Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: The Philosophical and Historiographical Terrain
- 1 Positivism, Whiggism and the Chemical Revolution
- 2 Postpositivism and the History of Science
- 3 Postpositivist Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
- 4 From Modernism to Postmodernism: Changing Philosophical Images of Science
- 5 The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Science
- 6 Postmodernist and Sociological Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
- 7 The Chemical Revolution as History
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
6 - Postmodernist and Sociological Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: The Philosophical and Historiographical Terrain
- 1 Positivism, Whiggism and the Chemical Revolution
- 2 Postpositivism and the History of Science
- 3 Postpositivist Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
- 4 From Modernism to Postmodernism: Changing Philosophical Images of Science
- 5 The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Science
- 6 Postmodernist and Sociological Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
- 7 The Chemical Revolution as History
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The most immediate impact of postmodernist nominalism and sociological finitism on the historiography of eighteenth-century science and natural philosophy took the form of a pervasive interest in the ‘specificity’ of historical practices and a devaluation of the role of global traditions in the development of science. The globalist view of the cognitive priority of research traditions construed eighteenth-century science and philosophy as a group of coherent bodies of theory and practice, composed of a set of discourses formed and unified by their allegiances to one or other of the cognitive traditions associated with the names of Leibniz, Descartes, Locke, Wolff, Kant and, above all, Newton. But sociologically inclined historians of science dismissed the ‘tradition-seeking method’ as ‘profoundly unhistorical’ and portrayed ‘a great deal of diversity and a low degree of consensus’ in the cognitive features of eighteenth-century science. While a number of scholars drew attention to the variety in Newtonian matter theory, the importance of anti-Newtonian beliefs, and the eclectic nature of eighteenth-century scientific thought in general, Schaffer identified ‘natural philosophy’ as a mode of discursive and experimental practice distinct from science and philosophy. In the same vein, Bensaude-Vincent viewed the Chemical Revolution not as a specific instantiation of the platonic form of a scientific revolution, but as a local event, peculiar to late eighteenth-century France and ‘inappropriately universalized’ by its participants, as well as by subsequent historians and philosophers of science.
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- Information
- The Historiography of the Chemical RevolutionPatterns of Interpretation in the History of Science, pp. 195 - 228Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014