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Filling the Space of Possibilities: Eighteenth-Century Chemistry's Transition from Art to Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Lissa Roberts
Lissa Roberts
Affiliation:
Department of HistorySan Diego State University
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Abstract

This paper charts eighteenth-century chemistry's transition from its definition as an art to its proclaimed status as a science. Both the general concept of art and specific practices of eighteenth-century chemists are explored to account for this transition. As a disciplined activity, art orients practitioners' attention toward particular directions and away from others, providing a structured space of possibilities within which their discipline develops. Consequently, while chemists throughout the eighteenth century aspired to reveal nature's “true voice,” the path of their investigations was directed by and toward their laboratory manipulations. So long as the chemical community maintained an ethos of polite cooperation and eschewed theoretical wrangling, this point was hidden by a rhetoric of “matter of fact” reporting. But as “facts” mounted in the 1770s and 1780s, especially in pneumatic chemistry, cooperation gave way to contention as chemists sought to name and organize their findings without the guidance of a communally accepted “natural” system. Lavoisier and his fellow “new” chemists offered a forceful solution to this dilemma by introducing a revolutionary network of theories, nomenclature, and instruments that unabashedly fused the productive manipulation of their laboratory work with what they claimed as the structure and activity of nature.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1993 , pp. 511 - 553
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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