Fact and fable in Enlightenment sciences

Organised by

• Department of History

The status of matters of fact in the late Enlightenment was never stable and often questioned: puzzles of evidence and authority were critical in the establishment of reliable forms of knowledge at that decisive conjuncture. In a range of episodes that included reports of falling stones and wondrous cures, of dramatic experiments and marvellous machines, questions of plausibility and credibility were debated in public. Strenuous attempts were made somehow to police and control models of knowledge and doctrines about nature and society, and thus to define what counted within society as imagination or superstition. These imbroglios raise issues of trust and of politics that have, perhaps, become familiar in more recent concerns with factitious news. The historiography of facts thus requires careful and attentive study to make sense of the entanglement between authorities in the sciences and conditions of public knowledge.