Law and science in David Wootton's The Invention of Science A New History of the Scientific Revolution

In reading Wootton’s The Invention of Science, I was struck by the degree to which scientific concepts of evidence and proof co-evolved with legal concepts.

As to proof, Wootton noted that different scientific, logical and legal ideas could make it difficult to understand what a writer in the 1500s was referring to (page 314):

“Another striking example is ‘proof’. On the one hand, we use the word to refer to proofs, deductions, and demonstrations in mathematics, geometry and logic. On the other, we talk about ‘the proof in the pudding’, alcohol being 40 proof and proving a gun. ‘Proof’ thus covers both necessary truths and practical tests, and it has the same etymological root as ‘probe’ and ‘probability’. This ambiguity comes from the Latin (probo, probatio) and is found in all the modern languages derived from Latin (Spanish probar, Italian provare, German probieren, French prouver…A proof, at least, in mathematics and logic, is an absolute; you either prove something or you do not. On the other hand, evidence (to use our modern English word) is something you can have more of, or less of. In Roman law two witnesses may provide a full proof of guilt; one witness and a confession may do the job; or one witness and circumstantial evidence (the accused’s knife, for example, was found in the victim). Renaissance lawyers were trained to talk about half a proof or a whoel proof.”

In trying to trace where the concept of a fact came from, Wootton contrasts the burgeoning idea of facts to to the idea of testimony (page 303):

“This phrase, ‘immutable mobiles’, sums up neatly the epistemological paradox of the fact: facts can be moved around, transferred from one person to another, without being degraded, or so at least the story goes. In this they are quite unlike testimonies, which degrade as they pass from ear to ear in an endless game of Chinese whispers; eighteenth century probability theorists actually devised formulae for calculating this rate of degradation. It was argued that such formulae could be used to date the Second Coming: the last trump would blow before the testimony for the resurrection of Christ would degrade to the point that belief in it would case to be rational. Testimonies degrade, facts to do not, and yet both are grounded in the very same sensory experience. Facts are made in the image not of people, who misremember, misquote, and misrepresent, but of books, immutable but mobile. The fact, you might say, is an epistemological shadow originally case by material reality: the printed book.”