From phlogiston to caloric: chemical ontologies

Abstract

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

Scientific pluralism and the Chemical Revolution

“…For instance, Frederic Holmes argues that it would be a mistake to construe the Chemical Revolution as the "overthrow of the reigning paradigm" of phlogistonism: "Priestley's use of phlogiston was so loosely connected with the older phlogiston theories descended from Georg Ernst Stahl that the events at the heart of the chemical revolution should be viewed more as a competition between two rival new research programs than as the replacement of a reigning paradigm" (2000b, p. 735). Mi Gyung Kim (2008Kim ( , 2011 and John Stewart (2012) develop this line of thought in considerable detail (cf. Mauskopf 2013).…”

Traços da hermenêutica filosófica na educação em ciências: possibilidades à educação química

“…eTaber (2006) mencionam a hermenêutica sob o viés metodológico. O primeiro buscou inconsistências naquilo que se diz sobre Bioquímica e o segundo ressaltou que é possível uma análise mais profunda do que se faz no Ensino de Ciências no viés hermenêutico e que o autor considera vagarosos em produzir resultados como ressaltado em outros de seus trabalhos Kim (2011). se centra sobre a evolução das visões a partir da química pré-Lavoisier, das manipulações de materiais, dos atores históricos e do uso linguístico, historicizando as realidades de laboratório e da agenda filosófica.…”

A Historical Atlas of Objectivity

“…If we can trace the history of chemical ontology with an ethnographic sensitivity, it should offer the philosophers of "thing knowledge" and "materialist epistemology" 70 rich material to probe the built (and therefore historical) nature of scientific objects, the culturally and materially disciplined identity of scientific investigators, and the evolving totality of the material world constructed by our scientific knowledge. 71 Admittedly, this would be a tall order: chemistry did not play an important role in the twentieth-century philosophy of science precisely because chemists did not pretend to deal with nature-as-is, but stabilized artificial objects through a set of instrumental and linguistic practices. 72 Nevertheless, it is not clear why a shift toward an epistemology of "fabricated objects" would focus on visual images and especially on atlases.…”