ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Epistemic Disobedience and the Making of Physical Chemistry: Reimagining Interdisciplinarity through Gender

• In Event: Whose Values Count? Political Commitments, Marginal Voices, and the Construction of Scientific Legitimacy

English Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, debates over what counted as legitimate scientific knowledge and who could claim epistemic authority intensified across the sciences. The formation of physical chemistry, led by the Ionists’ efforts to reframe marginal chemical problems through thermodynamic methods and language, offers a revealing episode of such contestation. Seeking to reform chemistry through physical methods, mathematical reasoning, and new instruments, the Ionists challenged both the conceptual and institutional boundaries of the discipline. Drawing on Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie and the historical reconstructions of Root-Bernstein (1980) and Servos (1990), the paper reinterprets their project through the lens of interdisciplinarity to examine how their boundary-crossing interacted with, and at times exposed the limits of, the value regime structuring epistemic authority in modern science.

To clarify this tension, the analysis draws on feminist discussions of epistemic norms –Longino on authority, Fricker on credibility asymmetries, and Medina on epistemic friction. In this sense, the Ionists’ boundary-crossing can be read as an act of epistemic disobedience whose critical potential resonates with feminist concerns, not because they advanced a gendered agenda, but because challenging disciplinary separations unsettled hierarchical and implicitly gendered ideals of detachment and methodological purity.

Seen in this light, their attempt to reorganize chemistry through the methods of physics unsettled expectations of rigorous method and credible expertise. Their commitment to quantification upheld central ideals of objectivity, yet their crossings also revealed the limits of the value regime sustaining those ideals. Interdisciplinarity thus emerges as a value with epistemic and political force, exposing established hierarchies and showing how boundary-crossing can reveal the value-laden foundations of scientific legitimacy.

Authors

• Dimitris Kalogiannis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

• Maria Amiridi-Wiedenmayer, National and Kapodistrian University Athens