Knowledge in Action : Experimenting in History and in Science

The paper aims at outlining a recent historiographical approach ‘Experimental History of Science' developed in the 1990s. It was designed to study knowledge in action by stressing the role of materiality and the knowing body in the making, transmission and reconfiguration of knowledge in history. Reworking of past experimental practices enables the historical exploration of forms of knowing involved in performances of actions and reveals hitherto unrecognized dimensions of the formation and dissemination of scientific knowledge that have never found any literary expression in the historical records. Finally, it describes scientific knowledge making – in fact any form of knowledge making – as historically embodied cognitive practices performed in a material world and thereby transgresses the conventional boundaries between the sciences and humanities. [Publisher's text]