modest witnesses

Modest witnesses acted as the transparent spokesmen for Reality. Only the most civil men, it seems, were capable of the neutrality, invisibility, selflessness and culturelessness necessary to Know apart from any embodiment. Their writings, free of adornment or flourish, cleanly reported science to others who, by virtue of reading such objective accounts, were now essentially present. Boyle's laboratory was semiotically (though not actually) public.

Modest witnesses were among the few authorized occupants of the new open laboratory, but they were not the only group co-present. Boyle’s “laborants,” “operators,” “assistants,” and “chemical servants” were unseen actors who lacked the status to validate experimental results. Shapin wrote:

They made machines work, but they could not make knowledge. Indeed, their greatest visibility (albeit still anonymous) derived from the capacity of their lack of skill to sabotage experimental operations. Time after time in Boyle’s texts, technicians appear as sources of trouble. They are the unnamed one responsible for pumps exploding, materials being impure, glasses not being ground correctly, machines lacking the required integrity. (Haraway, 1997, p. 492)

These technicians were physically present but epistemologically invisible. Women, on the other hand, were both physically and epistemologically invisible in the new laboratory. Women’s dependent status precluded the possibility of modest witnessing, modesty of the mind, and allowed for bodily modesty exclusively (see Potter, 2001 for more on Boyle and gender).

Haraway admitted it would be “ridiculous” to suggest that Boyle’s precedent comprises “the whole story in crafting modern experimental and theoretical science,” but it is a story, one with “practical inheritances” that have been reconfigured but “remain potent” (p. 33).