The rupture in chemistry between common sense and scientific knowledge from the analisis of Gaston Bachelard

Abstract

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the rupture between common sense and scientific knowledge of Chemistry from the epistemology of Gaston Bachelard. As a guideline for such an analysis, the concepts of immediate materialism and learned materialism, which appear mainly in the bachelardian work Le Matérialisme Rationnel of 1953, were taken as the great bases of thoughts that founded Chemistry science in different historical periods. It will be demonstrated that in Bachelard's epistemology the concept of immediate materialism equals the moment in which there was continuity between common sense and scientific knowledge and that the various ruptures and conceptual innovations that occurred in the present time will establish a new Chemistry based on a new basis of thought, entitled by Bachelard of learned materialism. Here, the materialism is in the advanced state of scientific culture, and by incorporating discursive knowledge about matter, it breaks with the knowledge of appearances and departs definitively from elementary ideas linked to common sense. The chemistry of the new scientific spirit is presented by bachelardian epistemology as an inventive science that creates its object, it instructs and orders reality from mathematical thinking through very peculiar techniques and thus distances itself from the immediate analysis of empirical data of ordinary reality. The Bachelard’s epistemology chemistry points to a series of reorganizations and conceptual updates that serve to characterize the evidence of the evolution of scientific thought.