By John G McEvoy
Till lately, the Chemical Revolution was once the Cinderella of clinical revolutions, demurely wedged among her noisier and extra visible sisters - the medical Revolution of the 17th century (which observed the beginning of contemporary science), and the Darwinian Revolution of the 19th century (which evoked passionate debates concerning the foundation of lifestyles and human future) - the extra prosaic concerns linked to the Chemical Revolution attracted the curiosity of just a handful of historians and traditionally minded chemists. The final fifty years, even if, have witnessed virtually as many reports of the Chemical Revolution as happened within the previous century. This examine bargains a severe survey of previous and current interpretations of the Chemical Revolution designed to lend readability and course to the present ferment of perspectives. fascinated with interpretive styles instead of details, it relates this series of interpretive types - positivism, post-positivism and the sociology of clinical wisdom - to the emergence and improvement of philosophical and sociological versions of technology. It explores inside of this framework more than a few diverse interpretations of the Chemical Revolution, noting conflicts and tensions among rationalist and relativist, realist and antirealist, materialist and idealist, and essentialist and nominalist philosophical sensibilities. eventually, it outlines an alternate, ancient interpretation of the Chemical Revolution, highlighting continuity and discontinuity, id and distinction, permanence and mutability, within the phenomenon of clinical swap.
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Additional info for Historiography of the Chemical Revolution: Patterns of Interpretation in the History of Science
Sample text
Since the statements of metaphysics, theology, and ethics are neither analytic nor experimentally testable, Logical Positivists dismissed them as ‘meaningless or linguistically impossible’. This Manichean research strategy shaped the view that Logical Positivists held about the nature and function of the philosophy of science and its relation to the discipline of the history of science. Since the philosophy of science is clearly not an empirical discipline, Logical Positivists were forced by the threat of meaninglessness to construe it as a logical or formal activity.
Comte’s deterministic view of the organic development of knowledge and society encouraged a relativistic respect for the developmental stages of the different disciplines of science; but this respect was mitigated by his teleological view that all the sciences are moving towards the same basic mode of knowledge. 12 Logical Positivists like Rudolph Carnap and Otto Neurath embraced these views with particular enthusiasm, linking the unity of science to the deployment of a single international method and language of science grounded in the theory-neutral protocols of individual experiences.
9 The Positivist Movement found its philosophical inspiration in a blend of empiricism, rationalism and utilitarian philosophies developed in the previous century. Combining ‘positive philosophy’ with ‘positive polity’, Positivism, Whiggism and the Chemical Revolution 27 positivism deployed these philosophical resources in an optimistic response to the social and cultural upheavals generated by the Industrial Revolution that linked progress and improvement to the explosive growth of science, technology and industry.