Re-construction or re-invention? Experimental strategies in the historical sciences

Prototypical historical sciences are in the business of reconstructing the past based on traces. Experimental research into the past often seems precluded by the very nature of historical phenomena: they are not only unobservable, but unmanipulable. In this paper, I focus on a less prototypical historical science–origins-of-life research–to add to the debate over the role of experiments in the historical sciences. I identify and address two distinct challenges for experimental research into the deep past. The first, Turner’s challenge, concerns scientists’ inability to manipulate research targets in the deep past, while the second, Cleland’s challenge, questions whether experimentation can support inferences about such research targets. Turner’s challenge can be resolved by distinguishing between two experimental strategies–isolation and synthesis–that rely on different types of manipulability. While isolation depends on token-manipulability, synthesis requires type-manipulability. Turner’s challenge presupposes isolation as the default experimental strategy, but can be mitigated when recognizing the central role of synthetic experiments in studying the deep past. To address Cleland’s challenge, one needs to pay attention to the diachronic nature of experimentation. In origins-of-life research, this means focusing on the processes by which experimental results are turned into actual evidence for steps on the chemical path to life. Although individual experiments may not always be sufficient in yielding significant inferences about the past, the accumulation and integration of different results over time can support such inferences.