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Theory Pursuit: Between Discovery and Acceptance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Laurie Anne Whitt
Laurie Anne Whitt*
Affiliation:
Michigan Technological University
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Scientists typically do something other than accept or reject their theories, they pursue them. Throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century numerous chemists devoted their research energy and resources to the development of Daltonian theory, declaring themselves willing to make use of the atomic theory in their research but reluctant or unwilling to accept it. When Frankland, for example, declared that he did not want to be considered a “blind believer” in the atomic theory and could not “accept it as true”, but that he had been—and planned to continue—using it “as a useful ladder”, he had arrived at a decision shared by many of his colleagues that while the theory was not acceptable, it was promising and worthy of pursuit.1 And when Van’t Hoff measured the kinetic-molecular theory by its fruits in the 1880’s, he judged that it barely gave the then-current 4% interest rate, and so was an unpromising theory, unworthy of pursuit (van Nelsen 1960. p. 151).

Type
Part VIII. Theory and Hypothesis
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 467 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1990

Footnotes

1

See B. Brodie (1868-69, p.435). Other such 19th century chemists include W.H. Wollaston and J. Berzelius, whose work is described below. A more extensive account of these developments can be found in (Whitt 1990).

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