Experience and knowledge in eighteenth-century literature and science: Denis Diderot and Benjamin Franklin

One foundation for the interdisciplinary study of science and literature lies in the importance to both of understanding the relationship between knowledge and experience. On one level, both involve the transformation of experience into narrative texts. Scientists write up their experimental experience into articles. Authors represent many kinds of experience in narrative form. On another level, both consist of direct intellectual experiences: the experience of scientists as they conduct their research, and the experience of readers as they read. Both readers and scientists bring expectations and previous knowledge to the experience of reading or research. A major function of any text is its ability to evoke for the reader recognitions of previous experiences in the process of providing a new experience, that of reading the text and seeking to understand what is there to be understood. This study attempts to pick out some common threads that connect science and literature in the basic fabric of Western culture by looking at the eighteenth century, in particular Diderot's De l'interpretation de la nature and Jacques le fataliste and Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity, because the beginnings of the modern scientific method and the roots of the modern novel lie in the eighteenth century. It seems likely that this coincidence may indicate, if not a common cause, some common concerns between the two disciplines and between the two centuries. Indeed, since the eighteenth century concern about the accuracy of human perceptions has grown more pronounced in philosophy, art, and science. In both literature and science, experience and interpretation form the foundation of our knowledge about reality, and the primary mode of representing and interpreting experience is the narrative.