James Hutton defended the doctrine of phlogiston in two lengthy dissertations 1792 and 1794. Empirical, biographical and disciplinary contexts jointly explain his position. Observationally, Hutton based his argument on facts about heat, light and the storage of energy, explicitly contrasting them to concerns about weight relationships. Hutton's intellectual development shows how he found these particular problems centrally relevant, and focusing on phlogiston indicates how his better known geology fits into more fundamental thinking about the natural economy. The resonance of Hutton's (...) views with many contemporaries highlights the significance of his views, and suggests how we might reconsider the role of phlogiston in late-eighteenth-century chemistry. (shrink)

To be, or not to be, that is the question…In his wonderful Facts and Mysteries, Martinus Veltman terminates a section with an anecdote: “When quarks were not immediately discovered after the introduction by Gell-Mann he took to calling them symbolic, saying they were indices. In the early seventies I met him at CERN and he again said something in that spirit. I then jumped up, coming down with some impact that made the floor tremble, and asked him: Do I look (...) like a heap of indices? This visibly rattled him, and indeed after that he no more advocated this vision, at least not as far as I know” (see page 240 in Veltman 2003). Although it is probable that Murray Gell-Mann, the inventor of quarks, has changed his mind regarding the reality of his symbols after this tough conversation, even later in the start of eighties the reality of quarks, as basic constituents of protons and neutrons, was a matter of disputes and exchanges (Shrader-Frechette 1982a, b; Albright 1982; Gruender 1982). A g. (shrink)

For some fifteen years in his chemistry lectures in Edinburgh, Joseph Black taught that phlogiston possesses absolute levity. It was not an aberration on Black's part: he justified the notion on experimental grounds. Moreover, the existence of a nongravitating substance capable of entering the composition of bodies raised intriguing possibilities for uniting physical and chemical phenomena. The doctrine became something of a tradition in Edinburgh, but was subject to growing criticism, particulary with the growth of pneumatic chemistry. By the early (...) 1780s, Black found the hypothesis was no longer tenable and quietly dropped it, leaving a void in the explanation of weight relations in combustion which his students were quick to fill with Lavoisier's oxygen theory. (shrink)

The ‘triumph of the anti-phlogistians’ is a familiar story to the historians and philosophers of science who characterize the Chemical Revolution as a broad conceptual shift. The apparent “incommensurability” of the paradigms across the revolutionary divide has caused much anxiety. Chemists could identify phlogiston and oxygen, however, only with different sets of instrumental practices, theoretical schemes, and philosophical commitments. In addition, the substantive counterpart to phlogiston in the new chemistry was not oxygen, but caloric. By focusing on the changing visions (...) of chemical body across the revolutionary divide with a more sensitive probe into the historical actors’ material manipulations and linguistic usage, we can historicize their laboratory realities and philosophical agenda. An archeology of chemical bodies that configures the fragile stability of the material worlds chemists created in succession promises a philosophical horizon that would recognize our hybrid (natural–artificial) environment as an evolving investigative object of science. (shrink)

We are all acquainted with persons who seem to have a talent for making things over-complex, persons who invent exceedingly devious explanations for what can be simply explained. Such individuals strike us as hardened violators of Occam's Razor: Entities are not to be multiplied unnecessarily. We shall say briefly that such persons goropise.

This article attempts to develop a rational reconstruction of Kuhn's epistemological relativism which effectively defends it against an influential line of criticism in the work of Shapere and Scheffler. Against the latter's reading of Kuhn, it is argued (1) that it is the incommensurability of scientific problems, data, and standards, not that of scientific meanings which primarily grounds the relativism argument; and (2) that Kuhnian incommensurability is compatible with far greater epistemological continuity from one theory to another than is implied (...) by the criticisms in question. The reconstruction of Kuhn is then used to show that while it constitutes a provocative form of relativism, it can also plausibly account for the sense in which scientific development is rational, involves standards external to particular paradigms, and exhibits progress of a sort. Finally, the article attempts to develop an adequate critical perspective on Kuhn's relativism by distinguishing a ?short?run? from a ?long?run? relativism, and a relativism concerning scientific knowledge from one concerning scientific rationality in Kuhn; the challenge each poses to positi?vist philosophy of science is distinguished and separately evaluated. (shrink)