Boyle, Robert Shapin Schaffer

Constructivist sociologists of science, more than historians, have entered where Foucault declined to tread, dealing not only with the "big science" of modem times but with the classical period of Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society. Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer have emphasized social and discursive strategies of coercion and persuasion, marshaled by scientific protagonists who mimic codes of behavior ordinarily associated with the battlefield or the salon.5 This is a sociology of confrontation and conquest that emphasizes the contingent personal and cultural forms that scientific discourse can assume. 

Steven Shapin, Pump and Circumstance Robert Boyle s Literary Technology, Social Studies of Science 14, 1984, 481-520 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton University Press, 1985). 

On the skewed logic of representation between gentlemen and artisans, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Tump (Princeton University Press, 1985) Steven Shapin, The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England, Isis 79, 1988, 373-404 idem, A Social History of Truth (University of Chicago Press, 1994) Malcolm Oster, The Scholar and the Gentleman revisited Robert Boyle as Aristocrat and Artisan, Annals of Science 49, 1992, 255-276. 

For more on the rise of experimental philosophy in the seventeenth century, and Robert Boyle in particular, see S. Shapin and S. Schaffer (1985). 

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