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CONSISTENCY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF
AN EXPERIMENTAL SYSTEMS APPROACH TO
THE SCIENCES AND THEIR EPISTEMIC OBJECTS1
HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Berlin
GERMANY
rheinbg@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Abstract: It is generally accepted that the development of the modern sciences is
rooted in experiment. Yet for a long time, experimentation did not occupy a promi-
nent role, neither in philosophy nor in history of science. With the ‘practical turn’
in studying the sciences and their history, this has begun to change. This paper is
concerned with systems and cultures of experimentation and the consistencies that
are generated within such systems and cultures. The first part of the paper exposes
the forms of historical and structural coherence that characterize the experimental
exploration of epistemic objects. In the second part, a particular experimental cul-
ture in the life sciences is briefly described as an example. A survey will be given
of what it means and what it takes to analyze biological functions in the test tube.
Keywords: Experimental system. Epistemic object. Representation. Epistemic
cultures. In vitro experimentation. Model organism.
1. THE CONCEPT
The concept of ‘experimental system’ applies to those experimen-
tal arrangements in the laboratories of the world that have become
characteristic for the modern empirical sciences at least since the 19th
century. Experimental systems can be seen as the smallest integral
working units of the experimental sciences of our day and with that,
1Dedicated - as the contribution of an outsider to his field of work - to
Newton da Costa on his 80th anniversary.
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308 HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER
they are the privileged spaces in which the production of knowledge,
that is, the generation of new knowledge takes place.
In the research literature of the sciences, the concept of experi-
mental system for the characterization of their specific experimental
arrangements has become common parlance around the middle of the
20th century. Compare, e.g., Gale and Folkes (1954, p. 1224) as an
example. Often, the notion of ‘model system’ or simply ‘system’ is
also used synonymously. So, the French molecular biologist François
Jacob has emphasized that in his area of work, biology, “any study
begins with the choice of a ‘system’ ” (cf. Jacob (1987, p. 234)). In
the life sciences, the concept took root especially in connection with
the establishment of an in vitro biology and with the coming into use
of a series of new ‘experimental organisms’, or ‘model organisms’, in
particular bacteria and viruses, in the 1930s and the 1940s. Today,
the concept is widely used in all of the natural and also the technical
sciences. In what follows, the life sciences figure as the reservoir of my
examples. The message, however, should be taken as covering the em-
pirical sciences in general. Whether there exist homologous or at least
comparable structures in certain areas of logic and mathematics might
be an interesting topic for discussion.
A historical comparison may help to set the stage. If philosophers
and natural historians spoke of ‘systems’ toward the end of the 18th
century, they meant systems of ideas such as Baron d’Holbach’s ‘sys-
tem of nature’ (d’Holbach (1770)), or Georges Buffon’s ‘system of the
earth’ (Buffon (1749)) or Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’ ‘system
of the eggs’ and ‘system of the animalcules’ with respect to generation,
so eloquently described and criticized in his Vénus physique (Mauper-
tuis (1745)). Also Linné’s systema naturae - system of nature - is a
categorial one (Linné (1735)). In all these theoretical systems, their
protagonists integrated observations and sporadically also experiments
as additional arguments and evidences in favor of these systems. These
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CONSISTENCY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE 309
observations and experiments, as a rule, were however not the driving
forces for the establishment of the systems. At best, they strengthened
their credit and plausibility. Two hundred years later, the situation is
just the other way round. The guarantee for scientific coherence has
been put upside down. Experimental systems - that is, material con-
trivances - govern the research fields, into which theories and concepts
have to be fitted, at least if they want to earn scientific credit and have
a real influence on a particular research trajectory.
Despite of its widespread practical use in the everyday language of
the scientists, the concept of experimental system has for a long time
not been picked up and analyzed with respect to its historiographical
and epistemological potential for the description of the modern research
process. First hints at such a use we find in the writings of the Polish
immunologist and epistemologist Ludwik Fleck. In his book on the
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact of 1935 he spoke, with
respect to his case study of the Wassermann reaction, of a “system
of experiments and controls” (Fleck (1935)), but he did not yet make
systematic use of the concept. Fleck did however emphasize the fact
that the modern research process rests on a stream of experiments and
not on singular, isolated experimental acts. His contemporary Karl
Popper, as is well known, at the same time opted for the latter view
(Popper (1934)). Whether he thus formulated rather an epistemol-
ogy for the sciences as they prevailed in the 18th century than for
the present, we may here leave open. It was only at the beginning
of the 1990s and in the context of an ongoing replacement in history
of science of a theory-dominated by a practice-dominated perspective
on the research process that the concept of experimental system found
entrance into the literature of history and philosophy of science (Rhein-
berger (1992), Rheinberger and Hagner (1993)). From slightly different
perspectives, authors have been using expressions such as “manipula-
ble system” (Turnbull and Stokes (1990)), “production system”(Kohler
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310 HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER
(1991)), or “experimental model system” (Amann (1994)). Since then,
the concept has gained a wide use, as for instance in Hentschel (1998),
Creager (2002).
Now, it needs to be justified if one takes up a concept of the ac-
tors, i.e. the scientists themselves, takes it out of the context of the
language of the laboratory, and raises it to a more or less central epis-
temological category for the characterization of the coherence and the
dynamics of the units of the empirical research process. The concept
of ‘system’, here as well as in the originary context of the laboratory,
is not used with a very strict determination. It stands for a rather
lose coherence, but nevertheless for an existing empirical coherence. It
appears to be useful to retain this lose determination also in our histo-
riographical and epistemological context. The notion of ‘system’ then
shall only indicate that between the elements of the material culture of
the sciences, there exist - if rather flexible - connections that have to be
characterized in more detail for every historical context. The concept,
that means, is used in a first approximation for the characterization
of a certain kind of lose ‘coupling’, to pick up an expression used by
Ludwik Fleck. These couplings exist in a twofold direction. They ex-
ist synchronically with respect to the technical and organic elements
that enter into an experimental system, and they exist diachronically
with respect to the temporal persistence, that is, the existence of an
experimental system as a - usually limited - historical research trajec-
tory. Experimental systems are thus entities that persist over time.
The advantage of the concept of experimental system lies in its faculty
to think and to bind together essential, but nevertheless very different
and heterogeneous aspects of the scientific research process - such as
instruments and measurement apparatus, preparation arrangements of
different kinds, the necessary skills to use them in meaningful ways,
the research objects, and not least the spaces in which these moments
are brought to interact with each other in productive and creative ar-
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CONSISTENCY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE 311
rangements. The notion is thus not one to describe science as a system
of theoretical concepts. Rather, the category describes the process of
research as a materially mediated process of the generation and the
proliferation of knowledge, or to speak with the French anthropologist
of science Bruno Latour, of “science in action” (Latour (1987)).
2. ASPECTS OF THE CONCEPT
How can experimental systems be characterized with respect to
their more general characteristics? Such systems display social and in-
stitutional as well as epistemic and technical aspects. The social and
institutional aspects shall be only touched here in passing. They point
to the fact that experimental systems are always locally situated re-
search connections, thus creating a more or less coherent environment
of widely different embeddings for the activities of a single researcher or
a whole research group. At the same time they stand for a sufficient de-
marcation with respect to other, similar neighboring units, that is, they
also convey identity and individuality to the work of a single researcher
or a particular research group. But there exist also connections that tie
together whole groups of experimental systems to historically unique
‘research cultures’, as I have called these superstructures (Rheinberger
(1997)).
2.1. Epistemic Things and Technical Conditions
Let us now have a look at the epistemic and technical aspects of
experimental systems (see also Rheinberger (1997)). They can be sum-
marized in four points. First, such systems - as I said - constitute
the elementary, functional units of empirical research. In them, scien-
tific objects - the objects of epistemic interest - and technical objects -
that is, the technical conditions of existence of such epistemic entities
- are inextricably intertwined. The first entity, the scientific object, is
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312 HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER
that hardly definable something for the sake of which the whole exper-
imental enterprise exists and around which it revolves. Paradoxically
speaking, it embodies, in an experimentally manipulable fashion, ex-
actly that which one does not yet know exactly. In a late paper, the
noted sociologist of science Robert Merton has spoken in this context
of “specified ignorance”, and he has pointed to the productive func-
tion of this kind of ignorance, or state of not knowing (Merton (1987)).
Epistemic things are therefore notoriously underdetermined; they are,
so to speak, undefined per definition. In contrast, the technical objects
- at least temporarily - are defined in a characteristic manner. They
consist of instruments, apparatus and devices that at the same time
make possible and constrain the grip on epistemic objects. They re-
quire a certain measure of rigidity and precision in order to keep the
vagueness of the scientific objects at a sub-critical level. It is therefore
often that instruments are set in motion alone in order to test their
functional performance - their calibrating and testing probably con-
sumes the greater part of the working time of a scientific experimenter,
for the machines are supposed to function as ideally noiseless technical
boundary conditions of the experimental work. Within a particular
research process, former epistemic things can gain sharp contours and
become transformed into technical objects, thus becoming part of the
technical conditions of the system. But parts of the technical system
also can gain or regain an epistemic status and so be re-transformed
into research objects. In this view, the dialectic between the epistemic
and the technical is the core of an experimental system; it is its driving
force. Experimental systems are therefore to be seen as dynamic, ma-
terially conditioned research bodies; they bring scientific objects into
existence, and at the same time, determine the boundaries of their con-
ceptual apprehension. With François Jacob once more, it can be said
that on their “choice depend the experimenter’s freedom to maneuver,
the nature of the questions he is free to ask, and even, often, the type
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CONSISTENCY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE 313
of answer he can obtain” (Jacob (1987, p. 234)). They thus create ‘re-
gional ontologies’, as we could add with reference to Evandro Agazzi’s
opening address to this Symposium.
In this context, a remark on the understanding of scientific instru-
ments is in order. Since the so-called ‘practical turn’ in history and
philosophy of science in the 1980s, instruments have caught particular
attention from the part of historians of science. Research instruments,
however, must not be hypostasized and taken in isolation. Their sci-
entific meaning derives less from the technical identity conditions that
are realized in them - to speak with the French philosopher of sci-
ence Gaston Bachelard, the “theorems” that are “reified” in them (cf.
Bachelard (1949, p. 103)) - but rather from the context of the exper-
imental system in which they are placed as technical objects. Their
scientific meaning is thus defined by the epistemic objects with which
they are brought to interact and also brought in friction within a partic-
ular experimental system. This is a general characteristic of research
enabling technologies. And this is also the reason for the particular
importance of the interface between instrument and epistemic object -
for the researcher as well as for the historian of experimental systems
(compare Rheinberger (2010, chapter 11)).
2.2. Reproduction
Second, experimental systems must be reproduced and must be
able to be differentiated permanently in the cycles of their reproduc-
tion. Thus we could say, perhaps more neutrally and without neces-
sarily having to understand differentiation in the sense of an increase
of complexity, they must be capable of “differing” in the sense of be-
ing differentially iterated (Derrida (1972)). Only then do they remain
arrangements in which new knowledge is generated, that is, knowledge
that lies beyond what can be anticipated and imagined at a particular
point in time. Only then do they function, in the words of the Amer-
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314 HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER
ican molecular biologist Mahlon Hoagland, as “generators of surprise”
(Hoagland (1990, p. xvii)), or to use an expression of Jacob’s, as “ma-
chines for making the future” (Jacob (1987, p. 9)). If such a system
starts to turn in itself, it is reduced to the simple demonstration of
a phenomenon, and so loses its research function. Difference and re-
production are therefore the two inseparable sides of one coin. It is
their game and interaction that determines the retardations and the
breakthroughs in the course of a research process. In order to remain
productive, experimental systems must be arranged and carried on in
such a way that the generation of differences becomes the reproductive
driving force of the whole machinery. But differential reproduction also
lends experimental systems a particular kind of historicity. They can,
to speak with philosopher of science Ian Hacking, develop “a life of
their own” (Hacking (1983, p. 150)). They are entities that stretch in
time: They come into being, they grow, they proliferate, and they can
also disappear again.
2.3. Representation
Third, experimental systems are those units in which the material
semantic carriers of knowledge are produced. They usually begin their
life as meaningful traces of some kind that are generated in the sys-
tem. In their more permanent form, these traces become addressed as
‘data’. The horizon of their potential meaning is derived from those
spaces of representation in which the material traces and inscriptions
are recorded, connected, displaced, enhanced, superposed, marginal-
ized and eventually also replaced. Researchers ‘think’ with these in-
scriptions and within the boundaries of such spaces of representation,
in the hybrid context thus of the representational machinery at hand,
which is given by the totality of the technical conditions of an experi-
mental system. To understand experimental representation, not only
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CONSISTENCY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE 315
the activity of the subject has to be taken into account, but also - first
and foremost - the means and procedures of representation.
2.4. Experimental Cultures
Fourth and lastly, conjunctures and ramifications of experimental
systems can lead to whole ensembles of such systems or, as it were, to
experimental cultures. Conjunctures as well as ramifications, as a rule,
are themselves dependent on the occurrence of unprecedented events
within experimental systems. Such experimental events are often trig-
gered by the introduction of new techniques of representation into the
system. In the last instance, such experimental ensembles or experi-
mental cultures determine the contours of what Bachelard once called
the “cantons” or “cities” of modern knowledge (Bachelard (1949, p.
9)). He has also characterized them as scientific cultures that in their
innermost are specified by the “access to an emergence”, as he put it
(Bachelard (1951, p. 25)). The concept of experimental culture as an
articulated ensemble of experimental systems should also allow us to
write the history of research fields free from the burden of the tradi-
tional history of disciplines. But this is not only a historiographical
matter. The more basic argument consists in the observation that the
modern experimental sciences derive their dynamics less and less from
drawing disciplinary boundaries and from cementing them socially, and
more and more from the digressions and transgressions of smaller re-
search units below the level of disciplines, in which knowledge has not
yet become labeled and classified, and in which new forms of knowl-
edge can take shape at any time. Through the articulation of such
smaller units, novelties generated in one system can quickly spread
and create effects at other places. At the same time, however, failures
or non-events can remain contained and must not necessarily influence
neighboring systems in the negative. One sees thus that there are good
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316 HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER
reasons for the historical fact of a systems structure such as the one
brought into being by the modern research process.
2.5. Experimental Organisms
A particular feature of experimental systems in the modern life
sciences consists in the fact that they are bound to the utilization of
‘experimental organisms’, or ‘model organisms’, as they are usually
called. From the early modern times until the 19th century, it were
above all the differences between the organisms that raised the interest
of natural historians who made it their task to mount an exhaustive
tableau of the overwhelming diversity of forms of live. Interestingly,
under the epistemic regime of the beginning 20th century, the biolog-
ical differences between organisms became transformed into tools that
could be used in order to get access to the most general characteristics
of living beings. In this perspective, in other words, the peculiarities
of particular organisms are no longer interesting for the sake of them-
selves. They are only interesting insofar as they allow for a search of
generalizable characteristics. One could go even so far as to claim that
what came to be called ‘General Biology’ at the turn from the 19th to
the 20th century, in order to get rid of its image as a pure and simple
science of order and transform itself into an experimental science, had
simply to create the category of model organism. If biology around
1800 meant to pose the question of life as a phenomenon sui generis
and to ask for the specific difference between life and non-life, that is, to
demarcate life from without, then biology around 1900 meant to tackle
the problem of the identification of all those structures and processes
that were common to all organisms as such, that is, to define life from
within.
Beyond biology, Robert Merton has spoken in this context of what
he calls “strategic research materials”: According to Merton, it is, I
quote, that “empirical material that presents a phenomenon to be ex-
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CONSISTENCY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE 317
plained or interpreted in such an advantageous and accessible manner
that it renders possible the fruitful investigation of formerly resilient
problems and the discovery of new problems for further investigation”
(Merton (1987, p. 10-11)). An ‘ideal’ experimental organism in this
sense is, first, an organism that displays a particular interesting phe-
nomenon in a particularly prominent form; but second and even more
importantly, an organism that in the context of the establishment of an
experimental system can be handled in a particularly efficient fashion.
This last point is decisive: In order to function as an experimental or-
ganism, the living being must be embedded in an experimental system
in which it can display its dynamic and fulfill its role as a model. But
model organisms, as a rule, are always also organisms modified for par-
ticular research purposes. In that sense, they are research tools; they
are not epistemic objects, but something like organic instruments that,
in order to allow for the investigation of epistemic objects, have to be
purified, trimmed, and standardized.
2.6. In vitro Systems
A second peculiarity of experimental systems in the life sciences
is given by the differentiation between in vitro and in vivo systems.
This distinction developed at the beginning of the 20th century, after
it had been shown that not only secreted enzymes - such as intestinal
enzymes - can function out of the body, but also intracellular enzymes,
at least under appropriate buffer conditions. Of course, working with
dead bodies and the production of preparations has a far longer history.
But the in vitro systems of the first half of the 20th century claimed
to create artificial environments in which processes normally occurring
in intact cells could be reproduced extra cellulam, thus creating new
possibilities for analytical investigation. With that, they marked the
transition from the experiment on the living body to work with isolated
tissues and cells, to a sub-cellular, and finally to a molecular knowledge
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318 HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER
regime. In vitro systems are reduced systems. They expose certain el-
ements of a complex metabolic network and eliminate or purify away
others. They offer completely new interfaces between the biological ob-
ject of investigation and a whole arsenal of research instruments. But
since they are prone to produce artifacts, they need to be permanently
controlled by binding their results back - in one way or another - to
the in vivo situation. A good part of the history of molecular biology
in the 20th century has inscribed itself into this peculiar game of cor-
roboration and rectification.
3. CONCLUSION
What good is the concept of experimental system for a historical
epistemology of the sciences? The comparative investigation of the
complex structures that this concept covers should help us to under-
stand how new knowledge - that is knowledge that in essence cannot be
anticipated - is generated in the process of research. Structurally, the
new is always the result of a spatial and temporal singularity. There
are good reasons to assume that the generation of new knowledge in the
empirical sciences of the 19th and the 20th century is fundamentally
bound to those structures that I have characterized as experimental
systems. They are exactly those material contrivances with which in
the context of knowledge acquisition researchers are able to generate
such singularities. To formulate it paradoxically: They allow for the
generation of knowledge effects in a regular and regulated manner, and
yet transcend our limited capability of anticipation. In exactly this
sense we could - once more with Bachelard - say that the “scientific
real” (le reel scientifique) is not the final point of reference for the
scientific spirit (cf. Bachelard (1934, p. 6), here misleadingly trans-
lated as “scientific reality”); rather, the specific reality of the scientific
real consists in pointing beyond itself, in creating a space for unprece-
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CONSISTENCY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE 319
dented events. In exactly this sense experimental systems are, if you
will, more and differently ‘real’ than our everyday reality. The reality of
an epistemic thing to be explored in an experimental system lies in its
resistance, its resilience, its capacity to form an obstacle and to defy our
foresight. As the chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi
once remarked: “To trust that a thing we know is real is, in this sense,
to feel that it has the independence and power for manifesting itself in
yet unthought of ways in the future” (Polanyi in Grene (1984, p. 219)).
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