Scientific pluralism and the Chemical Revolution

The Chemical Revolution revisited

“…A succinct statement of this worry is given in the concluding section of his paper: correcting the assumption "that uses of 'phlogiston' were based on one coherent system of epistemic activities" "weakens Chang's comparisons and his counterfactual reasoning on what might have been, had the 'phlogistonist system' been kept alive longer." (Kusch, 2015, in this issue, p. 78) I did not suggest that all the different versions of the phlogistonist system would be mutually coherent. I think it would help to prevent misunderstanding if I were to say that phlogistonism was a system-type under which there were various phlogistonist systems.…”

“…Kusch (2015, in this issue, p. 71) makes much of some initial disagreement that Lavoisier and Priestley had about experimental results. My general sense is that where there were disagreements about observed phenomena during the Chemical Revolution, they were resolved relatively quickly and without any particular fuss.…”

“…I have not developed that suggestion fully, but it is perhaps worth investigating further. That would be a task for another day, but I should briefly answer some questions Kusch considers unanswered (Kusch, 2015, in this issue, p. 78). First, "Since the phlogistonist system was itself moving ever closer to compositionist ideas, how could the compositionist trend lead to its destruction?"…”

“…So how was agreement reached in the end? Kusch gives the following account (Kusch, 2015, in this issue, p. 77): "As Hufbauer sees it, 'Hermbstaedt's assault overwhelmed the phlogistic spokesmen ' (1982, p. 136). Although most of them initially attacked both Hermbstaedt's experiments and his way of reportingde.g.…”

A Revolution that never happened

“…However, this fact was not due to a difference in methodology but rather in financial means. Unlike most chemists, the rich Fermier-Général of the old regime could afford expensive precision instruments (Holmes, 2000;Kusch, 2015), Furthermore, phlogistonists such as Klaproth had also long attempted to replace the traditional names of substances by systematic chemical names expressing composition, in a way similar to Lavoisier's (Klein, 2014). Unlike Lavoisier, Klaproth had no access to Lavoisier's precision instruments.…”