This paper aims to assess the credibility of the legitimation thesis; the claim that the development of experimental science involved a legitimation of certain aspects of artisanal practice or craft knowledge. My goal will be to provide a critique of this idea by examining Francis Bacon’s notion of ‘mechanical history’ and the influence it exerted on attempts by later generations of scholars to appropriate the knowledge of craft traditions. Specifically, I aim to show how such projects were often premised upon socio-epistemological ideals that served to reinforce, rather than relinquish boundaries between artisans and natural philosophers. It will be my claim that a closer examination of the presuppositions underlying attempts by early modern natural philosophers to appropriate craft knowledge reveals, not a desire to legitimize aspects of artisanal practice, but rather strategies aimed at demonstrating the inferiority of the local ways of knowing upon which it was based.

It has long been common to conceive of observation mechanically—as a process of data registration that is marginal and automatic. This paper explores the ways in which this idea has been facilitated by conceptions of instrumental technology as hindering individual variation in the practice of scientific observation. Understanding instruments in this way parallels attitudes towards technology in industrial manufacturing, where individual skill and technique have also been considered sources of uncertainty to be extinguished by mechanization, and if possible, automation. My paper claims that both approaches commit a fundamental error: that of taking an element of an activity as definitive of an entire practice. I will argue that this strategy represents a rhetorical device which functions to obscure rather than reveal the practice of scientific observation, precisely by failing to account for the inherently variable nature of skilled practice.