Ontological shifts

This insight spurred not only Nelson Goodman, but other philosophers and historians as well, to study modes of classification and structures of kinds and to compare taxonomic changes over time in order to unravel the historical actors points of view. 

For an excellent discussion of this social context of classification, see Barnes et al. [1996], See Goodman [1978] p. 10. 

11 On Kuhn s later views about incommensurability and the translatability of taxonomic structures, see Kuhn [1989], [1993] and Buchwald and Smith [1997]. 

12 On self-reference and related social terms (S-terms), see Barnes [1983], 

Plutonium and other transuranic elements, PVC, Teflon, lasers, and genetically altered organisms are familiar techno-scientific objects to twentieth-century people. But the laboratory sciences were materially productive long before the twentieth century, and this material productivity had consequences for classificatoiy practices. In the laboratory sciences, changes in modes of classification may be conditioned by both alterations of epistemic regimes and the material culture of a science. Chemistry has certainly been the most productive laboratory science in history. From the second half of the eighteenth century onward, the production and individuation of new chem- 

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The simultaneity of chemists collective acceptance of the StahUan theory of an order of chemical composition and their new interest in and classification of the compound proximate principles of plants is a coincidence that had important consequences. Stahl s theory reinforced a continuous development of chemists analytical practice, which in the decades before had been spurred mainly by chemists attempt to reconcile their analytical and pharmaceutical objectives. By the middle of the century, the theory of a graduated order of chemical composition lent a clear and distinctive voice to these earlier attempts. It was an important and new condition for the acceleration of an ontological shift, which may be easily overlooked when historical studies concentrate exclusively on events taking place in the laboratory. But there was a further condition, external to developments in the chemical laboratory, which contributed to this accelerated ontological shift. This third condition will be examined in detail in the next section. 

A second ontological shift circa 1790 The coining into being of organic substances ... 

A Novel Mode of Classifying Organic Substances and an Ontological Shift around 1830... 

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