The Temporal Regime of Knowledge

The Académie des sciences in Paris started to work in December 1666. Its members put their research to the temporal regime of knowledge by which ignorance was understood as temporary. The inexhaustibility and diversity of nature necessitated the extension of knowledge over a longer time horizon: research therefore had to be long-term and fundamentally unconstrained. Because of the dependence on developing observational and experimental instruments, the limits of human knowledge were not fixed and absolute, but temporary and relative, implying a constant further expansion of knowledge in the future. The members of the Académie des sciences mostly recognized that mechanist explanations of natural processes were essentially hypothetical because of the unobservability of the constitutive parts of nature (i.e., corpuscles). Hypotheses were expected to be temporary and provisional. The traditional Aristotelian ideal of scientia was thus replaced with hypothetical knowledge that did not assert its definitiveness. The Secretary of the Académie, Bernard de Fontenelle, generally referred to the epistemological practice of academicians as a sage Pyrrhonism that included several methodological features: the pursuit of a continuous accumulation of data without interpretation; opposition to hasty conclusions and supposedly definitive systems; the suspension of judgment; the slowness and gradualness of research; and the advancement of the sciences from specific facts towards general principles. This methodology left open the question of whether the refinement of scientific knowledge would lead to definitive truth or continue without the possibility of reaching perfection.