I discuss the emergence and early history of the concept ‘fact’ in German learned culture around 1800, particularly in physics and historiography. I argue that the fact-oriented methods of German physicists and historians were of common historical origin, by showing that the concept ‘fact’ was adopted by historians and physicists more or less simultaneously and for similar reasons.
In the late eighteenth century, the concept ‘fact’ developed as part of a ‘historical’ repertoire, which comprised both human and natural fields of empirical study, and which was increasingly sharply contrasted with philosophy and speculative methods. In a context of scientific and political revolutions, facts were generally regarded as eternal knowledge, and put in contradistinction to short-lived theories. I demonstrate how a fact-based epistemology emerged at the University of Göttingen, by focusing on August Schlözer and Georg Lichtenberg. They construed facts as the empirical basis of ‘science’ (Wissenschaft), but not as science itself. From the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, however, facts increasingly began to be seen as having self-contained value, both in physics and in historiography. While the modern disciplinary system took shape, a new generation of historians and physicists embraced facts, as extracted from either archival or experimental study, as the essence of ‘scientific’ (wissenschaftliches) knowledge.
This history of the ‘fact’ exemplifies that, while establishing autonomous academic disciplines, scientists and humanists drew upon similar conceptual repertoires.
