Bewi 200901385

Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 32 (2009) 365–378 www.bwg.wiley-vch.
de
DOI: 10.1002/bewi.200901385
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
The Chemists’ Style of Thinking
Zusammenfassung: Der Denkstil der Chemiker. Der Aufsatz diskutiert die Trag-
fhigkeit des Begriffes „Denkstil“, wie er von Alistair Crombie eingefhrt und Ian
Hacking aufgegriffen wurde, fr das Verstndnis dessen, wie das Fach Chemie his-
torisch seine Identitt ausgeprgt hat. Obwohl weder Crombie noch Hacking den
Begriff „Denkstil“ in Bezug auf einzelne Disziplinen verwendet haben, erscheint im
Fall der Chemie seine Anwendung besonders vielversprechend, weil er hier hilft, ein
zentrales Problem zu thematisieren – nmlich die Frage, wie es Chemikern trotz
wechselnder Gegenstandsbereiche und theoretischer Umbrche gelang, eine eigen-
stndige und stabile Identitt auszubilden. Nach einer Einfhrung in den Begriff
„Denkstil“, argumentiert der Aufsatz, dass die Bestndigkeit der Chemie als eines
Faches wesentlich in ihren Laborpraktiken grndet, die ihrerseits wiederum die spe-
zifische Art der Fragen bestimmten, die Chemiker in ihren Forschungen stellten
bzw. die Form der Antworten, nach denen sie suchten. Folgende Merkmale kenn-
zeichnen diesen „chemischen Denkstil“ (1) eine spezifische, im Herstellen be-
grndete Form des Wissens, (2) die Befassung mit einzelnen Stoffen und Materialien
statt mit Materie im Allgemeinen und (3) eine Beobachtung von Natur besonders
im Hinblick auf Transformationsprozesse.
Summary: The Chemists’ Style of Thinking. This paper discusses the relevance of
the notion of “styles of scientific thinking” introduced by Alistair Crombie and re-
visited by Ian Hacking, for understanding how chemistry shaped its identity. Al-
though neither Crombie nor Hacking applied this notion to individual disciplines, it
seems appropriate to use it in the case of chemistry because it helps to address a
puzzling issue: how did chemists manage to shape an identity of their own, despite
shifting territories and theoretical transformations? Following a presentation of the
notion of style, I will argue that the stable identity of chemistry is rooted in labora-
tory practices, which determined the specific questions that chemists put to nature
as well as the answers to their questions. The “chemical style of thinking” is charac-
terized by i) a specific way of knowing through making, ii) the concern with indivi-
dual materials rather than matter in general and iii) a specific commitment to nature.
Keywords: alchemy, atomism, elements, experiment, epistemology, laboratory, ope-
rationalism, style of thinking,
Schlsselwrter: Alchemie, Atomismus, Elemente, Experiment, Epistemologie, La-
bor, Operationalismus, Denkstil,
Introduction
Many historians of chemistry have found themselves confronted with the same diffi-
cult problem: how to reconstruct a broad picture of the discipline from the distant
i 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim 365

past to the present without presupposing that there existed somewhere in nature a
pre-defined territory reserved for enlightened chemists to map out and unveil its
laws.1 For chemistry has no defined territory. Throughout its long history, one can
trace chemists at work in artisans’ and apothecaries’ workshops, in medical faculties
and offices of mines, in agriculture and industry, and today they continue to work in
diverse domains such as environmental science and nanotechnology. Chemistry
spans the borders between the living and the non-living, the heavens and the earth,
and, particularly today, the macroscopic and the microscopic. Chemistry is every-
where and nowhere at once. Given this absence of a well-defined territory, how are
we to account for the apparently solid and rather stable conception of chemistry as a
distinctive discipline? In our History of Chemistry, Isabelle Stengers and I chose not
,
to assume an a priori’ definition of chemistry from the outset but instead adopted
the question of identity as the organizing theme of our narrative.2 We argued that
the profile of chemistry has been shaped and reshaped through institutional and pro-
fessional struggles. Its identity today is the contingent product of a long history of
bold adventures, tremendous successes and occasional failures. The purpose was to
show that the question of identity has been raised time and again by chemists them-
selves who fought both to secure their specificity against rivals or neighbors and to
gain public recognition. In their search for identity they repeatedly enhanced a num-
ber of distinctive features, building up their own image and style. Thus, in our histo-
rical approach, the question that was brought to the fore was the stability of chemi-
stry rather than its changes.
It is this rather stable identity shaped by generations of chemists that this paper
, ,
will explore as the chemist’s style’. The argument is that the notion of style of scien-
tific thinking’ introduced by Alistair Crombie and revisited by Ian Hacking, is rele-
vant and useful for understanding the identity of chemistry. Although neither Crom-
bie nor Hacking applied their notions of styles of scientific thinking to individual
disciplines, it seems appropriate to use this concept in the case of chemistry because
it helps to address the puzzling issue of a stable and resistant identity that seems to
have persisted through the challenges of shifting territories and theoretical change.
The first section presents the notion of style developed by Crombie and Hacking
and the reasons why it is appropriate for capturing the identity of chemistry. Section
2 defines the chemist’s style as a laboratory style. Chemistry was the first laboratory
science and the laboratory remains the privileged place of practice where chemists
produce both theory and substances. Thus, we underline how chemists learn about
nature through artifacts, by analyzing and synthesizing material substances. The
third section characterizes the chemist’s attitude with respect to theories. Through
their laboratory activities, chemists developed a specific way of theorizing and speci-
fic views of matter. In particular, their views of atoms shaped over the nineteenth
century differ deeply from both the metaphysical notion of Ancient Greek philoso-
phers and the views developed in atomic physics. In conclusion, I try to characterize
the general conception of nature underlying chemical practices.
1. Styles and epistemic diversity

Crombie’s opus magnum Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition was
a landmark in the history of science because of its dual ambition: i) to provide a glo-
366 i 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim Ber.Wissenschaftsgesch. 32 (2009) 365–378
bal picture of Western science since Antiquity in a period when micro-history had
become more fashionable than this kind of big-picture approach; ii) to emphasize
the diversity of scientific rationalities. In contrast to those philosophers of sciences
who assume that there is one single “scientific method” or “scientific spirit” (often
modelled on mathematical physics), Crombie, who had a broad historical view of
science from Antiquity to the Renaissance and “the scientific revolution”, emphasi-
zed the diversity of the routes of scientific inquiry. He minutely described the va-
rious notions of causality, the questions addressed to nature and the various ways of
tackling them. He clearly outlined different views of nature underlying scientific in-
vestigations. His notion of styles – always in plural – was first and foremost an at-
tempt to emphasize the diversity of scientific methods. In particular, Crombie paid a
lot of attention to the taxonomic and historical sciences, which had been neglected
by his teacher Alexandre Koyr. Crombie’s typology of six different styles – 1) pos-
tulation, 2) experimental argument, 3) hypothetical modelling, 4) taxonomy logic, 5)
probabilistic and statistical analysis, 6) historical derivation – can be criticized for
being too rigid and narrow. Still, such criticism is just an invitation to complete the
list, as Ian Hacking did when he added “laboratory style” as a sub-division of the
second style, experimental argument. The message hammered home throughout
Crombie’s three thick and erudite volumes is that scientific rationality should no
longer be used in the singular.
Crombie’s ambition was to treat the history of science (including medicine &
technology) as a kind of “comparative intellectual anthropology”. “An historical an-
thropology of science must be concerned above all with people and their vision, their
perception of problems and their expectations in the uncertainty of an unknown fu-
ture, and with their responses both in ideas and in practices within the given intellec-
tual and technical possibilities”.3
Crombie’s “intellectual” anthropologists of science have to put themselves “into
the minds of individuals and societies” in an attempt “to understand their questions
and satisfactions and discontents.”4
Paying attention to people and their vision of the world, does not, however, imply
that the styles of scientific thinking are personal for Crombie, but instead characte-
rize a community of people. Although Crombie did not mention – and was presu-
mably unaware of – Ludwik Fleck’s notion of “Denkstil”,5 he shared Fleck’s view of
collective structures of thought, which influence individuals. He also, like Fleck,
characterized styles by their functions. “A scientific style with its commitments
identified certain regularities in the experience of nature, which become the object of
inquiry, defined the questions to be put within that subject matter and that style and
determined the acceptable answers. A style thus opened certain routes of inquiry
and closed others.”6
Although Fleck’s notion of “Denkstil” applied to specific fields of inquiry rather
than to scientific methods, in both cases the notion of style refers to a set of tacit
visions and precepts connected with a subject-matter and with a research tradition
that determine – and constrain – investigative pathways.7 Crombie especially em-
phasized the dual function of styles, in that they both open up avenues and at the
same time inhibit certain questions and forbid alternative pathways.
Contrary to Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms, styles are not incommensurable. Crombie
admitted that “styles with different objects of inquiry could be incommensurable
Ber.Wissenschaftsgesch. 32 (2009) 365–378 i 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim 367
and linguistically mutually incommunicable” but he also stressed that they could be
combined in any particular research.8 Although each of Crombie’s styles emerged in
a specific historical context, they do not refer to successive diachronic phases of
scientific thinking, but instead can co-exist and sometimes merge or compete in spe-
cific research areas.
Thus, Crombie’s notion of style of thinking can be used as a powerful antidote to
the various philosophies of science based on the assumption that there is a single
scientific rationality, which emerged gradually or discontinuously in Western
science. Through this work, Crombie argued for two major innovations.
First, he called for a more relativistic approach to science, which considered the
“mental ecologies” of different societies and traditions. “The categories in which we
in the West understand man and nature have never been accepted by all mankind and
have become ours only through a long process of orientation and reorientation”.9
His cultural ecology does not, however, lead to a crude relativism denying any de-
marcation between science and other forms of knowledge. On the contrary, Crom-
bie clearly identified the specificity of Western science as a “moral commitment to
truth in the acceptance of scientific argument and evidence”.10
Crombie also argued in favour of historical epistemology, understood as the study
of the changing categories of scientific rationality, such as truth, and objectivity. In-
terestingly, this programme has been most actively pursued not by historians of phy-
sics or mathematics but by two historians of probability (Style N85 in Crombie’s ty-
pology). Lorraine Daston, presently director of the Max Planck Institute for the Hi-
story of Science in Berlin, set out to study how the standards and practices of
objectivity have evolved historically through a comparison of different historical pe-
riods and disciplines.11 While she conducted her programme of historical epistemo-
logy independently from Crombie, Ian Hacking, who raised similar questions about
how objectivity became the standard of truth, presented his program as a continua-
tion of Crombie’s study of styles.12 He endorsed most of Crombie’s assumptions ab-
out science with two apparently minor variations. First, he chose the phrase “style of
reasoning” instead of “style of thinking” because he regarded thinking as too much a
mental process and wanted to insist on the public face of reflection and argument.
Second and more importantly, he was dissatisfied that in his description of style N82
as “experimental argument both to control postulation and to explore by designed
observation and measurement”, Crombie presented a very incomplete view of expe-
rimentation. Hacking pointed out that Crombie did not take into account a specific
style of experimentation, characterized by the building of apparatus in order to pro-
duce phenomena, an approach that Hacking labelled “laboratory style”. In contrast
with the Galilean style described by Crombie, the laboratory style aims at “manipu-
lating” objects by means of instruments.
Hacking’s notion of style offers a more appropriate analytical tool for addressing
the issue of the identity of chemistry, for three major reasons.
First, Hacking insisted that each style of reasoning creates novel objects. The ob-
jects of scientific inquiry are thus generated within the framework of a style; styles
of scientific reasoning generate their own ontologies and consequently prompt onto-
logical debate about the new type of object. This is an invitation to revisit the classi-
cal debates about realism-antirealism in the context of styles of reasoning. Since these
positions are engendered by styles they can be described as conflicts between rival
styles of reasoning in a given period.
Second, Hacking emphasized that although styles are the product of contingent
history, they transcend their historical origin to become standards or canons of
truth.
Every style comes into being by little microsocial interactions and negotiations. It is a contingent matter
to be described by historians. […] Yet each style has become independent of its own history. […] Each
style has become what we think of as a rather timeless canon of objectivity, a standard or model of what it
is to be reasonable about this or that type of subject matter […]. They have become after fierce struggles
what it is to reason rightly.13
Through this changing status, styles turn into prescriptions. They prescribe not
only what is true and what is false but also what is thinkable and what is not. In epi-
stemological terms, they generate a new scientific rationality. In more anthropologi-
cal terms, they generate a new scientific culture.
Thirdly, far from being ephemeral like fashions, styles are durable. “The remar-
kable thing about styles is that they are stable enduring accumulating over the long
haul”. The reason for their resilience is that the process generating norms or pres-
criptions is self-reinforcing – “self-authenticating” in Hacking’s terms14 – and thus
makes styles immune to refutation. Each style of reasoning has its own self-stabili-
zing techniques and “persists in its peculiar and individual way because it has harnes-
sed its own techniques of self-stabilization”.15
Hacking was attracted by Crombie’s concept of style because he found in it a res-
ource to address an issue raised by constructionism. If truth is the local product of a
contingent history, it cannot account for the remarkable stability of science. Hacking
discussed this issue at length in his courses at the Collge de France in 2002–2003
and again in 2006.16
2. Knowing through making

How are we to use this notion of style in order to tackle the issue raised in writing a
History of Chemistry, in order understand the stability of chemistry?
The first thing we can remark is that neither Crombie nor Hacking paid any parti-
cular attention to chemistry. Crombie, trained as an intellectual historian of science,
still described the rational experimenter in the same terms as Claude Bernard, seeing
him as someone who designs experiments according to a clear anticipated interpreta-
tion of observations and thus submits his ideas to the judgement of nature, ready to
abandon them or reinforce them depending on the result. He consequently neglected
the emergence of alternative practices of experimentation meant at creating pheno-
mena and producing artefacts. Although he mentioned that the practical arts intro-
duced a new style into experimental methods, aimed at “a theoretically designed and
measured control of materials of different kinds”, he sketched the portrait of the
“rational artist” after the model of Renaissance artists, painters, sculptors and clock-
makers.17 For Crombie, the practical arts aimed at visual representation, mechanical
machines and book keeping. He did not include alchemical practices among the
various routes of scientific rationality, and, indeed, hardly mentioned alchemy except
as an obstacle to be overcome. Rationality implied attributes such as quantification,
measurement, making chemistry strangely absent from Crombie’s vast panorama of

scientific styles in the early modern and modern periods.18
Although he added a laboratory style, and was more concerned with interventions
and artefacts Hacking, just like Crombie, overlooked chemistry and located the
emergence of laboratory style in Boyle’s air pump. The neglect of chemistry pro-
ceeds from a widespread ignorance of the history of chemistry, particularly serious
in this case, since the laboratory as a space of scientific work was invented by che-
mists.
As the attention of historians of science has shifted from concepts and theories to
practices over the past two decades, instruments and sites of knowledge have become
a major focus of investigation. In the domain of chemistry, Frederic Larry Holmes
was no doubt the historian who insisted most on the significance of the laboratory
for understanding the identity of chemistry.
The problems and objects of study of chemistry have been provided by and limited by the operations
that could be performed on materials in a chemical laboratory […] As theoretical structures changed and
new objectives supplemented or displaced older ones, the stable setting of the chemical laboratory both
identified chemists and distinguished them from other natural philosophers who dealt with some of the
same phenomena that concerned them.19
Invented by the alchemists, this distinctive site of knowledge remained the exclu-
sive domain of chemists until it was in turn adopted by the other experimental scien-
ces as they emerged. The etymology of the term reminds us that the laboratory is a
place of labour, of manual work rather than of inductive or deductive reasoning. In
the seventeenth century, the chemical laboratory ceased to be the dark and messy
room depicted in classical paintings of alchemists, and became a lighter, better venti-
lated place.20 However, unlike the anatomy theatre, or the natural history cabinet, or
the lecture theatre for experimental physics, the laboratory was not a space for de-
monstrating knowledge; it was intended neither for putting the laws of nature on
show nor for presenting nature as a public spectacle. It is a theatre for performing
operations, a place for the transformation of materials. Materials are brought into
the laboratory to be manipulated and changed into something else; the product that
leaves the door is never the same as the raw materials that enter the laboratory.
Today, chemists order their raw materials from chemical companies, which pro-
vide standard, pure products, and we tend to forget that preparing pure substances
used to constitute an essential aspect of chemists’ practice which shaped their style
of reasoning. A recent historical study of eighteenth-century chemistry reminds us
that laboratory science was above all meant to produce artefacts.21 The authors, Ur-
sula Klein and Wolfgang Lefvre, emphasize that eighteenth century chemistry deve-
loped techniques for identifying and tracing material individuals, or “pure substan-
ces”, out of necessity for daily practices. Even in more recent periods the preparatory
side of chemistry remains important, with the ever-increasing production of new
chemicals, as Joachim Schummer emphasized in a series of papers.22
Thus, chemistry developed in the laboratory, and this niche determined a specific
way of knowing with three distinctive features.
First, chemists attempt to know natural substances through transforming them by
means of manipulations and physical operations, accessing nature via a detour by the
laboratory. This does not simply mean that they, like experimental physicists, use the
mediation of instruments to understand natural phenomena. Rather, they take for
granted that only man-made, artificial products provide information about natural
substances. To know the nature and properties of substances, chemists proceed by
analysis and synthesis. Since the Renaissance, decomposition or the resolution of bo-
dies into their components, combined with the recombination of the alleged compo-
nents to give the original substance, has provided the key to understanding material
substances.23 For chemists, we can know only what we have produced through tech-
nological processes. As Gaston Bachelard noted, even when they extract plants or
minerals from nature, chemists first submit them to a number of purifying proces-
ses.24 They rely on facticity’ to understand nature. This is how Bachelard interpre-
,
ted Marcellin Berthelot’s famous statement: “Chemistry creates its object”.25 Ma-
king things and rendering them pure as artefacts is the chemist’s approach to nature.
Second, the practice of chemistry is as much a physical activity as a mental exer-
,
cise. Joan Baptista Van Helmont used to say that God sells the arts in return for
sweat’, meaning that knowledge of nature was to be obtained only at the cost of
painstaking experiments.26 Historically, chemistry provided the grounds for criti-
,
cisms of the esprit de systme’, especially in Diderot’s Encyclopdie. While Diderot
attacked speculative and abstract knowledge in De l’interprtation de la nature, Ga-
,
briel Franois Venel set up the heroic portrait of the chemist as an artist’, in his ar-
ticle “chymie” in the Encyclopdie.27
Third, chemistry, like cookery, involves following recipes stabilized through a
long process of trial and error. The manuals, guides or handbooks of seventeenth-
century chemists were not books of theory. Rather they contained instructions, reci-
pes for correctly bringing about chemical changes. The first printed chemistry cour-
ses or treatises on the subject provided details for preparing medicines, cosmetics,
soaps, etc. After some preliminary chapters in which he discussed the elements or
principles of chemistry, the author would turn to the essentials, i.e. the detailed des-
criptions of how to arrive at a variety of products. 28 Undoubtedly the recipes motiv-
ated the purchase of the book more than the introductory theoretical pages, which
have nevertheless retained the essential of the historians’attention for a long time.
Recipes and protocols were the major vehicles for transmitting knowledge through
, ,
handbooks; as suggested by the terms Handbuch’, or manuel’, these were small vo-
lumes that could be handled while working in the laboratory. We can describe this as
,
a literature of performance’ intended not to construct a discourse, but to discipline
apprentice chemists, to provide rules that were meant to be followed with precision.
Thus, the laboratory shaped a specific way of knowing through making, of rea-
ching nature through artefacts. This mediation required manual skills as well as intel-
lectual activity and a specific genre of discourse and literature for the transmission of
knowledge.
3. Narratives of material plots

If the experimental style of chemistry is practice-oriented does it mean that it is
purely empirical? From the seventeenth until at least the nineteenth century, authors
of chemistry books claimed that their science was empirical. They shaped their spe-
,
cific style in opposition to systems and the speechifying’ scientists of the academy.
Yet it is obvious that chemistry books are theory-laden, relying in particular on spe-
cific theories about the principles constituting matter. However, the rhetorical claims
of their authors call our attention to a specific way of theorizing, which constitutes a
major – albeit largely neglected – feature of their style of reasoning. Chemical theo-
ries, unlike theories in physics, are not really aimed at explaining phenomena. Rather,
they try to make sense of phenomenological data using stories about tiny invisible
atoms or molecules. This specific way of dealing with atoms and molecules seems
remarkably stable throughout history. In the seventeenth century, Nicolas Lemery
forged hooked and spiky atoms to account for the behaviour of acids and alkalis just
as modern chemists use molecular models to predict new compounds. In doing this,
chemists do not claim to provide a causal explanation, and their theory is closer to
being a narrative than a fundamental explanation. Just as early-modern hooked and
spiky atoms were a “Cartesian novel”, modern electronic orbitals could be regarded
as a “quantum novel”. Roald Hoffmann, a theoretical chemist and 1982 Nobel Prize
winner for chemistry, summarized this style in a short sentence: “Making up a story,
while making molecules”.29
Atoms, as we know, are anything but recent objects of science. Nevertheless, the
chemical atoms introduced by John Dalton early in the nineteenth century were new
objects created by the chemists’style of reasoning rather than a “rediscovery of an-
cient atoms” as many historians present them. Nineteenth-century chemists viewed
atoms as fictions or conventions, even those who were staunch advocates of atom-
ism.30 For instance, Charles Gerhardt who developed structural formulas for organic
and inorganic compounds did not consider these formulas as representations of the
,
real world of atoms and molecules. He derived his formulas from three types’ (what
we could term ideal types), which allowed him to interpret a great many reactions,
to classify organic compounds and even to predict unknown compounds by substi-
tuting radicals for hydrogen in each of the types. Nevertheless, he strongly denied
that his formulas reflected the internal architecture of the compounds he was repre-
senting and he refused to view the radicals as isolable and real bodies. They were just
useful and indispensable fictions, taxonomic schemes. Ursula Klein convincingly
presents the chemical formulas of nineteenth-century chemists as “paper tools”.31
They did not represent an exterior reality, but rather allowed the manipulation of
symbols, a visual display of possible recombinations. Structural formulas provided a
sort of simulation experiment. This does not, however, mean that all formulas were
equally acceptable, equally true or false. On the contrary the fierce controversies
among nineteenth-century chemists prove that some of them made a difference. In-
stead, chemical formulas epitomized one major function of styles of scientific reaso-
ning identified by Hacking: “Each style of reasoning introduces new ways of being a
candidate for truth, a new positivity. […] The kind of sentences that acquire positi-
vity are not well described by a correspondence theory of truth”.32
Similarly August von Kekul, who conjectured the hexagonal structure of benzene
that formed the basis of most artificial organic compounds manufactured by the end
of the nineteenth century, denied the existence of atoms. More precisely, he banished
the ontological issue from chemistry, claiming that it belonged to the realm of meta-
physics.
The question whether atoms exist or not has little significance from a chemical point of view: its discus-
sion belongs to metaphysics. In chemistry we have to decide whether the assumption of atoms is a hypo-
thesis adapted to the explanation of chemical phenomena. More especially, we have to consider the ques-
tion of whether or not a further development of the atomic hypothesis promises to advance our knowled-
ge of the mechanism of chemical phenomena. I have no hesitation in saying that, from a philosophical
point of view, I do not believe in the actual existence of atoms, taking the word in its literal signification of
indivisible particles of matter. I rather expect that we shall some day find, for what we now call atoms, a
mathematico-physical explanation, which will render an account of atomic weights, of atomicity, and of
numerous properties of so-called atoms. As a chemist, however, I regard the assumption of atoms, to be
not only advisable, but absolutely necessary in chemistry.33
Thus, nineteenth-century chemists made extensive use of atoms and molecular
models while denying their existence or claiming that they were simply fictions.
This apparently inconsistent attitude survived (in France at least) long after the first
demonstrations of molecular reality and the founding of atomic physics. For in-
stance, the French chemist Georges Urbain wrote as late as 1921: “It is not absurd to
suppose that the atomic model is identical with absolute reality. However, we know
nothing positively about it. This model is a creation of art”.34
Another major feature of the chemical style of theorizing is that chemists never
settle on a single scale for their reflection. In stark contrast to physicists who struggle
to reach the ultimate level of matter, chemists are generally skeptical about the idea
that all properties and chemical behaviors could be deduced from the shape of ulti-
mate particles. This skepticism constitutes a stable feature of their style of reasoning.
In 1669, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, the first secretary of the Royal Academy
of Sciences in Paris proposed the following comparison.
Through its visible operations, chemistry resolves bodies into a certain number of crude tangible prin-
ciples; salts, sulfurs, etc. while through its delicate speculations, physics acts on the principles as chemistry
acts on bodies, resolving them into other even simpler principles, small bodies fashioned and moved in an
infinite number of ways: this is the principal difference between physics and chemistry. […] The spirit of
chemistry is more confused, more dense; this spirit is more like mixts, where the principles are mixed
together one with another, while the spirit of physics is clearer, simpler, less obstructed, and, finally, goes
right to the origins of things, while the spirit of chemistry does not go to the end.35
As Venel argued in response to Fontenelle, chemists do not strive to reach the
roots, or to unveil the ultimate building blocks of matter. Instead, they invent plau-
sible narratives to account for the properties observed in individual substances that
they use, or to predict and make new substances with particular useful properties.
Hence chemists have developed a characteristic expository style in which they con-
stantly shift from the macro- to the micro-level. Chemistry textbooks, whether from
the seventeenth century or from recent decades, tend to juxtapose narratives of expe-
riments performed at the macro-level with narratives about relationships between
invisible microscopic entities. The two kinds of narrative run in parallel but neither
one alone accounts for the ultimate causation.
Thus, structural formulas and molecular models were not intended to refer to real
individual molecules but instead worked as icons representing bonds between indivi-
dual entities that the synthetic chemist could break in order to make new molecules.
The models show what is theoretically possible rather than what is real. In organic
,
synthesis, the creation of an artificial’ molecule is never a simple process of deduc-
tion from a theory or even a set of theories. Chemistry does not comply with the
methodological model that stands at the centre of traditional philosophy of science.
The synthetic challenge is to find a route in order to make compounds that are theo-
retically possible. The industrial synthesis of hundreds of benzene derivatives cer-
tainly depended on Kekul’s hypothesis of the hexagonal ring structure of the ben-
zene molecule, but there was a long road to be traveled from the hypothetical struc-
ture to its concrete production. The synthesis of these molecules also required the
introduction of a suitable catalyst by Friedel and Crafts in 1877. These kinds of

astute inventions that proved so decisive in the rise of the chemical industry, like the
Grignard reaction, for example, still bear the names of their inventors. Although
they can be viewed as scientific discoveries they are true inventions and as such were
the subject of various process patents.
To sum up this section of the paper, chemical theories are not meant to be repre-
sentations of the objective structure of the material world. Rather they are better
understood as tools for operating on this world and transforming substances.36
4. Nature as the theatre of transformations

The theatre metaphor was often used for describing nature in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The standard clich conveyed a mechanistic view of nature as a
spectacle performed on the front of the stage by means of machines that were hidden
backstage. By contrast, the chemists’view of nature is that of a stage where material
actors are interacting and performing more or less predictable operations.
First, it is important to keep in mind that chemists deal with materials, with indivi-
dual substances rather than with matter in general. Thus, while they have used the
terms “substances” or “bodies” for centuries, as Venel noted in Diderot’s Encyclop-
die, “no natural body consists of matter per se”.37 Chemists wanted to know why
only one particular acid dissolves gold or why spirit of niter joined to salt of tartar
produced true saltpeter. To this end, they have paid attention to individual proper-
ties, albeit with respect to a wealth of different materials and their potentialities. One
common theme in this history of chemistry is that explanations of chemical pheno-
mena rely on a few immutable elements taken to be responsible for the individual
properties of compounds. Phlogiston is a typical example. While it was generally
conceived to be irremediably invisible, it could nevertheless be traced by means of
the sensible effects at the phenomenological level caused by its circulation from one
compound to another.
The view of nature gradually shaped by chemists throughout their history is thus
populated with materials (rather than matter in general). This remains the most
stable feature of the chemists’ style of reasoning.
A second recurrent and less obvious feature of chemistry is the prevalence of rela-
tions over substance. The chemists’ concern with individual substances and the stuff
they are made of does not automatically imply a form of substantialism. Chemists
do not necessarily postulate the Aristotelian view of substance as a permanent and
pervasive substrate underlying phenomenological change. Although the principle of
the conservation of matter played a central role in Lavoisier’s chemistry, it did not
imply any privileging of the notion of substance. Rather, as the philosopher Emile
Meyerson and Hlne Metzger rightly noted, Lavoisier transformed the metaphysi-
cal principle, which postulated the conservation of qualitative and sensible qualities
of matter into an operational principle, essential for interpreting quantitative experi-
ments.38 Indeed, historians of chemistry would object that Lavoisier set up a compo-
sitional paradigm in chemistry, and that post-lavoisieran chemists were satisfied
when they identified substances by the nature and proportion of their constituent
elements.39 However, despite the historical significance of this episode, one cannot
ignore that Lavoisier’s analytical chemistry did not cover the entirety of chemical
science and left aside the central issue of affinities as well as organic compounds.40
Therefore, nineteenth-century structural formulas, which were not meant to be ima-
ges of reality, were not pure conventions either, indicating capacities for bonding;
the so-called atomicity or valence. Similarly, series of compounds were essentially
viewed as potential combinations or syntheses. As Ernst Cassirer argued in Sub-
stance and Function, the treatment of an atom as the “absolute substrate” of proper-
ties is only apparent, because in fact the concept of atom serves as a mediator for
mapping out a network of interdependent relations between objects.41
Finally, a third stable feature of the chemists’ style of reasoning, which justifies
and reinforces their commitment with individual materials, is that they consider
them as agencies rather than as constituent elements of the material world. In the
eighteenth century, Hermann Boerhaave and Guillaume-Franois Rouelle redefined
the traditional four elements identified by Empedocles and Aristotle in terms of
agents, conceiving them as both the constituent units of compounds, responsible for
the conservation and transport of individual properties through chemical change,
and instruments for chemical reactions. Rouelle introduced his four-element theory
under the heading “Instruments” that included “natural instruments” – fire, air,
water and earth –, and two artificial instruments – menstrua and vessels. The ancient
radical distinction between nature and human artifacts was thereby blurred in favor
of an instrumental view of matter as an active operational process. Whatever the
theories of matter that they embraced – whether 3, 4, or 5 principles or a broader
plurality of chemical elements – they were not primarily concerned with ontological
issues or with the ultimate foundation of reality. Rather, as Alfred Nordmann argued
they were concerned “with the processes by which reality is transformed”.42 This is
why nineteenth-century chemists could reject all ontological commitment concern-
ing atoms and molecules, while continuing to use them like plumbers use pipes,
valves, and joints. Even today, chemists refuse to endow the atomic theory with the
power of representing the world, particularly when they are considering the range of
possibilities for intervening in the world. In this context, atoms and molecules are
just potential actors in the drama of chemical transformation.
Concluding remarks
The chemists’ style of reasoning clearly belongs to Hacking’s “laboratory style”. In
light of the “practical turn” that has dominated the history of science over the past
two decades, chemistry can be considered as both the source and the epitome of this
style of scientific reasoning oriented towards manipulation and intervention rather
than explanation of natural phenomena. This suggests that the laboratory style did
not originate with Robert Boyle’s air-pump, as Hacking claimed. But the historical
origin of such styles of reasoning is not an appropriate matter for debate. As Hak-
king has rightly noted, the creation of mythical founding fathers is one of the distinc-
tive features of styles.43 It would be more interesting for us to engage a debate over
the systematic neglect of chemistry in most current philosophical essays on the
sciences and their history.44
However in order to conclude this essay on a more positive note, I want to supp-
ort Hacking’s argument that “style” provides a useful tool for articulating history
and philosophy of science. Despite frequent allusions to N. Russell Hanson’s famous
adaptation of Kant – “History of science without philosophy of science is blind […]

philosophy of science without history of science is empty”45 – the articulation of
philosophy and history of science remains a difficult task. And the notion of “style”
is helpful for overcoming a number of obstacles. First, no matter whether one admits
six, seven or any number of styles, the fact that styles are always taken to be plural
helps to deconstruct the illusory unity of scientific rationality. Thus, we can only
write histories of particular sciences and consider local philosophy of science. Se-
cond, Hacking’s development of Crombie’s notion of styles opens up an important
issue that historians of science have tended to neglect, as they have mainly focused
their attention on scientific change. How is it that experimental sciences, such as che-
mistry, which have been open to all sorts of enterprises of reduction or refutation
throughout their history, remain nevertheless relatively stable? In response to this
question, Hacking has drawn the attention of philosophers and historians to the
subtle self-stabilizing techniques developed within styles of reasoning. Finally, alt-
hough the laboratory style of reasoning best distinguishes the discipline of chemistry
from others it can also be found in various cross-disciplinary research areas that are
booming today – such as materials science, nanotechnology, etc. – areas where often
chemists are to be found working in close interaction with other scientists trained in
different styles. The question of how this specific style will evolve or dissolve, there-
fore, is an issue that will have to be addressed by future generations of historian-phi-
losophers.46
1 One of the earliest historians of chemistry, Hermann Kopp (1817–1892), already pointed out the issue
of the identity of the discipline he belonged to. In pointing out the changes in methods and goals over
time he tried to debunk the illusion of an a-historical essence of chemistry. Hermann Kopp, Geschich-
te der Chemie, Brunswick: F. Vieweg und Sohn 1843–47, vol. I, p. 4–5.
2 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Isabelle Stengers, A History of Chemistry, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press 1996, p. 3–8.
3 Alistair Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition, London: Gerald Duckworth
1994, Vol. 1, p. 3.
4 Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (see note 3), p. 7.
5 Ludwik Fleck, Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einfhrung in die Lehre vom Denkstil
und Denkkollektiv, Basel: Schwabe 1935, English transl. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1979.
6 Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (see note 3), p. x–xi.
7 I take the phrase “investigative pathway” from Frederic Larry Holmes. Although Holmes used it for
understanding the personal trajectories of individual scientists, I want to extend the metaphor of the
pathway to emphasize the trails that lead historical development in science in one direction rather
than in any other. (Holmes Frederic L., Investigative pathways. Patterns and stages in the careers of
experimental scientists, New Haven: Yale University Press 2004.)
8 Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking, (see note 3), p. xi.
9 Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking, (see note 3), p. 6.
10 Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking, (see note 3), p. 7.
11 See in particular Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Boston: Zone Books 2007.
,
12 Ian Hacking, Style’ for historians and philosophers, Historical Ontology, Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press 2002, pp. 178–199.
,
13 Hacking, Style’ for historians and philosophers (see note 12), p. 188.
,
,
15 Hacking, Style’ for historians and philosophers (see note 12), p. 193–194
16 See the outline of his Course at the Collge de France in 2002-2003 and the full text of his final lecture
on May 9, 2006. http://www.college-de-france.fr/default/EN/all/historique/ian_hacking.htm
17 Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (see note 3), p. 425.
18 The chemical revolution is mentioned only once (p. 527) and Crombie explained the overthrow of
phlogiston as well as the acceptance of Dalton’s atom by the superiority of theories based on measure-
ment.
19 Holmes Frederic L., La chimica nell’eta dei Lumi, in: Storia delle scienze Natura e Vita, vol. 3, Dal-
l’Antichita all’illuminismo, Torino: Giulio Einaudi 1993, p. 478–525. cit. p. 478. For a more detailed
description of the chemical laboratory see B. Bensaude-Vincent&Jonathan Simon, Chemistry, the Im-
pure Science, London: Imperial College Press 2008, pp. 55–80.
20 See Hlne Metzger, La Chimie. Chapter 2 Le laboratoire au XVIIe sicle, in: M.E. Cavaignac ed.,
Histoire du monde, vol. XIIII, 4th part, Paris: E. Boccard 1930, pp. 11–17.
21 Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefevre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontology,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2007. The similarity of the subtitle “A Historical Ontology” with the
title of Hacking’s 2002 volume where he discusses the notion of style of scientific reasoning may not
be a mere coincidence.
22 Joachim Schummer, Scientometric studies on chemistry I: The exponential growth of chemical sub-
stances, 1800–1995, Scientometrics 39 (1995), 107–123. Scientometric studies on chemistry II: Aims
and methods of producing new chemical substances, Scientometrics 39 (1995), 125–140. Challenging
standard distinctions between science and technology: the case of preparative chemistry, Hyle 3
(1997), 81–94.
,
23 In the Renaissance, chemistry was often referred to as spagyria’ or the spagyric art, a term which,
according to a dubious etymology spread by seventeenth-century chymical textbooks, derived from
, ,
the Greek span’ (to pull apart) and ageirein’ (to put together) Newman, William, and Larry Principe,
Alchemy Tried in the Fire, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2003, p. 90.
24 Bachelard, Gaston, Le matrialisme rationnel, Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1953, reprint
PUF, 1990, p. 22.
25 Berthelot, Marcellin, La synthse chimique, Paris: Alcan 1876, p. 275 (in the 1897 edition).
26 Van Helmont, J.B. De febribus, Opuscula chap. 15, N/26, p. 58 quoted in Newman, William, and Lar-
ry Principe, Alchemy tried in the Fire (see note 23), p. 180.
27 Diderot, De l’interprtation de la nature, 1753. Venel, Gabriel-Franois article “chymie”, in Diderot,
d’Alembert (ed.), Encyclopdie ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences, des arts et des mtiers, vol. 3,
1753, p. 420b. If most historical references in this paper are to French chemists, it is simply because I
know more about the history of French chemistry than that of any other country. It does not mean
that chemical styles should be thought of as national.
28 For instance, Nicolas Lemery’s Cours de chymie, published in 1675 and reprinted until the mid eigh-
teenth-century developed a Cartesian model of a number of chemical operations in the introductory
chapter that were independent from the recipes collected in the rest of the volume. See Michel Bou-
gard, La chimie de Nicolas Lemery, apothicaire et mdecin, (1645–1715), Turnhout: Brepols 1999.
29 Roald Hoffmann, What might philosophy of science look like if chemists built it, Boston University
Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, October 20, 2005.
30 The standard references on atomic debates in nineteenth-century chemistry are the three volumes by
Alan J. Rocke, Chemical Atomism in the Nineteenth Century. From Dalton to Cannizzaro, Colum-
bus: Ohio State University Press 1984; The Quiet Revolution: Hermann Kolbe and the Science of Or-
ganic Chemistry. Berkeley: University of California Press 1993; Nationalizing Science. Adolphe Wurtz
and the Battle for French Chemistry, Cambridge MA: MIT Press 20 1. On the specific status of chemi-
cal atoms see B. Bensaude-Vincent, Atomism and Positivism: A Legend about French Chemistry, An-
nals of Science 56 (1999), 81–94.
31 Ursula Klein, The creative power of paper tools in early nineteenth-century chemistry, in U. Klein
(ed.), Tools and Modes of Representation in the Laboratory Sciences, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publications 2001, pp. 13–34.
,
33 A. Kekul, On some points of chemical philosophy, The Laboratory, I, july 27, 1867. Reprint in R.
Anschtz, August Kekul, Vol. 2, Berlin 1929. Quoted by Britta Grs, Chemischer Atomismus: An-
wendung, Vernderung, Alternativen in deutschsprachigen Raum in der zweiten Hlfte des 19 Jahr-
hunderts, Berlin: ERS-Verl. 1999.
34 Georges Urbain, Les disciplines d’une science, Paris: Douin 1921, p. 11.
35 Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Histoire de l’Acadmie royale des sciences, vol. 1, comments on the
year 1669, cited in Hlne Metzger (1923), pp. 266–68.
36 Chemistry would perfectly fit the argumentation developed by Hacking in Representing and Inter-
vening, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983.
37 Venel, article «principes», D’Alembert, Diderot, Encyclopdie ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences,
des arts et des mtiers, vol. 13, Paris: Briasson 1751, pp. 375–376.
38 Emile Meyerson, De l’explication dans les sciences, Paris: Alcan 1921, Eng tr. Explanation in the Scien-
ces, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991, p. 407. Hlne Metzger, La philosophie de la matire chez Lavoisier,
Paris: Hermann, 1935.
39 On the compositional paradigm see R. Siegfried, B.J. Dobbs, Composition: A neglected Aspect of the
Chemical Revolution, Annals of Science 24 (1968), 275–93. Robert Siegfried, From Elements to Atoms,
A History of Chemical Composition, Philadelphia: American Chemical Philosophy 2002.
40 B. Bensaude-Vincent, Lavoisier, Mmoires d’une rvolution, Paris: Flammarion 1993.
41 Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of relativity, New York: Dover Publica-
tions 1953. Chapter “Conceptualization in natural science”.
42 Alfred Nordmann, From Metaphysics to Metachemistry, in: Davis Baird, Eric Scerri, Lee McIntyre
(eds.), Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of
Science, Dordrecht: Springer 2006, pp. 347–362.
43 “I judge that the laboratory style began about the time that Boyle made the air pump in order to inve-
stigate the spring of air. It is characteristic of styles that they have popular myths of origin. Schaffer
and Shapin set out the myth of origin for laboratory style. Their hero is an instrument rather than a
,
person.” Hacking, Style’ for historians and philosophers (see note 12), p. 185. On the importance of
the founder myth in chemistry see B. Bensaude Vincent, Between history and memory: Centennial
and bicentennial images of Lavoisier, Isis 87 (1996), 481–499.
44 On the neglect of chemistry in philosophy of science see Mary Jo Nye, From Chemical Philosophy to
Theoretical Chemistry. Dynamics of Matter and Dynamics of Disciplines, 1800–1950, Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press 1993. J. Schummer, The philosophy of chemistry,
Endeavour 27 (2003), 37–41. Davis Baird, Eric Scerri and Lee McIntyre (eds), Philosophy of Chemi-
stry, Synthesis of a New Discipline, Dordrecht: Springer Verlag: 2006, “Introduction: The invisibility
of chemistry”, pp. 3–18, B. Bensaude-Vincent, Matire penser, Essais d’histoire et de philosophie de
la chimie, Paris: Presses de l’Universit Paris Ouest 2008, pp. 13–21.
45 N. Russell Hanson: The irrelevance of history of science to philosophy of science, Journal of Philoso-
phy, 59 (1962), 574–586.
Anschrift der Verfasserin: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Universit Paris Ouest Nanterre La Dfense –
Paris X, Dpartement de philosophie, EA 373 – Histoire de la philosophie, histoire des sciences, 200 ave-
nue de la Rpublique, 92001 Nanterre, E-Mail: bensaude@club-internet.fr

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Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 32 (2009) 365–378 www.bwg.wiley-vch.

The Chemists’ Style of Thinking

i 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim 365

1. Styles and epistemic diversity

2. Knowing through making

measurement, making chemistry strangely absent from Crombie’s vast panorama of

3. Narratives of material plots

introduction of a suitable catalyst by Friedel and Crafts in 1877. These kinds of

4. Nature as the theatre of transformations

adaptation of Kant – “History of science without philosophy of science is blind […]

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