Descrizione del progetto
Nuove scoperte sulle conoscenze scientifiche attraverso l’elettroterapia del XVIII secolo
La scienza è soggettiva e situazionale, è plasmata dalle esperienze e dalle percezioni cognitive, che a loro volta vengono influenzate dalle circostanze, dalle conoscenze e dalle credenze. I dati sull’elettroterapia del XVIII secolo, all’avanguardia e meticolosamente registrati, sono uno strumento unico nel suo genere per comprendere tali interazioni e come queste condizionarono le conoscenze scientifiche. Il progetto ELBOW, finanziato dal CER, è uno studio empirico che approfondisce come l’esperienza diretta, le percezioni cognitive, le conoscenze esperienziali e le credenze epistemologiche dei pazienti comuni influirono sulle conoscenze scientifiche nel loro complesso. In tal modo, il progetto offrirà un approccio più complesso e chiaro alla storia della conoscenza.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsIstituzione ospitante
00014 Helsingin Yliopisto
Finlandia