Bjelic1994
| Bjelic1994 | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Bjelic1994 |
| Author(s) | Dušan I. Bjelić, Michael Lynch |
| Title | Goethe's “protestant reformation” as a textual demonstration: comment on Jackson |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Ethnomethodology |
| Publisher | |
| Year | 1994 |
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| Journal | Social Studies of Science |
| Volume | 24 |
| Number | 4 |
| Pages | 703–724 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1177/030631279402400404 |
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Abstract
This Comment takes its point of departure from Myles Jackson's historical study of Goethe's attempt to incite a 'protestant reformation' in colour theory. According to Jackson, Goethe tried to unseat the remote authority of Newton's science in favour of a science grounded in non-specialized personal knowledge. Goethe's natural-philosophical texts, as we shall demonstrate, involve readers in a firsthand engagement with the actual experimental materials. Consequently, Goethe's physics is presented in the form of a reflexive anthropological inquiry. When Jackson proposes that Goethe respecifies Newton's optical experiments, he treats this as a substantive historic accomplishment. Although his paper nicely reviews how Goethe can be understood to be respecifying Newton's experiments, in this Comment we demonstrate the possibility of such respecification both as a way of reconceptualizing an event in the history of science, and as a distinctive mode of ethnomethodological inquiry. In other words, we invite readers to work with the materials of this text in order to demonstrate the possibility of a reformed experimental field
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