Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe ...

94 Lorraine Daston
Facts and Evidence
them so valuable to a certain view of rationality, one that insists upon the
neutrality of facts and staunchly denies that they are "theory-laden." Were
facts to be frozen into any one evidentiary scheme, fixed signposts forever
pointing in the direction of a single conjecture, they would lose their
power to arbitrate between rival arguments or theories.
Implicit in this conventional distinction between facts and evidence is
that in order for facts to qualify as credible evidence, they must appear
innocent of human intention. Facts fabricated as evidence, that is, to make
a particular point, are thereby disqualified as evidence. Nature's facts are
above suspicion, because presumed free of any intention, but many manmade
facts also qualify: the blood-stained weapon found at the scene of a
murder counts as incrimating evidence as long as it was not planted there
with the intention of incriminating; the unaffected simplicity of the witness
adds weight to testimony as long as it was not feigned with the intention
of persuading. Similarly, many methodological precautions in
contemporary science, such as the double-blind clinical trial and the fixing
of statistical significance levels before the experiment, were instituted to
thwart the intention, however unconscious, to confirm a pet hypothesis.
Note that the planted weapon, the affected testimony, the skewed empirical
results lose neither their status as facts nor their potential to serve as
evidence for conjectures other than those intended: so long as they do not
point in the intended direction, these fabricated facts can be made to
point somewhere else with no loss of evidentiary force. It is the distinction
between facts and evidence that is at issue, not the reality of the facts per
se, nor their quality as evidence in general.
I have sketched the well-known distinction between facts and evidence
not to defend or attack it (as does a vast literature in the history
and philosophy of science), but rather as a preface to a key episode in the
history of the conceptual categories of fact and evidence. My question is
neither, "Do neutral facts exist?" nor "How does evidence prove or disprove?"
but rather, "How did our current conceptions of neutral facts
and enlisted evidence, and the distinction between them, come to be?"
How did evidence come to be incompatible with intention, and is it possible
to imagine a kind of evidence that is intention-laden?
It is my claim that partial answers to these questions lie buried in the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature on prodigies and miracles.
I shall argue that during this period prodigies briefly became the proto-
Lorraine Daston is professor of history of science at the University of
Gottingen, Federal Republic of Germany. She is the author of Classical
Probability in the Enlightenment (1988) and is currently at work on a history
of scientific objectivity.