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To cite this Article Cutting, Gary(1987) 'Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science', International Studies in the Philosophy
of Science, 2: 1, 55 — 71
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/02698598708573302
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Gaston Bachelard's
philosophy of science
Gary Cutting
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Gary Gutting
Because of his demand that the philosopher of science work from the
historical development of the sciences, the center of Bachelard's philosophy
of science is his model of scientific change. This model, which also provides
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Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science
his account of the nature of scientific progress, is built around four key
epistemological categories: epistemological breaks, epistemological
obstacles, epistemological profiles, and epistemological acts.
Bachelard employs the concept of an epistemological break in two
contexts. First, he uses it to characterize the way in which scientific
knowledge splits off from and even contradicts common-sense experiences
and beliefs. This sense of 'break' is fundamental for Bachelard, since it
constitutes science as a distinctive cognitive realm: '. . . scientific progress
always reveals a break [rupture], constant breaks, between ordinary
[commune] knowledge and scientific knowledge' (1953, 207). Bachelard
illustrates this claim with several examples that we can use to elucidate the
key features of epistemological breaks. He finds one simple example in a
chemistry text's comment that glass is very similar to wurtzite (zinc sulfite).
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The comparison is one that would never occur to common sense, since it is
not based on any overt resemblance of the two substances but on the fact
that they have analogous crystalline structures. Thus, science breaks with
ordinary experience by placing the objects of experience under new
categories that reveal properties and relations not available to ordinary
sense perception.
But we should not think of scientific breaks as merely a matter of
discovering new aspects of ordinary objects, of taking up where everyday
experience leaves off, as a telescope reveals stars not visible to the naked
eye. New, scientific concepts are required to give an adequate account of
even familiar facts. This is very nicely illustrated by the case of Lamarck's
futile efforts to use his exceptional observational abilities to develop an
account of combustion in opposition to Lavoisier's. His approach was to
note carefully the sequence of color changes a piece of white paper
undergoes when burned. On the basis of such observations, Lamarck
interpreted combustion as a process whereby the 'violence' of the fire
'unmasks' the fundamental, underlying color of the paper (black)
by stripping away successive chromatic layers. Bachelard argues that
Lamarck's idea here is not merely wrong in the ordinary way of an
incorrect scientific hypothesis. Rather, it is essentially anachronistic
because it is based on immediate phenomenal experiences that Lavoisier
had already shown to be inadequate for the task of understanding
combustion. 'The time for direct, natural observation in the realm of
chemistry had passed' (1953, 219).
A final example shows how science may break with common-sense
even when employing models based on its language and concepts. This is
the case of Bohr's 'water-drop' model of the atomic nucleus. Via this
model, Bohr pictured the protons and neutrons of the nucleus as forming a
drop of water, the 'temperature' (internal energy) of which increased when
a neutron was added and which partially 'evaporated' when a particle was
emitted from the nucleus. This model was an excellent aid to understanding
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the process of fission, but its use of ordinary concepts must not mislead us.
As Bachelard puts it, such words as 'water-drop', 'temperature', and
'evaporation' occur only in quotation marks. In fact, the words are tacitly
redefined so that they express concepts that 'are totally different . . . from
the concepts of common knowledge' (1953,216). (Imagine, Bachelard says,
the stupidity of asking a physicist to make a thermometer to measure the
'temperature' of the nucleus.)
This last example also illustrates Bachelard's second sort of epistemo-
logical breaks: those that occur between two scientific conceptualizations.
If nuclear 'temperature' is a very different concept from ordinary
phenomenal temperature, it is likewise very different from the classical
conception of temperature as the mean kinetic energy of a collection of
molecules. This illustrates how science develops not only by breaks with
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steadfast in rejecting any view ('naive realism') that would make the
contents of ordinary, subjective experience as or more real than scientific
objects. But he sees the subjective realm that feeds the poetic spirit as
intrinsically valuable and a necessary complement to scientific knowledge.
The concept of an epistemological act counterbalances that of an
epistemological obstacle. Whereas epistemological obstacles impede scien-
tific progress through the inertia of old ideas, 'the notion of epistemological
acts corresponds to the leaps [saccades] of scientific genius that introduce
unexpected impulses into the course of scientific development' (1951, 25).
An epistemological act is not, however, just a change; it has a positive
value that represents an improvement in our scientific accounts. There are,
accordingly, different values that must be accorded to different episodes in
the history of science. Consequently, Bachelard holds that writing history
of science is different from writing political or social history. In the latter
case, 'the ideal is, rightly, an objective narration of the facts. This ideal
requires that the historian not judge; and, if the historian imparts the values
of his own time in order to assess the values of a past time, then we are
right to accuse him of accepting "the myth of progress" ' (1951, 24). But in
the case of the history of the natural sciences, progress is no myth. Present
science represents an unquestionable advance over its past, and it is
entirely appropriate for the historian of science to use the standards and
values of the present to judge the past. Application of these standards
results in a sharp division of the scientific past into Thistoire perimee' (the
history of 'outdated' science) and Thistoire sanctioned' (the history of
science judged valid by current standards). More broadly, following F. K.
Richtmyer, Bachelard distinguishes between the story of science - an
account of past scientific achievements that have contributed to our
present body of knowledge - and mere history of science, which includes
efforts that have no positive place in the genealogy of current science
(1951, 27). Bachelard also speaks of an account of science that 'starts from
the certainties of the present and discovers in the past progressive
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Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science
But, for Bachelard, even though all scientific results are open to
revision and some can be definitively rejected, others must be accepted as
permanently valid achievements. Thus, he says that phlogiston theory is
'outdated [perimee] because it rests on a fundamental error.' Historians
who deal with it are working 'in the paleontology of a vanished scientific
spirit' (1951, 25). By contrast, Black's work on caloric, even though most
of it has long been jettisoned, did yield the permanent achievement of the
concept of specific heat. 'The notion of specific heat — we can assert with
equanimity - is a notion that is forever a scientific notion . . . One may
smile at the dogmatism of a rationalist philosopher who writes 'forever'
regarding a scholastic truth. But there are concepts so indispensable in a
scientific culture that we cannot conceive being led to abandon them' (1951,
26).
How is this idea of unalterable progress consistent with Bachelard's
insistence that all scientific results are open to revision? How can an
achievement be 'permanent' and at the same time open to correction in the
wake of an epistemological break? Bachelard's response is that an
epistemological break is not merely the rejection of past science but also a
preservation, via reformulation, of old ideas in a new and broader context
of thought. Specifically, past results are replaced by generalizations that
reject them as unconditionally correct but preserve them as correct under
certain restricted conditions. Bachelard finds a model here in the
development of nonEuclidean geometry. This development refutes the
claim that the Euclidean postulates express the sole truth about geometry
but at the same time presents these postulates as defining one exemplifica-
tion of a more general class of geometries (i.e., Euclidean geometry is the
particular geometry possessed by a space of zero curvature). In the same
way, 'Newton's astronomy can . . . be seen to be a special case of
Einstein's "pan-astronomy" ' (1934, 45). This is so not merely because, to
a certain approximation, Newtonian calculations yield the same numbers
as Einsteinian calculations but because key Newtonian concepts such as
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Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science
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have to think that the basis of our science will prove any firmer than did
that of our forebearers? But, beyond this, Bachelard argues that there are
no grounds for according Cartesian intellectual intuitions (or any other sort
of claim to direct intuitive knowledge) the privileged certainty that
Descartes does. His critique of intuition centers on the two poles of an
intuitive experience: its subject and its object.
With respect to the latter, the object of a foundational intuition must be
analyzable into a set of simple elements, each known fully and unambigu-
ously. To the extent that the objects of our experience contain hidden
complexities, our judgments about them are subject to correction in the
light of more penetrating analyses. This is why Descartes, in particular,
required that clear and distinct perceptions effect a reduction of their
objects to 'simple natures'. (Similarly, foundationalists in the modern
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will think as I have to the extent that I make you aware of the problem to
which I have found the solution'. In this way, we achieve the 'sanctioning
[consecration] of our method, the proof of the efficacy of our thought, the
'socialization of truth' (1949, 58).
In this connection, Bachelard speaks of a move from the solitary cogito
to the communal cogitamus (1949, 57) and from individual existence to
social surexistence (1949, 60). (He also speaks of the community of truth as
based on a corationalism.) His key point is that this move from the
personal to the interpersonal is a move from the merely psychological to
the genuinely epistemological whereby 'a psychological value becomes an
epistemological value' and 'personal knowledge acquires a certain security
by becoming the knowledge of the scientific community [une connaissance
de la cite scientifique]' (1949,48). Indeed, he even exploits the psychological
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it to x-rays: 'Thanks to the slow cooling of the ball of wax, the surface
molecules will be oriented in a precise way relative to the surface of the
drop. This orientation will determine the diffraction pattern of the x-rays
and yield spectrograms similar to those obtained . . . for crystals.' On the
basis of established results with crystals, the scientist will expect these
spectrograms to provide explanations of many of the wax's surface
properties (smoothness, adherence, oiliness, etc.). Bachelard goes on to
suggest how further techniques might be employed to determine the
molecular structure of the wax at deeper levels. But the essential point
should be already clear: scientific observation consists in the systematic
manipulation of an object on the basis of a theoretical preunderstanding of
it. The scientist treats the object as he does because an already accepted
theory tells him that this is how to reveal the object's secrets. The very
process of scientific observation is based on a theoretical redescription of
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NOTE
REFERENCES
Bachelard, G. (1927), Essai sur la connaissance approché, Vrin.
Bachelard, G. (1929), La valeur inductive de la relativité, Vrin.
Bachelard, G. (1933), L'histoire des sciences dans l'enseignment, Publications de
l'enseignment scientifique, no. 2.
Bachelard, G. (1934), Le nouvel esprit scientifique, Presses Universitaires de
France. References will be to the English translation by Arthur Goldhammer,
The New Scientific Spirit, Beacon Press, 1984.
Bachelard, G. (1938), La formation de l'esprit scientifique, Vrin.
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