This chapter focuses on the experimental practices and reasoning strategies employed in nineteenth century investigations on the causal origin of the phenomenon of Brownian movement. It argues that there was an extensive and sophisticated experimental work done on the phenomenon throughout the nineteenth century. Investigators followed as rigorously as possible the methodological standards of their time to make causal claims and advance causal explanations of Brownian movement. Two major methodological strategies were employed. The first was the experimental strategy of varying (...) the circumstances. Suspected causal factors were varied and the resulting effect on Brownian movement was studied. The main goal of this strategy was the identification of difference-making factors, i.e., factors having a causal influence on the phenomenon. The second was the so-called method of hypothesis. Rather than relying exclusively on the ability of experiments to identify difference-making factors, its proponents tried to show how the independently developed tenets of the new kinetic-molecular conception of matter provided a plausible causal explanation of Brownian movement. Each one of these methodological strategies had its distinctive practices and notions of control. None of these strategies could, on its own, establish molecular motion as the cause of Brownian movement. It was only the fruitful combination of the two strategies and of their accompanying practices and notions of control that led, at the end of the nineteenth century, to the recognition of molecular motion as the most probable cause of Brownian movement. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, there have been many efforts to defend the relevance of History of Science to Philosophy of Science, and vice versa. For the most part, these efforts have been limited to providing an abstract rationale for a closer integration between the two fields, as opposed to showing: (a) how such an integrated work is to be produced concretely, and (b) how an integrated approach can lead us to a better understanding of past and/or current science. 1 In this (...) chapter, I argue that the most promising way to integrate the history and philosophy of science is the historicist-hermeneutic approach. I will present the main features of the historicist-hermeneutic approach, and will show, concretely, how it can provide a mutually beneficial integration of the History of Science and the Philosophy of Science. More specifically, I will employ the historicist-hermeneutic approach to elucidate one of the most problematic historical case studies in philosophy of science: namely, Jean Perrin’s argument for molecular reality, which he formulated at the beginning of the twentieth century. (shrink)