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<p>The early history of chromatography presents a philosophically revealing pattern: a major transformation in scientific practice that neither followed nor produced any corresponding crisis in scientific theory. When Mikhail Tswett introduced chromatographic adsorption analysis in the first years of the twentieth century, the technique was rejected despite its practical efficacy. It was revived in the early 1930s by Richard Kuhn and Edgar Lederer, rapidly adopted, and became foundational to modern analytical chemistry. No theoretical transformation separated Tswett’s rejection from chromatography’s later acceptance, and no theoretical revision accompanied its eventual triumph. This paper argues that this episode cannot be adequately explained by theory-centred accounts of scientific change, including the standard Kuhnian model, and proposes a conceptual response: the distinction between the theoretic and praxical dimensions of scientific paradigms. The <i>praxical paradigm</i> designates the discipline-wide constellation of canonical procedures, standards of evidence, and modes of manipulation considered legitimate — a supra-local, historically sedimented practical order that shapes but is not reducible to theoretical commitments. The relationship between the theoretical and praxical dimensions is one of use rather than derivation: practice draws on theoretical vocabulary without being determined by theoretical change. The paper reconstructs the praxical paradigm of early twentieth-century organic and physiological chemistry, shows how it excluded chromatography without theoretical grounds, and analyses its eventual transformation under practical rather than theoretical pressure. The early history of chromatography is thereby situated as an earlier and analytically clearer demonstration of the theory-practice disjunction than the mid-century instrumental revolution with which it is usually associated.</p>

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The first steps of chromatography: practice, paradigm, and scientific change in early twentieth-century chemistry

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月4日

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  • Apostolos Gerontas

摘要

The early history of chromatography presents a philosophically revealing pattern: a major transformation in scientific practice that neither followed nor produced any corresponding crisis in scientific theory. When Mikhail Tswett introduced chromatographic adsorption analysis in the first years of the twentieth century, the technique was rejected despite its practical efficacy. It was revived in the early 1930s by Richard Kuhn and Edgar Lederer, rapidly adopted, and became foundational to modern analytical chemistry. No theoretical transformation separated Tswett’s rejection from chromatography’s later acceptance, and no theoretical revision accompanied its eventual triumph. This paper argues that this episode cannot be adequately explained by theory-centred accounts of scientific change, including the standard Kuhnian model, and proposes a conceptual response: the distinction between the theoretic and praxical dimensions of scientific paradigms. The praxical paradigm designates the discipline-wide constellation of canonical procedures, standards of evidence, and modes of manipulation considered legitimate — a supra-local, historically sedimented practical order that shapes but is not reducible to theoretical commitments. The relationship between the theoretical and praxical dimensions is one of use rather than derivation: practice draws on theoretical vocabulary without being determined by theoretical change. The paper reconstructs the praxical paradigm of early twentieth-century organic and physiological chemistry, shows how it excluded chromatography without theoretical grounds, and analyses its eventual transformation under practical rather than theoretical pressure. The early history of chromatography is thereby situated as an earlier and analytically clearer demonstration of the theory-practice disjunction than the mid-century instrumental revolution with which it is usually associated.