Philosophical Chemistry: Genealogy of a Scientific Field by Manuel DeLanda

Author:Manuel DeLanda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Genealogy of a Scientific Field
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-05-21T08:00:00+00:00

From Personal to Consensus Practice 1800–1900

1800–50

John Dalton (1766–1844), Humphry Davy (1778–1829), Michael Faraday (1791–1867), Johann Döbereiner (1780–1849), Pierre Louis Dulong (1785–1838), Eilhard Mitscherlich (1794–1863), Germain Henri Hess (1802–50), Hermann Kopp (1817–92)

The domain of chemistry in the first decades of the nineteenth century was experiencing dramatic changes. Analytical techniques were undergoing rapid improvement and as a result the number of elementary substances was increasing enormously: from the 33 postulated at the end of the previous century, to the 54 known in the 1830s, to the 70 elements that would be classified into the Periodic Table in the late 1860s. The multiplication of substances constituting the limit of chemical analysis was not only philosophically jarring, conflicting with the long-held belief that the number of basic elements should be small, but also created difficulties for professors and textbook writers who had to transform a growing list of particular statements about the properties of elements, and of the compounds they could form, into a teachable discipline based on general principles.1 The incorporeal or imponderable “substances,” heat and electricity, continued to be the most problematic components of the domain. Phenomena of electrical and thermal nature inhabited two domains, those of chemistry and physics, and were therefore associated with different cognitive tools. Electricity, for example, was already being studied by physicists using mathematical models in the early part of the century, at a time when mathematics was not a part of chemistry.2 But there was nevertheless traffic between the two domains. One type of transfer involved the conversion of what was a phenomenon in one domain into an instrument in the other. The best example of this was the Volta pile, an early form of the electric battery that in physics was used to display electricity as a phenomenon but that in chemistry was transformed into a powerful analytical tool, the very tool that had led to the proliferation of elementary substances.

Although in this period most members of the chemical community were exploring the organic portion of the domain, there were some who were attracted to the zone of contact with physics. This was the case of those who practiced electrochemistry, but it also involved chemists who were dedicated to the accurate measurement of a variety of properties which could be used to fix the referent of substance concepts, properties like crystal shape, specific heat, specific gravity, optical and magnetic behavior. Philosophers of science, particularly those who tend to reduce laboratory practice to the testing of predictions deduced from models, have never adequately conceptualized the activity of measurement, an activity that is often a goal in itself.3 In the case of chemistry, one effect of the accumulation of numerical data about physical properties was to prepare the ground for the eventual reintroduction of chemical reactions into the domain. Although some eighteenth-century chemists (Bergman, Berthollet) had already approached transformations as objects of study, their research program was mostly abandoned by later practitioners, and its revival had to wait for the creation of the new subfield of physical chemistry in the 1860s.

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