an origin than it is the appearance of successive moments of epistemological reconfiguration. Only in their treatments of the Royal Society's founding do the two books intersect at all, and even in that episode, they come at the relevant history f (...truncated)