ABSTRACT
Was there incommensurability between the phlogiston and the oxygen paradigms? The Chemical Revolution of the late eighteenth century was one of the stock examples to which Kuhn referred in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR), although he did not make a separate in-depth study of it. At almost every major juncture in SSR the Chemical Revolution appears as an illustration, including here: “after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked in a different world” (Kuhn 1970, 118). Therefore the Chemical Revolution has been understood by those sympathetic to the idea of Kuhnian scientific revolutions as a prime case exhibiting incommensurability. Paul Hoyningen-Huene (2008, 101, 114) shows in detail how well the Chemical Revolution fits the Kuhnian model of scientific revolutions, and goes as far as to suggest that this was because the Chemical Revolution was actually constitutive of Kuhn’s thinking about revolutions. All the same, in many other accounts of the Chemical Revolution incommensurability does not feature as a key element of the story, and some authors have made an explicit denial of incommensurability in the Chemical Revolution.
