Compositionism as a Dominant Way of Knowing in Modern Chemistry

Pickstone John V. , “Museological science? The place of the analytical/comparative in nineteenth-century science, technology and medicine”, History of science, xxxii (1994), 111–38, p. 111.

Ibid., p. 118.

Pickstone John V. , “Working knowledges before and after circa 1800: Practices and disciplines in the history of science, technology, and medicine”, Isis, xcviii (2007), 489–516, p. 489.

Ibid., p. 495.

Ibid., pp. 490–1.

Pickstone John V. , Ways of knowing: A new history of science, technology and medicine (Manchester, 2000), p. xi.

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 3), 494–5.

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 6), chaps. 7 and 8.

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 3), 495.

Hacking Ian , “The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences”, in Pickering Andrew (ed.), Science as practice and culture (Chicago, 1992), 29–64, pp. 44–50.

What I aim for is a philosophical grammar of scientific practice, “grammar” as meant by the later Wittgenstein. For this purpose I take and freely adapt insights from the traditions of pragmatism, operationalism and phenomenology, and also from a broad range of other authors such as Michael Polanyi, J. L. Austin, Stuart Hampshire, and Marjorie Grene.

Gooding David , “Putting agency back into experiment”, in Pickering (ed.), Science as practice and culture (ref. 10), 65–112.

Rouse Joseph , Engaging science: How to understand its practices philosophically (Ithaca and London, 1996); Rouse Joseph , How scientific practices matter: Reclaiming philosophical naturalism (Chicago, 2002).

Bridgman Percy W. , “The present state of operationalism”, in Frank Philipp G. (ed.), The validation of scientific theories (Boston, 1956), 75–80, p. 76.

Hacking Ian , Representing and intervening (Cambridge, 1983); Woodward James , Making things happen: A theory of causal explanation (New York and Oxford, 2003); Cartwright Nancy , Hunting causes and using them: Approaches in philosophy and economics (Cambridge, 2008).

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 3), 492.

Bridgman Percy W. , The way things are (Cambridge, MA, 1959), 3; Klein Ursula , Experiments, models, paper tools: Cultures of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century (Stanford, 2003).

The focus on activities and their aims throws new light on the old philosophical preoccupation with truth. Surely, evaluating the correctness of certain statements is an important scientific activity; however, it is not the only scientific activity worth engaging in. Also, the standards of correctness can easily vary from system to system. If we are talking about “Truth with a capital T” that is not at all dependent on the system of practice one works in, it is doubtful that there are any actual scientific activities that are concerned with it. The success of each activity, and of a system of practice, needs to be judged first of all in terms of how well it achieves the aims that it sets for itself; in addition, we may make judgements on the value of the aims themselves. But there will be precious few occasions on which “Truth” becomes an operative aim or standard of judgement in science. This is, of course, not to deny the value of Truth as a regulative principle (or, less grandiosely, a rhetorically or motivationally effective purpose).

Kuhn Thomas S. , The structure of scientific revolutions, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1970), 180–91; this explication occurs in the 1969 Postscript.

See Chang Hasok , Is water H²O? Evidence, realism and pluralism (Dordrecht, forthcoming), chap. 5.

There are, of course, some reasons to be sceptical about the atomistic—reductive structure of things and statements, too, but that is a story for another day.

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 1), 113; Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 6).

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 3), 494.

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 1), 117.

It will become clear in Section 4.4 why I prefer to say “decomposition” rather than “analysis” here.

These are terms used by Lavoisier himself; see, for example, his remarks quoted in Kirwan Richard , An essay on phlogiston and the composition of acids (London, 1789), 16. I avoid the terms “analysis” and “synthesis” here, because “analysis” was too often ambiguous, and “synthesis” came to take on other significance later.

The term “principalist” has been used in some secondary sources, but I think it is more correct to spell it as “principlist”, as we are referring to principles, not principals.

See, for example, Siegfried Robert Dobbs Betty Jo , “Composition, a neglected aspect of the Chemical Revolution”, Annals of science, xxiv (1968), 275–93; Siegfried Robert , “Lavoisier's table of simple substances: Its origin and interpretation”, Ambix, xxix (1982), 1982–48; Siegfried Robert , From elements to atoms: A history of chemical composition (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, xcii/4; Philadelphia, 2002); Klein Ursula , “Origin of the concept of chemical compound”, Science in context, vii (1994), 1994–204. The interaction between the experimental and the theoretical dimensions is clearly demonstrated in Ursula Klein, ” The chemical workshop tradition and the experimental practice: Discontinuities within continuities”, Science in context, ix (1996), 1996–87.

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 3), 494.

Bensaude-Vincent Bernadette Simon Jonathan , Chemistry: The impure science (London, 2008), 125.

Priestley Joseph , Experiments and observations on different kinds of air, 2nd edn, i (London, 1775), table of contents.

Ibid., 3.

Priestley Joseph “An account of further discoveries in air, in letters to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P.R.S. and the Rev. Dr. Price, F.R.S.”, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, liv (1775), 384–94, p. 392.

Debus Allen G. , “Fire Analysis and the elements in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries”, Annals of science, xxiii (1967), 127–47; Holmes Frederic L. , “Analysis by fire and solvent extractions: The metamorphosis of a tradition”, Isis, lxii (1971), 1971–48.

Siegfried , opera cit. (ref. 28, 1982, 2002); Klein , opera cit. (ref. 28, 1994, 1996); Holmes , op. cit. (ref. 34); Debus , op. cit. (ref. 34); Multhauf Robert P. , The origins of chemistry (London, 1966); Multhauf Robert P. , “Operational practice and the emergence of modern chemical concepts”, Science in context, ix (1996), 1996–49.

Chang Hasok , “We have never been whiggish (about phlogiston)”, Centaurus, li (2009), 239–64; Chang Hasok , “The hidden history of phlogiston: How philosophical failure can generate historiographical refinement”, HYLE — International journal for philosophy of chemistry, xvi/2 (2010), 47–79; Chang , op. cit. (ref. 20), chap. 1.

I am using Lavoisier's own numbers, as given in Kirwan, op. cit. (ref. 26), 16, though his pre-Revolutionary “g” was “grain”, not the metric “gram” that he helped to put into place. There is some irony in these numbers, as Lavoisier displayed utter conviction that 85:15 was the correct oxygen—hydrogen ratio in water, rather than anything like 8:1.

In his numerous experiments leading to (and based on) these conceptions, Priestley took note of all sorts of properties that were given to substances as they were modified, but weight was not something he noted very frequently. Such was common practice in the phlogistonist tradition. Changes of weight seemed capricious in relation to phlogistication, which meant that weight was not taken as a reliable variable if one wanted to extract stable patterns of nature from these phenomena.

Thinking of the balance-sheet of weights in chemical reactions must have been pleasing to the commercial-bourgeois sensibilities of Lavoisier's middle-class scientific community, though the oxygenists did not all share the same class background, and I have no means of supporting a real causal link in any case.

Poirier Jean-Pierre , “Lavoisier's balance sheet method: Sources, early signs and late developments”, in Beretta Marco (ed.), Lavoisier in perspective (Munich, 2005), 69–77; Kim Mi Gyung , “Lavoisier: The father of modern chemistry?”, in Beretta Marco (ed.), Lavoisier in perspective (Munich, 2005), 167–91.

Lavoisier Antoine-Laurent Laplace Pierre-Simon , Mémoire sur la chaleur (Paris, 1783).

Brock William H. , The Fontana history of chemistry (London, 1992), 112–13.

Perrin Carleton E. , “Lavoisier's table of the elements: A reappraisal”, Ambix, xx (1973), 95–105, pp. 97–101.

Quoted in Bensaude-Vincent Simon , op. cit. (ref. 30), 87, from The critique of pure reason, transl. by Smith Norman Kemp (London, 1963; first published, 1781), 20.

Siegfried Dobbs , op. cit. (ref. 28).

Rocke Alan J. , Chemical atomism in the nineteenth century: From Dalton to Cannizzaro (Columbus, OH, 1984).

Kim , op. cit. (ref. 40), 173.

Nash Leonard K. , “The origins of Dalton's chemical atomic theory”, Isis, xlvii (1956), 101–16.

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 6).

It may, of course, happen that the concrete practices come into being before the abstract schema; in such cases we can only speak of concretization in retrospect, as if the schema had been present unconsciously.

Holton Gerald , Thematic origins of scientific thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge, MA, 1973).