Exploring the As Yet Unknown in Historical Epistemology, Experimental Systems and Contemporary Nutrition

The manuscript, entitled, Exploring the ‘As Yet Unknown’ in Historical Epistemology, Experimental Systems and Contemporary Nutrition, concerns the material and conceptual conditions for the emergence of vitamins as new scientific objects within experimental systems. Vitamins developed as scientific objects from ‘as yet unknown’ food factors in experiments concerned with the food values of isolated proteins. Such explicit statements of the ‘as yet unknown’ as the object of encounter for these scientists are striking and important because they highlight that experimental systems produce, for scientists, productive encounters with that which they do not know, yet. To render an account of how the scientists determine this ‘as yet unknown’ food factor I combine the approach of historical epistemology, little used in the Anglophone world, with a phenomenology of perception. Thus, my work constitutes a novel theorization of scientific discovery as I consider the character of the ‘as yet unknown’ in the world such that it is productive of new ideas and objects.

Whereas most social science is either theoretical or empirical, my manuscript is rare in being theoretico-empirical, a style of reasoning that is characteristic of the best in classical social science. My approach combines deep readings in philosophy with rigorous primary research on the history of vitamins. I gathered the primary data for this work from the little-explored archives of E.V. McCollum at Johns Hopkins University and Lafayette B. Mendel at Yale University. These records included data and images from their laboratory notebooks and personal and official correspondences. I analyze the historical record for the practices by which the scientists solicited novelty and aimed at producing the future and for the emergence of the problem of the vitamins and the development of the vitamin concept. I have written the manuscript for an audience interested in inter-disciplinary study of the life sciences, particularly through historical analysis of the concepts and practices informing the life sciences.