Lavoisier and the Chemical Revolution--论文代写范文精选

拉瓦锡更广泛的社会背景也导致了他的工作，可观的收入意味着他有充足的资源和时间进行实验。早期传记作家说，他的财富,优秀的教育,以及坚持行业的精神,注定了他的成功。下面的essay代写范文进行阐述。

Abstract
In previous work, I offered a cognitive account of the chemical revolution in which Lavoisier's oxygen theory of combustion overthrew the phlogiston theory of Stahl (Thagard 1989, 1990, 1992). This account has two parts, a description of the conceptual changes that took place when Lavoisier developed an alternative to the phlogiston scheme and an explanation, in terms of explanatory coherence, of why the oxygen theory was viewed by him to be superior to the phlogiston theory. Both parts are cognitive, in that conceptual schemes are taken to be organized systems of mental representations, and judgments of explanatory coherence are specified as psychologically plausible computational procedures. My account of the chemical revolution thus instantiates the cognitive schema (B) presented above.

I remarked, however, that my account omitted the social side of the chemical revolution and did not presume to tell the whole story (Thagard 1992, p. 113). What would a social explanation of the chemical revolution look like? My aim in what follows is not to provide a full social account of the acceptance of the oxygen theory, but merely to sketch enough that the compatibility and integrability of social and cognitive explanations becomes evident. (Social treatments of the chemical revolution include McCann (1978), Levin (1984), and Perrin (1987, 1988); other useful sources include Guerlac (1961), Conant (1964), Holmes (1985), and Donovan (1988).) From a social perspective, we can look both at the developments of Lavoisier's own beliefs and also at how these beliefs spread to the larger scientific community.

No scientist is an island: Lavoisier had numerous teachers, friends, and associates who contributed to the development of his ideas. We can mention, for example, Guyton de Morveau who demonstrated to Lavoisier in 1772 that metals gain weight when calcined, Joseph Priestley who showed Lavoisier in 1774 his experiments that mercury when heated forms a red "calx", and his wife, Marie, who translated English articles for him, made entries in his notebooks, and drew figures for his publications. Lavoisier was elected young (25) to the French Academy and participated in its meetings. He also had a smaller circle of chemists with whom he could perform experiments and discuss the defects of the phlogiston theory uninhibitedly at a time when senior chemists such as Macquer would not have approved of the aggressive proposal of an alternative theory. Although his most important publications on the oxygen theory were written by himself alone, he had various other joint publications including the influential Methods of Chemical Nomenclature (1787), written with Berthollet and Fourcroy.

Lavoisier's broader social situation also contributed to his work. His substantial income as a tax farmer meant that he had ample resources and time to conduct his experiments (although this position ultimately led to his execution during the French Revolution). According to an early biographer: "His great wealth, his excellent education, his mathematical precision, his general views, and his persevering industry, all contributed to ensure his success" (Thomson 1813, p. 81). Understanding of the differences between the spread of oxygen theory in France and England requires appreciation of the institutional differences between the two countries, which McEvoy summarizes:

The difference between Lavoisier's corporate view of knowledge and Priestley's individualistic epistemology highlights the difference between the institutional organization of French and British science in the late eighteenth century. In the highly organized and centralized community of France, the pressures of formal education, centralized learned societies, employment opportunities, and a competitive system of reward and recognition meant that aspiring French chemist had little choice but to follow the intellectual lead of the academicians in Paris. In contrast, the organization of English science was much weaker, comprising fewer educational institutions, decentralized societies, little employment opportunity, and a looser congregation of amateurs with closer ties to entrepreneurial industry than their French contemporaries. Thus, whereas the highly integrated community of state-subsidized French theoreticians provided fertile ground for the flowering of paradigmatic conformity during the Chemical Revolution, the dissemination of Lavoisier's theory in England met with a more varied resistance. (McEvoy 1988, pp. 210-211).

Thus a full explanation of the development of the oxygen theory should not be limited to conceptual development and belief revision as in my cognitive account. Nevertheless, there is no incompatibility between that account and the relevant social information. No matter how much is said about how Lavoisier gained information from his associates or about how his social situation inclined him to act in certain ways, there remains the problem of describing how his conceptual system developed and changed as he formed and adopted the oxygen theory of combustion, rejecting the phlogiston theory that he had held as a young chemist. As displayed in the integrated Cognitive/social explanation schema (D), cognitive and social explanations of conceptual change can coexist.

Mind and society thus both contributed to the development of the oxygen theory, but they do not tell the whole story either. The experiments of de Morveau, Lavoisier, Priestley and others were a very important part of the development of eighteenth century chemistry: neither mental nor social construction can fully explain why experiments on combustion and calcination gave the results they did. The growth of scientific knowledge is a function of mind, society, and the world. The difficult task for science studies, including naturalistic philosophy of science, is to create a synthetic account of how mind, society, and the world interactively contribute to scientific development.

The social side of the chemical revolution becomes even more prominent if one addresses the question of how other scientists besides Lavoisier came to adopt the oxygen theory. Contrary to the common view that adoption of a revolutionary theory only comes when the proponents of the previous theory die off, the oxygen theory was almost universally adopted in France and (more slowly) in England by scientists who had to abandon their previous phlogiston beliefs. A cognitive explanation of this switch goes roughly like this. Through personal contact with Lavoisier or his disciples, or through reading his argumentative publications, scientists began mentally to acquire the new scientific conceptual scheme. The new mental representations enabled them to understand Lavoisier's claims and to appreciate that the oxygen theory has greater explanatory coherence than the phlogiston theory. This appreciation is part of a cognitive process that led them to accept the oxygen theory, abandoning the phlogiston theory and its conceptual scheme.

From a social perspective, we want to know much more about how information spread from scientist to scientist. Diffusion of the oxygen theory was slow, even in France (Perrin 1988). Members of Lavoisier's immediate circle such as Laplace were fairly quick to adopt his views, but the majority of French chemists came around only in the late 1780s and early 1790s. According to Perrin, nearly all converts initially resisted Lavoisier's theory, but underwent a conversion lasting several years. The duration of conversion has both a social and a cognitive explanation: the cognitive explanation is that developing a new conceptual system and appreciating its superiority to the old one is a very difficult mental operation; the social explanation is that information flow in social networks is far from instantaneous. Lavoisier and his fellow antiphlogistinians worked to improve the flow, by giving lectures and demonstrations, by publishing articles and books, and by starting a new journal, Annales de chimie. It is also possible that different scientists had different interests that made them resistant to the new theories, although I know of no documentation of this. It is certainly true that different scientists had different initial beliefs and cognitive resources. My cognitive account of Lavoisier cannot be automatically transferred over to all the other scientists, since they had different starting points and associated beliefs. (For discussions of cognitive diversity, see Giere (1988), Solomon (1992), and Kitcher (1993).) In principle, we would need a different cognitive account for each scientist, although these accounts would have a great deal in common, since the scientists shared many concepts and beliefs, not to mention similar underlying cognitive processes.

Thus there is much more to a social account of the chemical revolution than was present in my cognitive explanation of Lavoisier, but the expanded social account must coalesce with cognitive descriptions of Lavoisier and all the other scientists whose beliefs and conceptual systems changed.（essay代写)

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