It was very strange and enjoyable to go back and actually think about what air was before the atomic model was even invented. The experiments that we can do now are no different than the ones that people in the Enlightenment era were performing and we get the same results, yet there were two drastically different ideas prevalent. I do not think that I ever learned of or had heard of phlogiston theory but it is fascinating. The idea prevailed what seemed like 99% of the time. This was by no means perfect but for predicting things or trying to explain things, realistically working a majority of the time is excellent. The two scientists who thought that they saw that phlogiston wasn’t actually leaving the substance but in fact something was actually adding to the objects couldn’t have arrived at this overnight. If a scientist performs an experiment and gets results that don’t match up with the theory, do they instantly think they’ve discovered a hole in the prevalent theory? No. That’s absurd. I would take an ego the size of Saturn to think that one of your experiments could undermine the entirety of science as it was known. The scientists would most likely redo the experiment to ensure that the data is actually true and attempt to come up with a new way that it fits into the prevalent theory. For some they said that phlogiston had negative mass. What I am curious about it where is the boundary. When does a scientist determine that absolutely nothing about the current theory can explain what they are observing and decide to try and pursue this new development. In Lavoisier’s case, it was because he heard another reputable scientist that couldn’t really explain what he was seeing. It is the ideas that aren’t published that could potentially spark another’s imagination into discovering what secrets the universe holds.
Quent, you have really hit on a lot of Kuhn’s ideas here on the progression of science. I think he would argue that it would take a pretty dramatic departure from the paradigm for scientists to see it. Even then, there would be an old-guard that would never acknowledge the holes in a theory. This is certainly true of the story of Priestly (who never rejected phlogiston) and Lavoisier. The other point that Kuhn makes is that there is no real objective reality and that theories are only useful to science because they work for problems they happen to be solving at the time (puzzle solving). Although it seems far-fetched, by this interpretation oxygen is no better a theory or closer to reality than phlogiston, it just works better for the problems being solved today.