Descripción del proyecto
Uso de los datos sobre la electroterapia del siglo XVIII para aprender más acerca del conocimiento científico
La ciencia es subjetiva y circunstancial. La conforman experiencias y percepciones cognitivas, que a su vez se ven afectadas por las circunstancias, los conocimientos y las creencias. Al ser punteros y estar meticulosamente registrados en la época, los datos sobre la electroterapia del siglo XVIII ofrecen una forma única de entender estas interacciones y cómo influyeron en el conocimiento científico. El proyecto ELBOW, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, es un estudio empírico sobre cómo la experiencia directa, las percepciones cognitivas, el conocimiento experiencial y las creencias epistemológicas de los pacientes ordinarios influyeron en las prácticas electroterapéuticas y en el conocimiento científico en su conjunto. De este modo, el equipo del proyecto ofrecerá un enfoque más complejo e informado de la historia del conocimiento.
Objetivo
Scientific knowledge has long been understood to be subjective and situated. ELBOW examines this situatedness from a previously unexplored historical viewpoint by investigating the role of lay embodied experiences in eighteenth-century scientific knowledge construction. The project starts from the premise that knowledge is necessarily filtered through individuals’ embodied cognition and therefore tactile, sensory, and experiential. Using eighteenth-century medical electricity as an empirical case study, the project analyses how patients’ embodied and experiential knowledge influenced the medical knowledge emerging from electrotherapies, as well as whose experiences and ways of knowing ended up contributing to scientific knowledge. As a novel experimental therapy, medical electricity provides an exceptional window into practices of knowledge construction, authorisation, and marginalisation. Since electrical treatments and the bodily sensations they created were meticulously recorded by doctors and patients alike, these descriptions can be analysed as repositories of experiences and understandings of embodiment as well as epistemological beliefs regarding body, life, and matter. Medical electricity offers the perfect vantage point for examining popular epistemological understandings, their interaction with scientific epistemologies, and the way they manifested themselves in electrotherapeutic practices. ELBOW devises an innovative methodological approach to tease out patients’ embodied experiences and epistemological beliefs from a variety of sources, including scientific treatises, doctors’ casebooks, advertisements, fiction, and ego-documents. Combining phenomenology and cognitive science with history of medicine methods, the project proposes a new, theoretically sophisticated approach to analysing historical everyday experiences and embodied knowledge—and thereby a turn towards a new experiential paradigm in history of knowledge.
Ámbito científico
Not validated
Not validated
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régimen de financiación
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsInstitución de acogida
00014 HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Finlandia