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Realism and the history of chemistry

Article  in  Foundations of Chemistry · March 2017

DOI: 10.1007/s10698-017-9274-7

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 Realism and the History of Chemistry.

Manuel DeLanda

Adjunct Professor of Philosophy. Princeton University.

Abstract:

This essay presents a model of a scientific field, as constituted by a domain of objective phenomena and a community of practitioners,
interfaced by laboratory instrumentation and machinery. The relations between items in the domain, as well as those between the cognitive tools
(concepts, statements, problems, classifications) that shape the practices of the community are postulated to be relations of exteriority, that is,
relations that do not determine the identity of what they relate. This move allows the model to avoid holism. The essay then goes on to contrast
the proposed model with Kuhn holistic theory of paradigms to highlight its advantages.

Key Words:

Domain, Emergence, Exteriority, Consensus Formation, Taxonomic Schemas.

I was invited to deliver this presentation because I recently published a book that engages in a sustained
philosophical meditation on the history of chemistry. 1 But the book does not really qualify as a book in philosophy
of chemistry because it does not engage with any currently ongoing conversation or discussion in the field. If we
wished to classify it, a better category would be the philosophy of history, a field to which I have made previous
contributions, promoting an approach to the study of historical processes that is intimately shaped by a realist social
ontology. The term “realism” is used to denote an ontological commitment to a world that exists independently of
our minds. In this sense, I am a hardcore realist. But when the term is applied to human history it must be modified
because communities and institutional organizations, cities and countries would not exist if human minds did not
exist. So in this context the term “realism” must denote a belief in social entities that exist not independently of our
minds, but independently of the contents of our minds, that is, independently of our conceptions of them.

In the realist social ontology that serves as the basis for my work, both micro-reductionism and macro-
reductionism are dangers to be avoided. The former type of reductionism is more familiar, as illustrated by attempts
to explain historical episodes by the actions of famous people alone. Blocking micro-reductionism can be achieved
by introducing the concept of an emergent property, a property of a whole that is not possessed by its parts, and
which is produced by specific interactions between its parts. Thus, when a human community is said to be solidary,
this property is not reducible to the feelings of togetherness of its members, or to their beliefs in a common political
cause. These feelings and beliefs are required to guide the members interactions with one another, but something
else results from those interactions, such as a certain degree of connectivity between the members. When this
connectivity reaches a threshold, word of mouth can travel fast through the community, particularly when its topic is
a violation of a local norm: a broken promise; an unreciprocated favor; a lie. As a result all members are informed of
the infraction, so the community as a whole may be said to store its members’ reputations, and to punish the
violations by ridicule or ostracism. One may object that when people laugh behind my back to punish me, it is
always a specific group of neighbors and not the whole community. But if the feeling of shame or humiliation
produced in me by this group could have been produced by any other group as long as they are community
members, this shows that the individual identities of those performing the ridiculing do not matter. In other words,
there is redundant causality at operation here, since any combination of community members will produce the same
effect. Although the concept of an emergent property was introduced by late nineteenth century philosophers, it was
always illustrated with examples from chemistry. Chemists had long known that the properties of a compound
substance like water disappear when the compound is broken down into oxygen and hydrogen, but reappear when
these gases are sparked together in the right proportions. In other words, properties lost through analysis emerge
again through synthesis. Thus, although chemists did not coin the word “emergence” they did introduce the concept
of an irreducible property. By the early 19th century chemical textbooks define the notion of affinity as a force that
produces compounds – substances with novel properties not present in their components – as opposed to mere
mixtures that have properties that are a blend of those of their components. 2

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 The second danger to avoid when thinking about human history is macro-reductionism, a stance more
commonly referred to as holism. In this case the error is to think of society as forming a seamless totality, a system
in which everything is inextricably related. Personal agency disappears in this conception of society, the choices,
preferences, habits and routines that guide behavior being fully determined by the position of agents in the overall
system. Thus, in a sense, the micro is reduced to the macro, leading historians to focus on the evolution of society as
a whole, postulating laws of development that guide this evolution as the overall system goes through its different
stages. The relevant philosophical distinction in this regard is that between relations of interiority, relations that
constitute the very identity of the terms they relate, and relations of exteriority, which modulate but do not constitute
their identity. Only relations of interiority lead to holism, so the lesson here is to conceive of the components of an
emergent whole as always interacting in exteriority, causally affecting one another but preserving a certain degree of
autonomy. Although classical chemists did not spend much time thinking about this distinction, and so they cannot
be credited with having found a solution, they certainly were among the first to see that there was an important
problem here. Thus, when an acid was reacted with an alkali to produce a neutral salt, a substance with entirely
different properties, the problem of what had happened to the original substances presented itself. Do they disappear
as they become fused into a new entity? But if so then why is it that we can recover them through chemical
analysis.? Despite our greater knowledge of molecules and atoms, we are still grappling with this problem, even in
the cases of mixtures which are less perplexing than compounds. One philosopher of chemistry, for example, argues
that there really is no salt in sea water, because when sodium chloride dissolves in water it becomes a collection of
hydrated sodium and chloride ions. But he acknowledges that salt is present in brine in a virtual or potential way, in
the sense that we can recover it by desiccation. I believe this shows that the identity of salt is not defined by its
relationship to water, only the current state of its components. 3 Without pretending to have solved this complex
problem we can move on to assert that when we bring together the concepts of emergence and exteriority we get
wholes that are both irreducible and analyzable. In the case of human history this leads to a conception of society in
which neither the micro nor the macro scales are privileged, and in which an entire meso-scale becomes visible
between those two extremes: the scale at which communities and organizations, social justice movements and
industrial networks, cities and urban regions, operate.

There is one more concept I need to introduce before I can move on to the history of chemistry. As is well
know, the concept of an animal or plant species underwent a radical change in evolutionary biology. Whereas in
Aristotelian philosophy a species is a category that exists outside of history – species are not subject to corruption
and decay as Aristotle himself would say – the reproductive concept of a species makes them fully historical entities,
born at a particular time through reproductive isolation, and capable of dying via extinction. Aristotle reserved the
possibility of birth and death only for the ontological category of individuals entities, so in this sense, species have
become individuals. We can generalize this further and argue that all entities, from atoms and molecules to planets
and stars, are individual entities: all are born through a concrete process of synthesis, and all can disintegrate and
cease to be. Applying this idea to human history, however, may seem confusing because the word “individual” has
become synonymous with that of “person”, but it is clear that we may speak without contradiction of individual
communities and individual organizations, as well as of individual cities and countries. A realist ontology that
accepts only unique historical entities must for this reason cope with the inevitable variation among them, so a
further loan from biology is the concept of a population in which variation has a certain statistical distribution. In a
population of atoms we can track the isotopic variation; in a population of organic molecules the isomeric variation;
in populations of plants and animals the genetic variation; in a population of communities the linguistic variation
and so on. More generally, all the social entities inhabiting the meso-scale must be studied as being members of
populations – pluralities of individual organizations; collectivities of individual cities; multiplicities of individual
countries – all of them displaying a certain distribution of variation in their emergent properties.

Deploying these ideas can allow a philosopher of history to replace the abstract entities mistakenly believed
to inhabit the macro-scale. Thus, the Market can be replaced with a multiplicity of individual trading areas of
increasing geographical extent, from local bazaars to regional trading areas to the national markets that emerged in
England in the eighteenth-century. Similarly, the State can be replaced with a large population of individual
organizations – some executive, some legislative, some judicial – the authority of which extends to different
jurisdictions: the entire country, a state or province, a city or town. 4 And more to the point of this presentation,
Science can be replaced by a plurality of individual scientific fields, each with its own methods and cognitive
content. There are, of course, interactions between fields, but not the kind of relations that would fuse the entire
population into a single monolithic entity. In these terms, what my book offers is a model of a member of this
population, a simplified version of a real scientific field: classical chemistry. I approach a scientific field as the
emergent whole formed by a domain of objective phenomena, a community of practitioners, and the laboratory
instrumentation and machinery that allows one to interact with the other. Let’s examine the first component, the
domain of a field. 5 A domain is made out of objective phenomena, many of which are synthesized and stabilized in
a laboratory, phenomena that are so varied that there are only a few characteristics shared in common: all
phenomena must be public, recurrent, and noteworthy. 6 A perfect illustration is the chemical reaction between an
acid and an alkali. The furious effervescence that characterizes this interaction is an effect that could be publicly
witnessed, that could be easily reproduced, and that was worthy of notice because of the battle or intense struggle
that it suggested. The domain of chemistry is made out of chemical reactions like these as well as of the products of

2
these transformations, such as the neutral salts that result from the energetic interaction of acids and bases. In the
case of scientific fields in which laboratory practice is fundamental, the concept of a domain captures the target of
scientific research – the set of problematic effects that is in urgent need of explanation – better than the concept of
Nature, because unlike the latter which may be taken as given and unchanging, a domain always has a history.

The domain of chemistry in 1700 blended gradually into the realms of craft and trade. Many substances
found in laboratories were neither from natural sources nor created by chemists. Rather, they were traditional
substances produced in mines, apothecary shops, or distilleries, and commonly traded as commodities. From
metallurgy came gold, silver, copper, tin, and led; from pharmacy and medicine mercury, antinomy, and arsenic;
from soap and glass manufacturing potash and soda; nitric, sulphuric, and muriatic acids came from a variety of
crafts. Even the raw materials for vegetable extracts came from medical and botanical gardens, not from Nature. At
this point in time, the domain not only had fuzzy borders but it was ordered according to various practical interests
not in terms of the problems it posed or what needed to be explained. A very effective means to bring order to a
domain is the creation of taxonomic schemas that can be superimposed on it. A good example are the affinity tables
that began to be published in 1718. In the earliest example the upper row of the table named sixteen substances
while the columns under each substance listed the other substances with which it had a disposition to combine. The
vertical position in the columns reflected a substance's degree of affinity: those immediately below the first row had
the highest tendency to combine while those in the bottom row had the lowest. Despite the fact that the original
affinity table summarized results well known to apothecaries and metallurgists, it performed cognitive labor by
making evident certain relations between substances, drawing finer distinctions between old categories, and
sharpening the boundaries between different chemical species. 8 In addition, the table brought order to a portion of
the domain by gathering together all the known ingredients of neutral salts, not just acids and alkalis but also metals.
This helped focus the practice of chemists on a specific family of substances with great potential to produce answers
to complex compositional problems. In a sense, the chemical domain became organized around neutral salts in the
eighteenth century: by the 1740’s a chemist like Roulle could set out to classify all known neutral salts using, in
addition to affinity relations, properties like crystal shape and solubility. 9

Another aspect of the history of a domain is episodes of rapid growth, when many novel substances are
introduced in a short period of time. In this case, the pressure that the increase in size can place on the community of
practitioners to bring order to the domain can be very intense. For example, the sudden availability of constant
electrical current made possible by the Volta pile (a primitive form of the electric battery) amplified the power of
chemical analysis and as a result the number of elementary substances increased enormously: from the thirty three
postulated at the end of the eighteenth century, to the fifty four known in the 1830's, to the seventy known elements
of the late 1860’s. Humphry Davy, who built larger and more powerful versions of the battery, used it in 1807 to
isolate sodium, calcium, boron, potassium, strontium, and magnesium, a list to which he added chlorine, iodine, and
bromine three years later. This population explosion destabilized the order of the inorganic domain, an order that
was reestablished by another tabular taxonomy: the famous Periodic Table of the Elements. A different example is
the portion of the domain corresponding to organic substances. These were paradoxical because their enormous
diversity had to be reconciled with the fact that their elementary components were only a handful, including carbon,
oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. Tabular taxonomies were of little use in this case and a different approach was
followed: a serial scheme of classification. A special kind of chemical reaction that substituted a single component
(or group of components) of a substance by another, yielding a close relative of the original, allowed chemists to
create long series of kindred substances, in which one member of the series varied from the previous one by a single
substitution. Of these series, the one comprising the family of substances we know as methane, ethane, propane,
butane, pentane, and so on, had been worked out by the middle of the nineteenth century. 10 By rendering this series
with formulas, its internal structure could be clearly displayed: CH4, C2H6, C3H8, C4H10, and so on. Even a cursory
examination of this sequence shows that it increases by a modular amount, CH2, and that the entire family can be
generated from a single formula: CnH2n+2. Series like these could be laid out on the confusing mass of disparate plant
and animal substances, allowing organic chemists to get a foothold on it, to create a small but secure territory from
which to launch other series. By 1900 many more sequences containing a constant part and a variable part were
crisscrossing the organic domain: the series of saturated and unsaturated alcohols; the series of saturated ethers; the
series of aldehydes and ketones; and the series of saturated acids. 11

Let’s move on to consider the human component of a scientific field. As mentioned before, tightly knit
communities have the emergent capacity to store reputations – as hearsay on both commendable and reprehensible
actions propagates rapidly – and to enforce local norms informally via ridicule and ostracism. Scientific
communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not as tightly knit as a geographically bound
community of neighbors, but correspondence networks, Royal societies, and the occasional national and
international gatherings, provided enough structure that a community could store reputations and use ridicule and
ostracism as enforcement mechanisms. But beyond that, what makes a community of practitioners special is the set
of cognitive tools that govern the personal practices of its members: the concepts they use to refer to phenomena; the
statements about phenomena they believe to be true; the problems posed by phenomena; the reasoning strategies
developed to tackle those problems; and the classification schemas used to order the domain. 12 This list should be
left open because it is impossible to tell in advance what novel cognitive tools could be added in the future. In the

3
late eighteenth century, for example, the personal practice of chemists did not include empirical formulas like H2O,
and as recently as the 1860’s mathematical models were an alien cognitive artifact to most chemists. Yet, by the
middle of the nineteenth century not only empirical formulas had been permanently added to the repertoire, but
several new versions (rational, type, structural) had been invented. And by the start of the twentieth century
mathematical models were on their way to general acceptance in physical chemistry.

Because what my book offers is just a simplified model of a scientific field, all the cognitive tools that
structure personal practices are also simplified models. Thus, empirical problems are modeled as Why questions,
questions such as “Why does substance X has these properties, instead of other properties?” or “Why does the
reaction between substances X and Y produces substance Z, instead of another substance.?”. This is one way of
modeling problems, one which has been carefully investigated, but clearly it is not the only way. We can pose
problems about chemical mechanisms using How questions, for example. So a fuller treatment would have to
include the various kinds of questions that can be used to express what in a phenomenon is deemed problematic. In
the case of concepts, my simplified model tackles only concepts for substances and chemical reactions, as well as
concepts for the properties and dispositions of these two kinds of phenomena. In these cases, the crucial function of
concepts is to correctly pick out their referents. In non-realist ontologies, reference is explained by semantic content:
understanding the meaning of a term gives us the means to select its referent. This account of reference also works
for those realists who believe that essences ensure the identity of real objects, since in this case the meaning of a
concept picks out the essence of the referent. But for realists who reject essentalism, reference is fixed
pragmatically, by performing causal interventions on phenomena. A well known example comes from the ancient
practice of assaying: to know whether this chunk of yellow metal is the referent of the term “gold” we do not consult
a dictionary definition but pour aqua regia on it: if the metal dissolves in it, but fails to do so in its ingredients taken
separately, then it is gold. 13 More generally, the referent of concepts for chemical substances can be fixed by the
methods of separation and purification needed to produce the substances. This is why we can confidently assert that
the acid substances that were part of the domain of 1700 were sulphuric, hydrochloric, and nitric acid, even though
back then chemists used the terms "spirit of sulphur", "spirit of salt", and "aqua fortis", which have entirely different
meanings. What gives us confidence is our knowledge of the techniques used to produce these three acids:
distillation of vitriol with ferrous sulfate, sodium chloride, and potassium nitrate, respectively. 14 It is important to
notice that I am not saying that the meaning of a substance concept is given by a method of preparation. This would
create problematic ambiguities in those cases in which there are several ways to produce a given substance. Rather
we are bypassing meanings all together and explaining reference by a process akin to affixing the label “sulphuric
acid” to a glass flask containing sulphuric acid.

To model the statements believed to be true by a community of practitioners at any point in time, we need
to select an account of truth. Truth is a tricky notion, and there really is no consensus among philosophers as to its
nature. 15 But we can simplify things by distinguishing from the start between the notions of truth of individual
statements and that of truth of entire theories. If the body of knowledge produced by scientific fields is as
heterogeneous as I am claiming, then the concept of a “theory” when applied to the entire output (as opposed to a
single hypothesis or model) is misleading, and so is the concept of the truth of such an overall theory. The exception
to this are bodies of knowledge that have been casted in axiomatic form, because in this case we can identify the
truth of the theory with the truth of its axioms (and derivatively, of its theorems). But this conception does not
generalize, since outside of physics there are rarely any axiomatizations, and even when it does apply it does not
solve the problem, because there usually are many alternative ways to axiomatize a theory, an embarrassment of
riches that raises the question of which of the alternative sets of axioms represents the truth of the theory. Thus,
rather than artificially homogenize cognitive content we must strive to discover the different forms of rightness of fit
that characterize each of the different items: problems can be well posed or badly posed; explanations can be
adequate or inadequate; taxonomies can bring order to the domain to different degrees. We must, of course,
preserve truth among the different types of rightness of fit, but only when applied to individual statements. Chemists
in the 1700's did not philosophize much about truth. But one thing is clear: almost all of them rejected a priori
schemes and hence would have rejected the justification of true statements in terms of their derivability from self-
evident truths. An eighteenth-century chemist would have probably agreed with the following characterization: The
statement "Glauber's salt is composed of vitriol and the base of sea salt" is true if Glauber's salt is composed of
vitriol and the base of sea salt. 16 This is Alfred Tarsky’s conception of truth, an account which can be casted in
terms of the concept of satisfaction, in turn explainable in terms of the notion of reference.

There is much more to be said on this topic, but let me move on to discuss some of the consequences of
refusing to conceive the cognitive content of a field as if it was fused into a seamless totality. First of all, the local
criteria for improvement of each item can be clearly defined and their actual refinement in the hands of specific
practitioners tracked over time: the referent of concepts can be fixed better; the truth of statements can be extended
by generalization, and be made more precise by moving from qualitative to quantitative truths; the list of
presuppositions of a problems can be made more complete and its contrast spaces be made more specific, and so on.

4
This way, we can replace the holistic notion of “scientific progress” with the much more concrete concept of a
plurality of series of local improvements. Second, if we agree that each cognitive item changes at its own rate, and
that the changes are distributed differently across a community, then the existence of multiple partial overlaps
becomes plausible: some practitioners may disagree on how the referent of a concept must be fixed but agree on the
truth of statements in which the concept appears; or they may dispute the value of an explanatory schema, but accept
the significance of the problem the schema is meant to solve. These overlaps can keep communication from
breaking down during a controversy, so that mutual understanding of arguments in favor and against the disputed
conclusions are possible, and new evidence bearing on the dispute can be taken into account. Let me illustrate this
point with what is surely the most famous controversy in chemical history, that between Lavoisier and Priestley in
the closing decades of the eighteenth-century.

One way of looking at this episode is as a confrontation between two paradigms, an old paradigm centered
around the Sulphur principle (or as it was renamed, phlogiston) and a new, modern paradigm centered around
oxygen. These paradigms are assumed to be monolithic entities, in which the very identity of the components is
defined by their relations, so they must be accepted or rejected as a whole. And because the very standards used to
assess evidence are part of the seamless totality, there is no independent way of moving from one paradigm to
another through argumentation and reasoned debate: only a religious conversion can allow a practitioner to switch
sides. Postulating relations of exteriority among cognitive items, on the other hand, allows for partial overlaps that
prevent a total communication breakdown between the two sides. And the subject of the controversy can be made
much more precise: not two world views confronting each other but two models of a chemical reaction (or family of
chemical reactions) one in which the reaction was explained by the emission of a substance (phlogiston) and another
in which the same reaction was accounted for by the absorption of a substance (oxygen). The controversy was
started by a single problem: if in the combustion of metals one component of metallic substances is emitted and lost,
then why are the calces produced by the reaction heavier rather than lighter.? The terms in which this problem could
be solved were shared by all participants: as with any other chemical reaction any valid solution must be framed in
terms of affinity relations. Affinity, therefore, could serve as a bridge, as arguments in favor or against a model
could be framed in affinity terms and accepted by both sides. Thomas Kuhn is therefore mistaken when he asserts
that affinity theory was part of a paradigm that was left behind at the start of the nineteenth century. In fact, the
concept of affinity continued to be used and improved for the next hundred years by both organic and physical
chemists. 17

Another advantage of rejecting monolithic paradigms is that the outcome of a controversy need not be
viewed as a sudden conversion, a process without any temporal structure. The controversy we are discussing, for
example, lasted a quarter of a century; it changed in nature as new evidence was added; and the set of possible
solutions was explored collectively by both sides, with critics (and even hold outs) playing a constructive role in the
creation of the final argument. The reason why the debate was seen at the time to affect all of chemistry was because
of the relatively large portion of the domain that was under scrutiny. The explanation of several chemical reactions
was contentious: calcination, the analytic transformation of a solid and shiny metal into a dusty and opaque calx;
reduction, the transformation performing the inverse operation, converting a metallic calx into a solid metal; and
finally, acidification, the reaction undergone by metals in interaction with acids, an apparently unrelated type of
chemical transformation until chemists realized that it could be conceived as a form of liquid calcination. 18 The
number of phenomena associated with these three types of reaction was so large that mastering them all would have
tested the abilities of even the best chemists at the time. And to make things more complex, some of the substances
involved were gases, and the very status of these ‘airs’ as distinct substances had not yet become stabilized. There
were seven practitioners directly involved, four French, two British, and one Irish, with several others contributing
from the sidelines. Despite their disagreements, these seven chemists were involved in a collective exploration of
the same space because of what they shared in common. For example, the British, who ended up on the losing side,
were the masters of pneumatic chemistry, the branch of the field that contributed the solution to the chemical status
of gases, and hence, of oxygen. The French chemists had to catch up with them as the debate raged, benefiting from
their successes and learning from their failures. 19

Viewing heated controversies as involving a collective exploration of a space of solutions to a problem

provides us with one model of consensus formation, a kind of collective instantiation of eliminative induction. 20
Other episodes in the history of chemistry require different explanations. The compositional problems posed by
organic substances, for example, with their myriad variations arising from the combination of a few elements,
demanded the slow convergence by mutual adjustment of many factors: if the numerical results of quantitative
analysis could be reconciled with the decomposition products of chemical reactions, and if these could be reconciled
with the way in which a substance tended to break down into pieces, the mutual fit of the different lines of evidence,
none of them compelling on its own, could itself be considered a source of evidence. 21 Another example of the
formation of consensus by mutual adjustment involved compositional units like atomic weights, valence numbers
designating the capacity to combine of a given elementary substance, and the Periodic Table of the Elements.
Compositional units were determined by measuring the amounts of different alkalis that exactly neutralized a
reference acid, or the amounts of different gaseous substances that combined with a reference gas, but unknown
sources of variation – the unsuspected existence of isotopic variants distributed statistically according to geological

5
accident – made their exact values hard to determine. But the rough values, if used to order all known elementary
substances, revealed other regularities: the chemical properties of the elements repeated at regular intervals, creating
groups of substances bearing family resemblances to each other. These were, of course, the rhythms captured by the
Periodic Table, rhythms that were so robust that they could be used to adjust atomic weights. The latter, however,
had another source of indeterminacy: assumptions about combining capacities. Thus, if hydrogen and oxygen were
assumed to combine one to one, then the formula for water should be HO, but if they combined two to one, then the
formula should be H2O. The groupings of the Periodic Table could be used to check some of these assumptions,
because capacities to combine (valencies) displayed regular variations across neighboring elements belonging to
different groups. 22 Thus, regularities in combinatorial units, taxonomic schemas, and the dispositions to combine
that different substances displayed in chemical reactions, could be adjusted to one another, the convergence itself
serving as a convincing source of evidence.

These mechanisms of consensus formation are imperfect, so the consensus reached is always partial, both
in the sense that there are always hold outs that never accept the evidence, and that among those who do accept it
there may be disagreements in detail. Other episodes, in which the disagreement is over methodology show a similar
pattern. Just as consensus about the explanation of the properties of organic compounds was being reached, and
almost everyone agreed that the nature and proportions of components were the crucial factors in that explanation,
new substances were discovered that had identical components in the same proportions and yet possessed different
properties. This so-called “isomeric substances” demanded an additional causal factor to be explained: the spatial
arrangement of components. But since this added factor demanded going beyond what was directly observable, so
that generalizations about spatial structure could not be reached using induction, chemists were forced to propose a
hypothetical cause and then test its consequences. In other words, they were forced to use the hypothetico-deductive
method, a maneuver that was at first highly controversial. Special formulas that depicted the connectivity of the
components of a substance were introduced, the so-called structural formulas, to predict the number of isomers that
different substances should have. There was little dispute on how to produce evidence for this: go ahead and
synthesize the predicted isomers. But structural formulas seemed to demand a commitment to unobservable entities,
atoms, and consensus about their existence did not form until the opening decades of the twentieth century. Yet,
partial consensus could be established since those who rejected the existence of atoms could still accept the formulas
as convenient isomer-counting devices. 23 This shows that the unbridgeable gap between atomists and anti-atomists
postulated by Kuhn did not really exist. In fact, in the nineteenth century there were intimate collaborations between
the two camps, like the partnership between Laurent and Gerhardt, showing that the divide between the two stances
could be negotiated, provided there was enough overlap in other cognitive items.

Controversies over methodology can lead to bitter disputes in which the leading participants do in fact talk
past each other. Thus, when mathematical models were introduced into physical chemistry the debate between
Ostwald and Armstrong, one defending the other attacking the validity of the methodology, would seem to validate
the idea of a paradigm shift, but only if we concentrate on the leading participants’ behavior. But the controversy
involved many practitioners and it had a temporal structure: arguments evolved in response to criticisms; new
evidence was produced and assessed; and intermediate positions were developed. Journals and chemical societies
played a constructive role, organizing encounters between the rival factions, reporting both sides of the discussion,
and assessing the cognitive costs and benefits of each position. In addition, some participants exerted a moderating
force, bringing the exchange back from polemics to serious debate, promoting good will, and smoothing out
misunderstandings. In time, the two rival leaders tired of the debate and withdrew, leaving the participants
occupying the middle ground to forge a compromise. 24 A more detailed historical analysis may reveal yet other
ways in which the resolution of conflict by the imposition of authority can be prevented. But even in those cases in
which an authoritarian outcome has not been avoided, we must assess the extent to which those who imposed it
managed to make it endure past their own generation, or to prevail beyond their own country. In most cases, the
effects of authority are of limited temporal or geographical extent. This is why historical studies that concentrate on
a controversy’s main participants (such as Boyle and Hobbes), that focus on a single country, and that consider
evidence from only a few decades, can be so deeply misleading.

Let me finish this presentation by discussing another difference between the model I am proposing and
Kuhn’s paradigm theory. The latter offers a general mechanism for scientific change: as the everyday routine puzzle
solving that characterizes normal scientific practice grinds on, anomalous results are set aside and allowed to
accumulate; when these anomalies reach a critical mass, an episode of revolutionary science takes place that leads to
a wholesale replacement of one paradigm by another. My model, on the other hand, offers no such general
mechanism. Its merit is the way in which it allows us to explore the historical record in its full heterogeneity,
highlighting what is unique about each scientist’s practice while still leaving room for the shared content produced
by the previous generation’s partial consensus. Every personal and collective achievement is taken to be contingent,
but this does not imply either that it was arbitrary nor that it was inconsequential. To say that improvements to
existing cognitive content, or the introduction of novel cognitive tools, is contingent is only to say that just as the
improvements or innovations happened they may not have happened. This can help us avoid the charge of writing
Whiggish history, of giving the development of scientific fields a teleological drive they do not really have. On the
other hand, it would seem to commit us to affirm that the history of chemistry could have happened otherwise, and

6
thus, that a different history could have led to an entirely different form of knowledge. This conclusion is wrong.
While there are many ways in which the domain of inorganic chemistry could have been explored – it was not a
historical necessity that neutral salts should become the organizing center of the domain – we may find that some
paths were more probable than others, given the previous availability of known substances, reactions and expertise.
But more importantly, the realist ontology underlying my model prevents the contingency of paths from
degenerating into relativism: while there may have been many possible paths to achieve the separation and
purification of elementary substances, those paths would have converged into the real elementary substances. And
given that many different scientists were working on the task of bringing order to this part of the domain, there was
plenty of causal redundancy to eventually lead to something like the Periodic Table. When it comes to organic
compounds, on the other hand, the infinite number of possible combinations taken as an objective fact, allows for a
wider variety of possible histories of improvement and innovation, but it still blocks relativism: it does not matter
what path research actually followed, chemists would have eventually concluded that carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and
hydrogen are the basic building blocks. In his later writings Kuhn denounced the relativistic interpretations of his
work. It would have been better if those interpretations had been blocked from the start by espousing a robust realist
ontology.

REFERENCES

7
1. Manuel DeLanda. Philosophical Chemistry. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015.)

2. John Murray. A System of Chemistry. Volumes I. (Edinburgh: Longman, Hurst & Rees, 1806). p. 72.

3. Joseph E. Earley. Why There Is No Salt in the Sea. In Foundations of Chemistry,7, p. 85-102 ( Amsterdam:
Springer, 2005.)

4. Manuel DeLanda. A New Philosophy of Society. (London: Continuum, 2006.) Ch. 2

5. Dudley Shapere. Scientific Theories and Their Domains. In The Structure of Scientific Theories. Edited by
Frederick Suppe. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977) p. 518.

6. Ian Hacking. Representing and Intervening. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 224-228.

7. Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefévre. Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science. A Historical Ontology.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). p. 16.

8. Robert Siegfried. From Elements to Atoms. A History of Chemical Composition. (Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society, 2002) p. 87.

9. Mi Gyung Kim. Affinity, That Elusive Dream. A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution. (Cambridge: the MIT
Press, 2003) p. 191.

10. Adolphe C. Wurtz. An Introduction to Chemical Philosophy According to the Modern Theories. (London: J.H.
Dutton, 1867). p. 106.

11. August Bernthsen. A Textbook of Organic Chemistry. (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1912). p. 30, 42, 49, 54,
66, 82, 86, 121, and 140.

12. Philip Kitcher. The Advancement of Science. Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 74-86.

13. Hillary Putnam. The Meaning of "Meaning". In Mind, Language, and Reality. (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1979) p. 227-228.

14. Robert Siegfried. From Elements to Atoms. Op. Cit. p. 70.

15. Richard L. Kirkham. Theories of Truth. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) p. 20-31.
16. Ibid. p. 161-162.

17. Thomas S. Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970.) p.
132.

18. Mi Gyung Kim. Affinity, That Elusive Dream. A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution. (Cambridge: the MIT
Press, 2003) p. 338-339.

19. Ibid. p. 315.

20. Philip Kitcher. The Advancement of Science. Op. Cit. p. 288.

21. Ursula Klein. Experiments, Models, and Paper Tools. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.) p. 205.

22. Eric R. Scerri. The Periodic Table. Its Story and Its Significance. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). p.
126-130.

23. Peter J. Ramberg. Chemical Structure, Spatial Arrangement. The Early History of Stereochemistry. 1874-1914.
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). p. 243.

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 24. Riki G. A. Dolby. Debates Over the Theory of Solution: A Study of Dissent in Physical Chemistry in the
English-Speaking World in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Historical Studies in the Physical
Sciences. Vol.7 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). p. 322 and 349.

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