Writing and Experimenting

Abstract: This essay is a short reflection on experimenting and writing. It starts from the assumption that both literary and scholarly writing as well as scientific experimentation share, as productive processes, a common ground structure. In the first part of the essay, I will expose the basic features of experimentation in scientific research by interpreting a key passage of scientist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi. I will then show, in the second part, that literary and scholarly writing can be described and assessed from the same perspective, although each of them comes with their own material specifications.