Abstract

I have sketched the well-known distinction between facts and evidence not to defend or attack it , but rather as a preface to a key episode in the history of the conceptual categories of fact and evidence. My question is neither, “Do neutral facts exist?” nor “How does evidence prove or disprove?” but rather, “How did our current conceptions of neutral facts and enlisted evidence, and the distinction between them, come to be?” How did evidence come to be incompatible with intention, and is it possible to imagine a kind of evidence that is intention-laden?It is my claim that partial answers to these questions lie buried in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature on prodigies and miracles. I shall argue that during this period prodigies briefly became the prototype for a new kind of scientific fact, and that miracles briefly exemplified a form of evidence patent to the senses and crucially dependent on intention. Both conceptions diverge sharply not only from current notions of facts and evidence, but also from medieval views on the nature of prodigies and miracles. Prodigies were originally closely akin to portent, divine signs revealing God’s will and things to come; miracles were more intimately associated with the private experience of grace than with the public evidence of the senses. Prodigies were transformed from signs into nonsignifying facts, and miracles into compelling evidence, as part of more sweeping changes in natural philosophy and theology in the mid-seventeenth century. Lorraine Daston is professor of history of science at the University of Göttingen, Federal Republic of Germany. She is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and is currently at work on a history of scientific objectivity