Abstract
Historians of philosophy have hitherto either given scant attention to Cournot and Renouvier’s views on scientific revolution, tried to read Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolution back into their works, or did not fully appreciate the extent to which these philosophers were reflecting on the works of their predecessors as well as on developments in mathematics and the sciences. Cournot’s views on cumulative development through revolution resemble Comte’s more than Kuhn’s, and his notion of progressive theoretical simplicity through revolution recalls Whewell’s philosophy of science. Renouvier, far from regarding a scientific revolution as resulting in a new set of conceptual boxes imposing a conformity of thought on the scientific community, recognized that a new theory proposed during a revolution is open to more than one interpretation.
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Notes
Saint-Simon wrote of a series of revolutions in science from Copernicus to Newton alternating with political revolutions, but in a posthumous publication that did not appear to have much influence. The Copernican Revolution in science was followed by a political revolution associated with Martin Luther that weakened papal authority, which was followed by a scientific revolution led by Bacon and Galileo, which somehow led to the overthrow of Charles I in England and Louis XIV’s reforms in France, giving rise to the scientific revolution of Newton, Locke, and the Encyclopédie, ultimately leading to the French Revolution. Saint-Simon presented this scheme in his Letter to Physiologists, from his Memoir on the Science of Man, written in 1813 but not published until 1858 (Cohen 1985, 330).
Renouvier raised similar objections to Comte. See Schmaus (2018, ch. 2).
Renouvier cited these same two experiments the following year, at (1873, 231).
See Schmaus (2018, ch. 6). Here I explain that in later works, beginning in the 1870s, Renouvier appears to have distinguished a social contract that establishes certain ground rules for interaction among scientists from specific conventions that guide research. These ground rules make it possible for scientists to reach a consensus about these conventions.
In a later work, Renouvier characterized Newton’s method simply as one of hypothesis testing (1897, vol. 3, 264), rather than induction, and argued that scientists never discovered anything by following rules of induction, at least not in Bacon’s sense (269–270).
Whewell also saw that Newton’s mechanics was open to an interpretation in which it could be made compatible with the vortex hypothesis (1860, 551–552).
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