Bachelard’s “Normative Turn” in Epistemology

The work of Gaston BachelardBachelard, Gaston is often taken to exemplify French historical epistemology. Indeed, the latter is sometimes reductively identified with the former. In this chapter, I outline BachelardBachelard, Gaston’s epistemology, focusing chiefly on his account of mathematical physics as characterized by a twofold discontinuity: an epistemological rupture between scientific knowledge and common experience, on one hand, and between new theories and those they supersede on the other. Bachelard’s approach to the history of science is normative, since it considers contemporary science a norm that allows historians to read backwards into the past of a given discipline from the point of view of more recent developments. To illustrate this, Bachelard employed the metaphor of the tribunaltribunal (history of science as)—presenting history of science as a courtroom where, inhabiting the role of judge, the epistemologist rules on past science on the basis of current scientific values. In the conclusion of this chapter, I situate Bachelard’s approach in relation to more recent presentistpresentism historiographies.