Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy

Abstract

Recent sociological studies of scientific discovery have challenged the assumption that such discoveries are easily identifiable processes which take place in the mind of heroic discoverers. In this paper, four examples of discovery stories are chosen from the critical period of transition from natural philosophy to the nineteenth-century scientific disciplines. In each case it is impossible to find any criterion for discovery apart from the local practices of contemporary research communities. `Discovery' is a retrospective label attributed to candidate events by these communities - a technique for marking technical practices which are prized by the community. Each discipline was sustained by the reproduction of these new techniques, with the aid of an ideologically loaded model of discovery and discoverers. Finally, it is suggested that the early nineteenth century was also marked by a change in the historiography, as well as the practice, of the sciences. Natural philosophers had often presented their histories as methods for training practitioners in discovery, but historians of the sciences from the early nineteenth century separated the disciplined training of scientists from the heroic discovery moment, for which no training was possible. The emergence of the disciplined sciences was thus the context in which discovery stories were constructed, and in which a historiography emerged which made those stories effective.

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