A Revolution that never happened

Abstract

If we define scientific revolutions as changes of scientists' ontologies, types of causal explanation, and paradigmatic types of methods and instruments, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's contribution to chemistry did not amount to a scientific revolution. Contrary to the received view that Lavoisier initiated a “chemical revolution,” which is accepted by Chang and Kusch, I argue that Lavoisier shared with the phlogistonists their “flat ontology” of chemical substance, established decades before the 1770s, their types of explaining chemical transformation, and their quantitative methods. Based on my historical reconstruction, I criticize Chang's argument that the late eighteenth-century phlogistic systems and Lavoisier's system belonged to two different theoretical traditions. As a consequence, I also question Chang's argument that the acceptance of Lavoisier's system can be explained in terms of dominance of “compositionism” over “principlism.”