Thomas Kuhn had little to say about scientific change in biological science, and biologists are ambivalent about how applicable his framework is for their disciplines. We apply Kuhn’s account of paradigm change to evolutionary microbiology, where key Darwinian tenets are being challenged by two decades of findings from molecular phylogenetics. The chief culprit is lateral gene transfer, which undermines the role of vertical descent and the representation of evolutionary history as a tree of life. To assess Kuhn’s relevance to this (...) controversy, we add a social analysis of the scientists involved to the historical and philosophical debates. We conclude that while Kuhn’s account may capture aspects of the pattern of an episode of scientific change, he has little to say about how the process of generating new understandings is occurring in evolutionary microbiology. Once Kuhn’s application is limited to that of an initial investigative probe into how scientific problem-solving occurs, his disciplinary scope becomes broader. (shrink)

Changes of theories are major events in science. Two main types of questions may be asked about them: i) how do scientists choose new theories?, and ii) how is consensus formed? Generally, philosophers do not distinguish these two questions. Kuhn, on the contrary, offers very different answers to each of these questions. Theory-choice, on the one hand, is explained through the application of epistemic criteria, such as accuracy and consistency; nonetheless, because these values do not prescribe a single choice, consensus (...) formation, on the other hand, is explained through a series of socio-epistemic mechanisms, namely: scientific pedagogy, diffusion and production of knowledge within the community, and restructuring of the scientific field. These mechanisms are the basis of Kuhn’s social epistemology, in that they are not restricted to sociology nor epistemology, encompassing both social interactions and epistemic evaluations of theories. Keywords: Thomas Kuhn, consensus formation, social epistemology. (shrink)

Taking the Royal College of Barcelona (1760–1843) as a case study, this paper shows the development of modern surgery in Spain initiated by the Bourbon Monarchy when they founded new kinds of institutions as academic activities to spread scientific knowledge. Antoni Gimbernat was the most famous internationally recognised Spanish surgeon. He was trained as a surgeon at the Royal College of Surgery in Cadiz and was later appointed Professor of Anatomy at the College of Barcelona. He then became Royal Surgeon (...) of King Carlos IV, and with that esteemed position in Madrid, he worked relentlessly to improve the quality of the Royal Colleges in Spain. Learning human body structure by performing hands-on dissections in the anatomical theatre has become a fundamental element of modern medical education. Gimbernat favoured the study of natural sciences, the new chemistry of Lavoisier and experimental physics in the academic programmes of surgery. According to the study of a very relevant set of documents preserved in the library, the so-called “juntas literarias”, among the main subjects debated in the clinical sessions was the concept of human beings and diseases in relation to the development of the new experimental sciences. These documents showed that chemistry and experimental physics were considered crucial tools to understand the unexplained processes that occurred in the diseased and healthy human body and in a medico-surgical context. It is important to stress that through these manuscripts, we can examine the role and the reception of the new sciences as they were applied to the healing arts. (shrink)

From the 1660s onwards, France tried to establish itself as a leading maritime and colonial power. The first French East India Company allowed a decisive penetration into the Indian Ocean, while the foundation of the Rochefort arsenal was the starting point of a great shipbuilding effort. The archives of the State Secretariat of the French Navy, ports, and learned societies, as well as printed scholarly literature, testify to an increasing mobilisation around the health of the “gens de mer.” Most of (...) the actors involved in this reflection, whether doctors or surgeons, naval officers or engineers, scholars or inventors, agreed in associating seamen's diseases with the poor air quality prevailing within ships. The environment of seafarers was thus definitely regarded as harmful. However, the atmosphere of a ship was also seen through the possibility to reshape it and reduce its dangerousness, with adapted behaviours, careful maintenance, or technical solutions. This was crucial to ensure the circulation of human beings and goods across the French overseas empire, but also to defend it from the threats associated with the major conflicts of the second half of the 18th century. This article highlights how environments regarded as “pathogenic” were conceived and reshaped during the second half of the early modern period in France, using the example of naval hygiene. It examines the strategies designed and implemented to combat the “noxious” air of French ships, in particular through the regulations introduced since the end of the 17th century, and considers how this issue has stimulated the search for technological solutions. (shrink)

By resituating Alexander von Humboldt in the “working world” of mining, this essay offers a case study of the way in which industry has shaped practice and theory in the history of science. While Humboldt’s experience as a miner in Saxony and Prussia provided him a venue in which to study fossilized vegetation, revealing a fundamental link between the migrations of plants and of peoples, industrial concerns about miners’ safety inspired a study of the interplay between plants and people that (...) shaped his later articulation of the verticality of plant distribution. Moreover, the cartographic methods Humboldt employed during his American journey depended as much on drawing practices indebted to mining as they did on patterns of vertical mobility above and below the surface of the earth. These arguments ultimately encourage a departure from “Humboldtian Science,” a term that has veiled an originally Prusso-Saxon science beneath a set of Anglo-American connotations. (shrink)

This is the first of a pair of papers. It focuses on the development of the most notable phlogistic theories during the period 1766–1791, including the main experiments that their proponents proposed them to interpret. There was a rapid proliferation of late phlogistic theories, particularly from 1784, and the accounts of composition and important implications of the main theories are set out and their issues analysed. Each of them either reached impasses due to internal problems, or included features that made (...) them unacceptable even to other phlogistians. The expositions and analyses of these theories are given in terms of details that were in the literature at the time or otherwise potentially understandable by the participants given contemporary practice. Some relevant methodological aspects of the history of science are discussed, and the secondary literature is briefly surveyed. The second paper deals with the contemporary development of the new chemistry, and with theory comparison and theory choice in the same period. (shrink)

Long after its alleged demise, phlogiston was still presented, discussed and defended by leading chemists. Even some of the leading proponents of the new chemistry admitted its ‘absolute existence’. We demonstrate that what was defended under the title ‘phlogiston’ was no longer a particular hypothesis about combustion and respiration. Rather, it was a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions and the empirical practices associated with them. Lavoisier's gravimetric reduction, in the eyes of the phlogistians, annihilated the autonomy of chemistry together (...) with its peculiar concepts of chemical substance and quality, chemical process and chemical affinity. The defence of phlogiston was the defence of a distinctly chemical conception of matter and its appearances, a conception which reflected the chemist's acquaintance with details and particularities of substances, properties and processes and his skills of adducing causal relations from the interplay between their complexity and uniformity. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

En este trabajo desarrollamos reconstrucciones estructuralistas de las teorías del flogisto, de Priestley, y del oxígeno, de Lavoisier. Nuestra propuesta es una alternativa a la de Caamaño en una pretensión de ajustarnos más a las formulaciones de esas teorías tal y como se dieron históricamente.