A Word and the World: The Significance of Naming the Calorimeter

Roberts, Lissa L.

doi:10.1086/355725

Cited by 26 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…The existing ''method of mixtures'' had inherent limitations due to incomplete mixing, the heat lost to the environment, and the unaccountability of the chemical reaction heat (avant la lettre)-the heat generated or lost through chemical action. The ice calorimeter was specifically designed to address these shortcomings and to measure the chemical reaction heat precisely (Kim 2003: 343-349;Lodwig and Smeaton 1974;Roberts 1991). More importantly, a 'metric' measurement promised an algebraic representation of chemical action.…”

Section: Chemical Ontologies 211mentioning

confidence: 99%

From phlogiston to caloric: chemical ontologies

Kim

2011

Found Chem

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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.Keywords Phlogiston Á Caloric Á Chemical ontologies Á Incommensurability Á Lavoisier Á Guyton de MorveauThe Chemical Revolution has enjoyed a privileged status in the historiography of the European sciences. Building on the nineteenth-century cult of Lavoisier (Kim 2005), historians scrutinized his self-conscious reformulation of chemical theory already in the 1930s, well before the history of science became established as a professional discipline. In these stories that amplified the nineteenth-century myth of Lavoisier's revolutionary ideas and methods, phlogiston was a 'hypothetical' substance that eluded detection, yet was held responsible for several genres of chemical actions such as combustion, calcination, and acidification. The anomaly in the weight consideration-that the release of phlogiston from a substance (e.g. lead) produced a heavier substance (e.g. lead oxide)-supposedly revealed the absurdity of the phlogiston theory ''based on an unsound and insecure

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Section: Chemical Ontologies 211mentioning

confidence: 99%

From phlogiston to caloric: chemical ontologies

Kim

2011

Found Chem

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“…Para atingir essa meta, Lavoisier e Laplace, segundo Roberts 10 , idealizaram e mandaram construir um instrumento tradicionalmente conhecido pela denominação de calorímetro de gelo. Na "Mémoire sur la chaleur"de 1783, o aparelho é designado simplesmente de "machine".…”

Section: -As "Disquisitiones" No Contexto Das Doutrinas Químicas E Fiunclassified

As "Disquisitiones" do naturalista Arruda da Câmara (1752-1811) e as relações entre a Química e a Fisiologia no final do Século das Luzes

Almeida¹,

Magalhães²

1997

Quím. Nova

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. This work is intended to rescue the field of validity of the "Disquisitiones" by the naturalist Arruda da Câmara placing them in the scientific and historical context of the end of the "Century of Light". Thus, a tentative is made here to reconstruct the debate established among the several theories that served as background of the relationships between Chemistry and Physiology of that time. In the present work is presented by the first time an integral translation of the "Disquisitiones" and a biographical resume of the naturalist in the historical context of his epoch in Northeast Brazil, especially in Pernambuco.Keywords: history of chemistry; physiology in the eighteenth-century; Arruda da Câmara. ASSUNTOS GERAIS INTRODUÇÃOO presente estudo pretende resgatar o campo de validade das "Disquisitiones" do naturalista Arruda da Câmara, situando-as no contexto histórico-científico do final do Século das Luzes.Assim, tenta-se reconstruir o debate travado entre as diversas teorias que serviram de pano de fundo das relações entre a Química e a Fisiologia da época.Objetiva-se superar, desse modo, uma história da ciência de cunho empiricista que, no seu conteúdo, elimina as questões pendentes, as controvérsias, as discussões, as falsas pistas, os campos de validade, os obstáculos epistemológicos e ideológi-cos. Só apresentam-se as contribuições acumulativas, que parecem definitivas (como tijolos de uma construção) que não serão mais questionadas. Eliminam-se as teorias ditas "falsas": frutos de erros ou divagações.Apresenta a ciência, enfim, como um produto acabado, esterilizado, insípido, sem história, sem humanidade, praticada por sábios ou gênios solitários e dotados de muita sorte.Por outro lado, é impossível ignorar o papel de Arruda da Câmara como homem do seu tempo, como cidadão, que parece ter exercido uma ação política marcante na preparação do movimento revolucionário republicano de 1817, em Pernambuco.Tenta-se mostrar que esse papel não foi desvinculado da sua notável obra científica. Muito pelo contrário, era parte integrante da sua formação iluminista, que, pressupunha um otimismo no poder da razão em reorganizar o mundo humano e no papel preponderante (das "luzes") da ciência para o progresso dos povos e das nações.Do ponto de vista da sua organização, o presente trabalho baseia-se, fundamentalmente, nas "Obras Reunidas de Arruda da Câmara" (1982) 1 , coligidas e organizadas pelo historiador pernambucano José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, autor de valioso estudo biográfico do naturalista. Divide-se assim, em tres partes: na primeira, é apresentada uma tradução integral das "Disquisitiones"; na segunda, a tese do naturalista é discutida no contexto das diversas doutrinas químicas e fisiológicas do final do século XVIII e na terceira, é apresentado um resumo biográfico e análise da ação do naturalista no contexto históri-co do Nordeste, principalmente em Pernambuco, de sua época. INVESTIGAÇÕES FISIOLÓGICO-QUÍMICAS SOBRE A INFLUÊNCIA DO OXIGÊNIO NA ECONOMIA ANIMAL, PRINCIPALMENTE NO CALOR E NA COR DOS HOME...

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“…astronomy (Schaffer 1988, Van Helden 1994. chemistry (Roberts 1991, Golinski 1994, genetics (Kohler 1994), and medicine (Lawrence 1985).…”

Section: Shapinmentioning

confidence: 99%

Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

Shapin

1995

Annu. Rev. Sociol.

337

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The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is one of the profession's most marginal specialties, yet its objects of inquiry, its modes of inquiry, and certain of its findings have very substantial bearing upon the nature and scope of tihe sociological enterprise in general. While traditional sociology of knowledge asked how, and to what extent, "social factors" might influence the products of the mind, SSK sought to show that knowledge was constitutively social, and in so doing, it raised fundamental questions about taken-for-granted divisions between "social versus cognitive, or natural, factors." This piece traces the historical development of the sociology of scientific knowledge and its relations with sociology and cultural inquiry as a whole. It identifies dominant "localist" sensibilities in SSK and the consequent problem it now confronts of how scientific knowledge travels. Finally, it describes several strands of criticism of SSK that have emerged from among its own practitioners, noting the ways in which some criticisms can be seen as a revival of old aspirations toward privileged meta-languages.There is no shortage of reviews and assessments of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). Most have been written by critics or by participants meaning to put their special stamp on a contentious and splintered field.' I too am a participant: My views about what the field is, and ought to be, are strongly held; they have been canvassed elsewhere, and they will be unavoidably evident in this survey. Yet my purpose here is less to score points than to offer a critical survey 'special note should be taken of Lynch (1993:Ch 2-4), which, while it argues a vigorous case for the virtues of ethnomethodology, is a detailed critical survey of recent trends in the social studies of science. SHAPINofhow SSKdeveloped, and continues to develop, in relation to sociology, and to make the leading concerns of the field rather more comprehensible to sociologists in general than they have been. For this specialty, such a purpose is not banal, as neither the place of SSK in the sociological culture nor its implications for the future of sociology+specially social theory-have been adequately canvassed b e f~r e .~The "here and everywhere" of my title refers at once to the problematic place of SSK within academic sociology and to a central problem it has generated and now confronts-how to interpret the relationship between the local settings in which scientific knowledge is produced and the unique efficiency with which such knowledge seems to travel. Sociology of ScientiJic Knowledge and the Academic CultureSSK must count as one of sociology's notable recent successes. Emerging not more than 25 years ago, in the 1970s and early 1980s it was an almost exclusively British practice (Collins 1983a:26&71). Now there are influential practitioners throughout North America, as well as in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Israel, and Australia; and key Anglophone works have been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Pol...

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A Word and the World: The Significance of Naming the Calorimeter

Cited by 26 publications

References 0 publications

From phlogiston to caloric: chemical ontologies

From phlogiston to caloric: chemical ontologies

As "Disquisitiones" do naturalista Arruda da Câmara (1752-1811) e as relações entre a Química e a Fisiologia no final do Século das Luzes

Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

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